“Then why are you hesitating?” he asked, his brows slanting.
“It’s nothing.” She shrugged helplessly. It was hard to put her insecurities into words. “I just have this feeling—”
The sedan came to a halt outside her townhome. Jacob’s hold on her didn’t flinch.
“What kind of feeling?” he asked.
“That the faster we go, the more intense we are, the quicker it will end,” she admitted.
“You can’t know that, Harper.”
“I know I can’t,” she admitted, staring at his chest. “I told you. It’s just this feeling.”
“Of dread?”
She looked up sharply, stunned by his insight. “Yes.”
He nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. But it’s like I said last night. We can’t go back. We can’t tread water. The only way to go is forward.” He caressed her cheek, and she instinctively moved her face toward his touch. “Besides. It’s not just dread, what I’m feeling. Far from it, Harper. Is it for you?”
“God, no. I wouldn’t be here, if it were. But aren’t you even a little worried we’re moving too fast?” she asked softly. That there’s some big unnamable thing happening, something either threatening or wondrous. She couldn’t tell which . . .
“I told you before. I don’t think I can be with you in any way but all the way. One hundred percent. Look at me.” She met his stare reluctantly. “Everything’s going to be okay, Harper. Trust me.”
She drank in his quiet confidence. How could she be so intimidated by him and everything he represented, and yet feel incredibly secure with him at the same time?
“The only thing you have to agree to is this afternoon. Tonight,” he said.
“What about tomorrow night? And the night after that? You said in San Francisco that you wanted us to spend every night together that we could—”
“Then I’ll take it back, if it makes you feel better about it. I guess I’ll just have to talk you into every night each day at a time.” He reached up the back of her head firmly, his gaze on her a smoldering demand. “I want you with me tonight. I want to go out on the boat and spoil you a little, and make love to you a lot. I want to watch the fireworks with you and fall asleep under the stars with you in my arms. Do you think you can manage that?”
She stared at him, her lips parting in bemused arousal. “How do you do that?” she whispered. She felt his little smile like a tickle in her lower belly.
“Is that a yes?” he murmured.
Of course it was. She was beginning to wonder if she’d lost the ability to even say no in his presence.
Harper returned to the sedan a few minutes later, having emptied her clothes from San Francisco and replaced them hastily with clean ones and a few more toiletries.
“Did you bring a swimsuit?” he asked her when she returned, and they resumed their journey via limo to his home.
She glanced over at him and saw his nearly imperceptible smile. “Of course I did. You didn’t think I was going to wear that itsy-bitsy one from before, did you?”
He shrugged as if he didn’t see the problem. “I liked that swimsuit.”
She snorted with laughter, her anxiety fracturing, her happiness swelling when he grinned full out and reached for her, bringing her against him.
Even as she drowned in the bliss of the moment, a flickering, dark thought took shape. Jacob hugged her closer, and it faded.
But maybe it burrowed int
o her unconscious, like a persistent worm.
How had it happened, that she’d fallen to this dangerous depth, when she was so unsure of him? How was it even possible that he could disarm her so completely, when she’d only known him for such a short period of time?