“Yes.”

“A husband who makes a good living now.”

I shrug and look away. Money talk is exceedingly awkward.

As playful and goofy as he can be sometimes, there is nothing but sincerity in his voice when he asks, “Then why would you need to depend on your father to do what you want?”

UPSTAIRS IN OUR apartment I follow him into the kitchen and lean against the counter as he reaches into the cabinet for a bottle. Ansel turns, shakes two ibuprofen tablets into my palm, and hands me a glass of water. I stare at my hands and then up at him.

“It’s what you do,” he says, offering a tiny shrug. “After two glasses of wine you always take ibuprofen with a big glass of water. You’re a lightweight.”

I’m reminded again how observant he is, and how he manages to catch things when I don’t even think he’s paying attention. He stands, watching as I swallow the pills and put the empty glass on the counter by my hip.

With each second that ticks by when we aren’t kissing or touching, I’m terrified the easy comfort we have tonight will evaporate and he’ll turn to his desk and I’ll turn to the bedroom alone.

But tonight, while we stare at each other in the muted light provided by the single bulb above the stove, the energy between us seems to only grow more electric. This feels real.

He scratches his jaw and then tilts his chin to me. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

My stomach flips. “I’m not sure I believe that I’m—”

“Stay,” he interrupts in a tight whisper. “I’m dreading the day you leave. I’m losing my mind thinking about it.”

I close my eyes. This is half what I’ve wanted him to say, and half what I was most afraid to hear. I pull my lip between my teeth, biting down my smile when I look back at him. “I thought you just told me to go to school to open my own business someday.”

“Maybe I think you should wait until I’m done with this case. Then we can go together. Live together. I work, you study.”

“How could I stay here until the spring? What would I do?” It’s been wonderful, but I can’t imagine another nine months living idly as a tourist.

“You can find work, or you can just research what’s involved in opening a studio. We’ll leave together, and you can defer school for one year.”

If possible, this is even more insane than my coming here in the first place. Staying means there is no end to us—no annulment, no fake marriage—and there is an entirely new trail blazed ahead.

“I don’t think I can stay here and be alone so much of the time . . .”

He winces, dragging a hand through his hair. “If you want to start now, go and I’ll come next spring. I just . . . Is that what you want?”

I shake my head, but I can see in his eyes he correctly reads my gesture to be I don’t know.

My first few weeks here I felt both like I was completely free, and also a bit of a leech. But Ansel didn’t invite me here only to be generous or save me from a summer at home or spent psyching myself up to start school. He did it for those reasons and because he wanted me.

“Mia?”

“Mmm?”

“I like you,” he says in a whisper, and from the slight shake of his voice, I think I know what he’s really saying. I feel the words like a warm breath across my neck, but he hasn’t stepped any closer. He’s not even touching me. His hands are braced on the counter behind him, at his hips. This bare admission is somehow more intimate from a few feet away, without the safety of kisses or faces pressed into necks. “I don’t want you to leave without me. A wife belongs with her husband, and he belongs with her. I’m always selfish with you, asking you to move here, asking you to wait until it’s good for my career before you leave, but there it is.”

There it is.

I tear my eyes from his and look down at my bare feet on the floor, letting the heavy drumming of my heart take over my senses for a beat. I’m relieved, terrified . . . but mostly I’m euphoric. He told me he couldn’t play the other night if I said it out loud, and maybe it’s the same fear again, that we can’t keep it light, can’t let it go in a few weeks if one of us says love.

“Do you think you could ever,” he starts after a few beats of silence, his lips pulled up to one side in a smile, “like me?”

My chest squeezes at the earnest vulnerability in his expression. I nod, swallowing what feels like a bowling ball in my throat before saying, “I’m already in like with you.”

His eyes flame with relief, and the words tumble out in a long, jumbled string. “I’ll get you a new ring. We’ll do it all over again. We can find a new flat with memories that are only ours . . .”

I laugh through an unexpected sob. “I like this flat. I like my gold band. I like my fractured memories of our wedding. I don’t need anything new.”

He tilts his head and smiles at me, dimple flirting shamelessly, and it’s all I can take. Reaching out, I hook a finger through a belt loop on his pants and tug. “Come here.”

Ansel takes the two steps to me, pressing the length of his body so closely to mine I need to tilt my chin to look up at him.

“Done talking, then?” he asks, hands slipping around my waist, bracketing me.

“Yeah.”

“What do you feel like doing now?” His eyes manage to look both amused and ravenous.

I slip a hand between us and palm him through his jeans, wanting to feel him come to life under my touch.

But he’s already hard, and grunts when I press into him, his eyes falling closed. His hands slide up my over my chest, around my shoulders and higher, cupping my neck.

The sweep of his thumb across my bottom lip is like a trigger: a warmth spreads through me and it turns nearly immediately to a hunger so hot, my legs grow weak. I open my mouth, lick the pad of his thumb until he slides it inside and, with dark eyes, watches me suck. In my palm, he lengthens further, twitching.

He steers me to my right, walking me backward out of the kitchen, but stops after only a few steps, cupping my face to kiss me. “Say it again?”

I search his eyes for his meaning before I understand. “That I like you?”

He nods and smiles, eyes closing as he bends to lick the tip of his tongue across my lips. “That you like me.” Ansel looks down at me from under the heavy fall of his hair over his brow, tilting my head back with his hand on my jaw. “Let me see your neck. Show me all of that gorgeous skin.”

I arch my neck and his fingertips skim along my collarbone, strong but gentle.

