Second Chance Mess (Bad News Billionaires #1) - Lucia Jordan Page 0,23
be that way so badly. I just hoped that it wasn’t the wrong thing again.
“Tim,” I asked as we both stared ahead into the flames. “If we were to give our relationship a second chance, what would you want to do about it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked as he turned to look at me with hopeful eyes.
“I mean if I were to tell you right now that I wanted to give us another shot. What would you want to do right now, right here?”
He looked as though he was carefully contemplating an answer.
“Do you want my honest answer?” he asked. “Or the answer that I would be willing to adhere to because I know it’s the one that you want to hear.”
I wanted both. I wanted to hear the change of tone in Tim’s voice when he told me what he really wanted.
“Let’s start with the one you think I want to hear.”
“Okay,” he said. “I would tell you how happy that makes me and how grateful I am that you’re willing to give me a second chance. I would say that you should spend the night here and that we can talk and snuggle under the blankets by the fire and maybe even fall asleep outside tonight for a bit before I would carry you back into the bed to sleep until morning. Then we would get up together, have coffee, and go to work. We could hold hands in the car again, and I can kiss your beautiful face again, and from now on, you’ll come with me on the projects instead of being left behind.”
“That was a wonderful answer,” I said. I could hear in his voice that he meant every word of it. I could hear that he would live up to all of the things that he said, and it sounded wonderful. I could also tell that he now knew how important some of those things were.
“Now tell me your honest answer,” I said.
“That actually was an honest answer, too,” he said.
“I know, I believe you,” I said. “But now I want to know what your honest answer to that question was. The answer that you would want to do right now and right here in this very moment.”
Tim took a huge and heavy breath. He sucked the air into his lungs and forced it out powerfully as if he were summoning the energy of a storm to get through his next answer. He looked at me with half-lidded eyes that oozed a sense of seduction, which make my body tremble.
“My honest answer,” he said as he turned to face me without letting a single part of his body touch mine in a painfully delicate balance of control. “Is that I would want to make love to you here and now by the fire and below the stars. I have missed your body so much that it makes my very bones and teeth ache. I long for you in a way that only the wild things on the earth can understand, and my body feels as though it will quake open and break into pieces if I can’t have you. But it’s also more than that because as much as I feel like I have missed your body, I also feel like I don’t fully know it yet.
“I feel like there was something missing before, something lacking that I had to figure out for myself. Now there’s nothing missing anymore. I know what I want, and it’s you. I want to feel you in the way that I couldn’t before—fully and with reckless abandon. I want to feel my body swell inside you and fill every space within you until you can feel that we are together. I want to make love to you endlessly, and I want to start right now and never stop.”
I watched as his heaving breaths made his muscular shoulders move up and down, and I could see by the pulsing vein at his neck that his heartbeat was rapidly increasing as each moment passed. I saw his clenched jaw and his tightened fists as he tried to hold himself in and not give in to the passion that was burning furiously within us both. And I felt my own body become upswept in the torrent of yearning that threatened to swallow me whole.
“That’s my honest answer,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked, barely able to speak as I tried to calm the sensual thoughts in my head.