Staring up at him, head still spinning, Sofia realized she might not be the idiot here.
She put her hands on his hard chest. “Why would you wait?” she asked.
“John said I shouldn’t just blurt it out. John said you probably have guys telling you they love you all the time. So I asked my uncle for next weekend off and John and I had figured out...”
As he described an overcomplicated plan involving parasailing and a lighthouse, Sofia thought of the large pool hidden in the tunnels of her kingdom. One lounging night, she’d told Aish and John about the tunnels, about the pool, about the belief that the body of water was the principal gathering point of mountain runoff and the initial source of the Río Christo, the river that sustained her valley. Legend had it, she’d told them, that something dropped into the pool was a sacrifice to the river, would not touch air again until it bobbed up kilometers away.
Right now, she could imagine dropping John into that deep, dark pool.
Aish cupped her face in one big hand, squeezed her waist with the other. “I loved you the moment I saw you.” His eyes were bright in the shadow of his hair, in the little cave for them he created with his height and width and dizzying warm scent against the barn wall. “I’ve needed you since the first second you opened your arms to me.”
His hand slipped under her shirt, and its rub and grip against her body felt like ownership.
Sofia slipped her hands into his hair and anchored his eyes on her. “Don’t wait to tell me words like that. I...” She closed her mouth, then opened it again. He was being honest with her. She had to be honest with him. “I need them, Aish. I don’t hear them very often.”
His heavy brow furrowed. “Fuck. I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t think. With my parents... I hear them all the time.”
And Sofia knew that, had heard “Love you, too” at the end of every phone call.
He pulled her up on tiptoe, against him. “I love you, Sofia.” He cradled her face. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I—”
She stole his final love you when she invaded his gorgeous mouth. But she gave it back to him, covered his body in cooed I love yous when she fell to her knees and pulled down his jeans, gave him love in a way that had him crying out the words against the barn wall. She had him moaning I love you after he grabbed a sleeping bag and rushed her into the small woods on the edge of the property, riding him with te amo, te quiero, mi amor, mi gigante, making him writhe beneath her. He fingered the I love yous on her lips when he covered her mouth to restrain her screams, when he got comfortable between her thighs and showed her that her body could do that magical thing more than once a night.
He swore, “I love you,” into her ear as she cried against him, as she felt—for the first time in her life—the impact of being deeply valued by someone she loved. He held her against him and continued to say it, in front of everyone, in front of John, with his arm slung over his best friend’s shoulders as they walked to the waiting trucks in the deep of the night.
September 15
Aish followed Sofia’s brother down the low-lit hallway to her suite, the ex-army ranger moving in that quiet but resolute way that made him look like he could bust cleanly through a wall. Aish imagined Roman Sheppard would bust through him if he tried to follow this path again. He was surprised he hadn’t been blindfolded.
But the fact that Devonte emailed and Namrita approved and Roman led him to this midnight meeting meant that everyone was in agreement. It was time for Sofia and Aish to clear the air.
“Haven’t felt your glares for a while,” Aish murmured. He needed banter, anything to distract him from the teeter-totter of anger, guilt, and aching erection he felt for the woman he was about to talk to for the first time in four days.
“Been busy” was all Roman gave.
Yeah, Aish imagined he was. Bad news kept streaming out of the Monte. The blow by blow of their fight appeared in the press, the public blow by blow, and recent stories positioned the queen and the Consejo as the kingdom’s saviors. Some tabloids had started a countdown clock to the end of #Aishia.
But fake countdown clocks were the least of Roman’s worries. Someone had shifted from pain-in-the-ass words to pain-in-the-ass actions.
Random acts of vandalism had started in the village, with taverns reporting break-ins and shattered bottles, restaurants dealing with spoiled food from fridges left open overnight, and inns managing middle-of-the-night fire alarms. They were stupid kid moves and no one had been hurt, but they’d happened enough over the last few days that tourists and press were grumbling. Devonte told him that Sofia had been refilling fridges and paying people’s hotel bills as fast as she could write the checks. But the business owners had started wondering if an expanded tourism industry was worth it. Right now, travel bloggers were calling them incompetent and unprepared.
A heart-eyed #Aishia would be a great distraction for everyone right now. But Sofia and Aish had stopped talking.
“So you’re gonna catch the motherfuckers?”
Roman shot him a sniper’s grin over his shoulder. “Never doubt it.” The guy was good looking with his dark hair cut short and bottle-green eyes. And scary. He was missing half of his right ring finger and his left hand was scarred with burn. Aish’s calluses from guitar playing couldn’t compare to what
