She laughed and then leaned forward, looping her hands around my neck. “I need all of you. And I don’t want to leave for that long. Being sick…having been through all that happened to us. It taught me a lot. It taught me what is really important. So it’s better that that slot at JHU goes to someone who really, really wants it. As for me, I still want to be a doctor and I think I’m going to be learning from some brilliant doctors at Irvine.”

I reached out and pulled her into my lap. She came willingly and clasped my neck, pressing her head onto my shoulder. “Adam…”

“Yes?”

“I just…I want to say that even though I have no idea what’s in store for us in the future…or if we are even finished with going through these rough bits in life. I just want to say that whatever happens, the good or the bad, I’m so incredibly lucky to be sharing those days and nights with you.”

I closed my eyes, turned and kissed her face. Her lips found mine and we shared a passionate kiss—one with enough fire in it to stoke the flames for more. I ordered my libido to calm the hell down because I wasn’t going to wear her out tonight. She was still recovering, probably still weak, and we had to go easy for her…

Before I knew it, though, she had pulled me down in the sand on top of her, reaching under my shirt to touch my chest. “So about that old bucket list…” she said.

“Sex in public?” I said in a faux-shocked voice.

“The beach is public. And look—I brought some of my own.” She pulled out a condom—the wrapping of a brand I didn’t recognize. I squinted at it in the dim light.

“You can’t read it but trust me, I conducted some research into the product testing these things have to go through and this brand has by far the best record for breakage.”

I laughed. Then I stood up and when she tried to pull me down again, I swung her into my arms. “Come on—I’m going to make sweet, slow love to my fiancée in the privacy of my own cottage, thank you very much. Where there’s no danger of sand getting involved.”

And she laughed all the way back to the front door. But when I put her down, sliding her slowly down over my hard body, she wasn’t laughing anymore.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Jordan

Six Weeks Later

It wasn’t easy getting my ass out of bed the first day back to work after Comic-Con and goddamn—what a week it had been…parties, women, oh yeah, and the panels. I think I managed to squeeze in some serious business in the cracks between all the fun. It’s good to be young, single and rich.

But even I had to go to work, and after a week of living as if I didn’t have a care in the world, my first day back at Draco had me dragging ass. Good thing I spent most of it alone in my office sipping my favorite hangover remedy and pushing paperwork around—even if virtually on my laptop. I really didn’t have much to complain about, in all honesty. I had a kickass job at a growing company that had made me a crapton of money at a young age. I may not actually have been a rock star but I was glad to live like one. The parties, the women, the dream beach house. And the open, spacious corner office that had its own view of the indoor atrium. I had a nice office. I wasn’t going to complain about that, even on a day when I was feeling like death warmed over, laying my head on the desk for much of the morning and wondering if I could wander out a little early for the day to catch up on my sleep.

Just before lunch, I was finally feeling the first hunger pangs when our jackass publicity manager, Weston, poked his head into my office—without knocking, of course.

“Fawkes—Need you in Adam’s office, asap.” He said it like a word instead of pronouncing all the letters, like that made him cool. He was a pencil neck and his habit of only calling me by my last name irritated the fuck out of me. He seemed to know it, too.

“Okay, Preston,” I said, hiding the smirk as I deliberately messed up his name. He rolled his eyes and spun from the doorway, leaving it ajar as he headed to the CEO’s office.

A few minutes later—long enough to make it known that I didn’t jump and follow his orders whenever he snapped his damn fingers—I sauntered over to Adam’s office, where our illustrious CEO was pacing in front of the wall of windows behind his desk, his hands shoved into his pants pockets.

He’d been on edge for the last few months. While he’d been tending to a sick girlfriend, he’d also been working on the secret project with me—a project which stood to make us all a lot more money and push him up into billionaire range if everything went down as we planned it.