“I knew I would care about you,” he said gruffly when she touched his lips. “I had no idea I’d fall in love with you.”
Her breath hitched with emotion. “It was an unexpected complication?” she asked with a soft bark of laughter.
His thumbs caressed her cheek, and the tightness in her throat transferred to her chest. “That’s what I thought at first,” he said, his arms going around her. Alice laid her head on his chest, secure and awed in the cocoon of his arms. “Now it feels more like fate. Or a blessing,” she heard him rumble against her pressing ear.
Intense emotion rushed through her.
What he was telling her was nothing short of a miracle.
Had she—Alice—reached a point where she could trust in miracles? She didn’t know. It was just that there, in that moment, the swelling ache she held inside her for Dylan was bigger than the black hole of doubt and cynicism.
“The next few weeks or months are going to be hard sometimes. Challenging,” Dylan said. “You still have so much to take in, so much to learn. But I want you to remember what I just said, through it all. Alice? Promise me.”
He cupped the back of her head. Alice turned her nose into his chest, inhaling his scent, letting it wash away the residue of her insecurities and anxiety. When she was with Dylan, her fears and distrust grew so small.
One doubt, however, seemed to grip at her very heart at that moment.
She lifted her face, seeking out his lips in the darkness. “I promise,” she said. Their mouths fused. She couldn’t stop the shudder of emotion that went through her; she couldn’t disguise it from him.
“Alice?” he prodded, his brows slanting.
She pressed her forehead to his.
“I’m afraid,” she admitted through a choked throat.
His arms tightened around her. “I know. I can’t imagine what these last few days have been like for—”
“Not of that. That’s not what I’m afraid of. At least not right this second,” she said.
“What, then?”
She gasped softly against his lips, the truth cutting at her. “I’m afraid because I would promise you almost anything.”
Keep reading for an excerpt of the
next stunning book by Beth Kery
Where Alice and Dylan’s heartstopping
love affair continues …
It was the second time in a week that Dylan awoke in the dark room to find his arms empty. Instinct told him that it was still too early for him to escort Alice to the camp, a clandestine ritual they went through every morning before dawn. Neither of them wanted the Durand managers to know that Alice, who was a candidate to become a Durand executive, had taken up with the CEO of the company. What was between Alice and him was complicated, and it was their business alone.
At least for now it was. Dylan wasn’t sure how long he could keep Alice and Durand Enterprises in separate spheres. For all intents and purposes, Alice was Durand Enterprises. She just didn’t want to—or couldn’t—accept that reality as of yet.
He reached blindly, finding his cell phone on the bedside table. He squinted at the time. No, he’d been correct. It was only a few minutes past two in the morning, way too early for Alice to be up and preparing to return to the camp.
He rose from the bed with just as much haste and alarm as that first time, but on this occasion with more certainty that he knew where to find her. The knowledge didn’t quiet his worry any. He flipped on a bedside lamp and hauled on some jeans.
On that other night, he’d found a half-wild, disoriented Alice blindly seeking in the pitch darkness of the west hallway. When he’d flipped on the hall light, he’d cringed at the vision of her searching hands, pale face, and huge haunted eyes. The ghosts of the past could come so close to her at times—even leap from the deepest recesses of her unconscious mind until they seemingly took form in front of her. Alice had said she’d seen a woman in that hallway on that night, a woman that Dylan knew for a fact had died nearly two decades before.
The human mind was as mysterious and vast as the night sky.
That night, Alice had seen her biological mother. It was as if her long-buried, resurging memories were too foreign to process in her everyday consciousness. Instead, those memories had been projected into her nightmares and even into the solid reality of her surroundings, like a weird unconscious hologram effect or a ghost taking shape. Or at least that’s how psychiatrist Sidney Gates had tried to explain it Dylan.
Presently, he found Alice standing square in the middle of the large empty bedroom suite in the west hall. Her long, toned legs were naked. They looked especially vulnerable in the bright glow of the overhead chandelier.
Tension coiled tight in his muscles. It was so hard at times, not knowing what to expect from her from one moment to the next. Sometimes he felt like he could only be certain of her when he was making love to her, an