He undresses me first, in no particular hurry. But once my skin is exposed to the cool air in the flat and the heat of his attention, I pull at his shirt, fumble with his belt. I want my hands on every inch of him at once, but they always gravitate to the smooth expanse of his chest. Everything in the world I find sexy, I find there: The firm, warm skin. The heavy drum of his heart. The sharp spasms of his abdomen when I scratch my short nails over his ribs. The line of soft hair that always tempts my hands lower.

Even in the small flat, the bedroom feels too far away. His fingers drift down my chest, breezing past my br**sts as if it isn’t where they intend to be. Over my stomach and lower, past where I expect him to slide two fingers and play with me. Instead, his hand smooths down my thigh, his eyes watching my face as his fingertips linger on my scar, on skin that’s not quite sensitive, not quite numb.

“It’s weird, maybe, that I love your scar as much as I do.”

I have to remind myself to breathe.

“You thought it was the first thing I noticed, but it wasn’t. I didn’t even pay attention to it until the middle of the night, when you finally lay down on the bed and I kissed from your toe to your hip. Maybe you hate it, but I don’t. You earned it. I’m in awe of you.”

He pushes away from me slightly so he can kneel down and his fingers are replaced by his lips and tongue, hot and wet against my skin. I let my mouth fall open and my eyes flutter closed. Without this scar, I’d never be here. Maybe I’d never have met Ansel.

His voice is raspy against my thigh. “To me, you’re perfect.”

He pulls me with him to the floor, my back to his front, my legs straddling his. Across the living room, I can see our reflections in the dark window, can see the way I look spread around his thighs.

He pets me, fingers sliding up and down the crease of my sex, teasing at penetrating me. On my neck, his mouth sucks and licks until he’s at my jaw and I turn my head so he can kiss my lips, his tongue slipping inside and curling over mine. Ansel pushes his middle finger inside me and I cry out, but he continues stroking slowly as if he’s feeling every inch of me.

Releasing my lip from between his teeth, he asks, “Est-ce bon?”

Is it good? Such diluted words for something I’m sure I need. The word good feels so empty, so plain, like color bleached from paper.

Before I even know I’ve answered, my voice fills the room. “More. Please.”

He slides his other hand up my body to my mouth, pushing two fingers inside against my tongue and pulling them out, wet. Ansel glides them across my nipple, circling in the same rhythm as his other hand between my legs. The world narrows to these two points of sensation—on the peak of my breast and his fingers on my clit—and then shrinks further until all I feel is circles and wet and warm and the vibration of his words on my skin. “Oh, Mia.”

I’ve been helpless before: trapped beneath a car, under the sharp command of an instructor, burned by my father’s heated disdain. But never like this. This kind of helpless is liberating; it’s what it feels like to have every nerve ending rise to the surface and drink in sensation. It’s what it feels like to be touched by someone I trust with my body, trust with my heart.

But I want to feel him inside me when I fall to pieces, and my release is too close to the surface. I lift my hips, take hold of him, and lower myself down his length as we both let out shuddering groans.

We stay motionless for a few seconds, as my body adjusts to him.

I slide forward and up. Back and down. Again, and again, closing my eyes only when his shaking voice—Just . . . please . . . faster . . . faster Mia—breaks away and he slides his hands up the front of my body, to my neck. His thumb strokes the delicate skin at the hollow of my throat.

It shouldn’t be so easy to bring me back to this point again, and again, but when Ansel drops one hand to my thigh, and moves it between my legs, his broad fingertips circling, his quiet, hoarse sex voice telling me how good it feels . . . I can’t stop my body from giving in.

“C’est ça, c’est ça.” I don’t need him to translate. That’s it, he said. That’s him touching me perfectly, and my body responding just as he knew it would.

I don’t know what sensation to focus on; it’s impossible to feel each thing at once. His fingers digging into my hips, the heavy length of him stroking inside me, the feel of his mouth on my neck sucking sucking sucking so perfectly until that tiny flash of pain where he pulls a mark to the surface.

I feel like he’s taking over every part of me: filling my vision with the things he’s doing, reaching into my chest and making my heart beat so hard and fast it’s terrifying and thrilling in equal measure.

He pushes up beneath me, moving so I’m spilled onto my hands and knees and we both moan at the new depth, and the new visual in the window of him braced behind me. His hands curl around my hips, head falls back, and eyes close as he begins to move. He’s the portrait of bliss, the picture of relief. Each muscle in his torso is flexed and beaded with sweat but he manages to look more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him, lazily thrusting into me.

“Harder,” I tell him, my voice thick and quiet with need.

His eyes open and a dark smile spreads over his face. Digging his fingers tighter into the flesh around my hips, he drives brutally into me once, pausing, and then picks up a perfectly punishing rhythm.

“Harder.”

He grips my hips, tilting them, and grunts with effort as he pushes deep, hitting me in a place I’ve never known existed and making me cry out, clutched by an orgasm so sudden and overwhelming I seem to lose the use of my arms. I fall to my elbows as Ansel holds me by my hips, rutting rhythmically, his voice coming out in sharp, deep grunts.

“Mia,” he rasps, stilling behind me and shaking as he comes.

I collapse, boneless, and he catches me, cradling my head to his chest. With my ear pressed against him, I can hear the heavy, vital pounding of his heart.

Ansel rolls me to my back, carefully sliding back into me as he always seems to, even when we’re done, and watching my face with clear, serious eyes.

“It felt good?” he asks quietly.

I nod.

“You like me?”

“I do.”

Our h*ps rock together slowly, trying to hold on.

Chapter EIGHTEEN