“Yeah. Just, busy day is all.”
“You sure? You look… tense. Or worried.”
“No.” I smiled, fake as it might be but I hoped like hell it looked normal and kissed her cheek. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you in an hour.”
She pulled back, grinning up at me, inspecting me but finding nothing. “I’ll be the girl waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Hudson Alexander Valentine. That is quite the mouthful.”
“Alexander means protector,” I said. “Mom didn’t name me for that, but once they started doing foster care, she used to remind me of that all the time. That my job is to protect people.”
“And here you are.” She flipped her hand in the air, gloves still on even though we were back at her house after dinner. “Killing it.”
She gestured to her apartment and then to herself.
Yeah, I’d protected her. Or tried. But that had nothing to do with my name. It was because I was falling in love with her.
“Yours,” I stated, asking for her middle name. We’d been playing this game since dinner. Favorite toys. Favorite memories. Favorite enemy. I barely resisted the urge to say her father’s name for that one. I didn’t have enemies, but that man would be at the top of my Most Hated list.
“I don’t think I know you well enough for that.”
“It can’t be that bad,” I teased. Her cheeks were burning and it had nothing to do with the cold weather. We’d been in my truck and her apartment was warm.
“It’s horrific.”
“Lilly.” I reached for her then, threaded my hands beneath her winter coat so I was holding her waist and yanked her to my chest. “Tell me your middle name.”
“I’m surprised you don’t know it.”
I did. I couldn’t remember it right now. Not with her windswept hair and pink cheeks and those damn freckles. I wanted to kiss every single one until I knew them all by heart.
“Tell me,” I whispered, and bent to kiss her cheek, the hinge of her jaw. She shivered beneath me and as she did, I pushed her coat off her shoulders until it fell to the floor behind her.
God. I wanted this woman. All of her. I was desperate to know everything about her, to have her tell me all the things I’d already learned before we met.
“Gertrude,” she said and cringed. “It’s stupid and horrible.”
I kept kissing her, trailed my lips down the column of her throat. “What does it mean?”
She tore off her gloves. “I have no idea.”
I needed to slow this down. Immediately.
Pulling back, I reached for my phone inside my own coat pocket and waited for the facial ID scan. A few quick taps on my screen gave me my answer.
“Strength.”
“What?” she asked.
I turned my phone so she could see it herself. “Gertrude means strength. I think that fits you pretty well.”
She traced her fingernail over my screen, mesmerized by it.
“Huh,” she said softly. She glanced at me, gave me a sad smile. “At least my mom gave me something good then, didn’t she?”
God, I wanted to show her all the good things I saw in her.
Which meant it was time to go.
“I should let you get to studying.” She had a test in the morning. Her last before the Thanksgiving break next week.
“I don’t think I want you to go.” She kissed me then. Lilly’s kisses tasted like sunshine and innocence, such contradiction to how she’d lived, but I knew she was inexperienced with men. She had to have been. Which made it all the more important we took this slow.
“Lilly.” I murmured it against her mouth, pulling back, peeling her hands off me. She glanced up at me, eyes glazed with desire, lips wet with the taste of me.
When she licked her bottom lip, cleaning me off her, sealing me in, it was almost my undoing.
I stepped back and reached for the doorknob.
“Have fun studying. Can I text you later?”
She smiled. She did it more frequently now, daily. And they weren’t the tight fake smiles she gave to the customers at the diner, but the true ones that lit up her face and made my dick harden.
“You better.”
30
Lilly
It was late when I finally closed my laptop. My eyes burned from hours of staring at a screen. Admittedly, my schoolwork took me longer since I couldn’t stop thinking about Hudson.
Collapsing back to my couch, my fingers drifted to my lips. If I closed my eyes, I could see the way he leaned his head just so when he went to kiss me. The furrowed brow of his when he pulled back when he didn’t want to.
I could tell he was holding back. If it was for my benefit, he certainly didn’t have to, but as much as I tried to give him clues I was ready for more, he wouldn’t budge. There were moments I was with him, when his focus grew so distracted, I was worried I overstayed my welcome. Then there were moments when his focus was so intensely set on me, it felt like I could settle against him and stay there forever.
Somehow, in weeks, I’d grown to trust him. I wanted him in ways I couldn’t deny and in ways I would have assumed foolish months ago.
A man like him. A woman like me. If others knew our histories, my history, they would say we didn’t fit. That he deserved better. But Hudson had never once made me feel like that. He never once treated me as if I was less than him. And neither had the rest of his family, Brandon and Jenna included. They welcomed me into their chaotic home with open arms and wide smiles.
I never wanted to leave. And yet, there were still those moments, like at the office earlier when we were teasing one another, flirting, and then Hudson stepped back, and shook it off.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew something was wrong. Something was bothering him.
Blowing out a breath, I shoved off the couch to head toward the kitchen for water. Maybe a snack before bed. As I did, my phone lit up with an unread text. I never studied with my phone nearby, too tempted to call Angie for a distraction or Hudson for an even better distraction.
The text was from Hudson, came in only ten minutes ago, right as I’d been finishing up.
Done studying?
I checked the clock on my microwave. 11:42pm. Why was he texting me this late?
Just finished. You okay?
Hudson tended to go to bed earlier than me. Of course, he also woke up at some godforsaken hour to work out, too.
Can’t sleep. Want to come keep me company?
If I was the kind of girl who squealed, I’d be doing it loud enough for him to hear me from floors above. As it was, my grip on my phone tightened and I read the message. Reread it. Surely he meant… didn’t he?
Are you asking me to come spend the night?
I squeezed my eyes closed. If I misinterpreted that text, mortification would melt me into a puddle of goo on my kitchen floor. Here lies Lilly—dead of embarrassment.
It took hours. Centuries. As I waited, I fine-tuned my epitaph. Possibly it was only seconds later when instead of a text, my phone rang, startling me so much I dropped it, caught it right before it hit the counter.
“Hello?”
“Is that okay?” Hudson asked. There was a rumble in his voice, like he was already in bed, and had been there for a while. I imagined him shoving back his dark hair and pressing his head into his pillow. A spark of desire flickered at the thought. Of Hudson. In his bed. Thinking of me. “To stay with me?”