Chapter 43
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
Joey leaned over and pressed her lips to Adam’s, feeling his smile against her mouth. His hand came up to cup her cheek, and warmth spread through her at his gentle touch.
“I love you,” he murmured.
“Mm.” Joey kissed him again. “I love you too.” When she pulled back, his eyes shone with happiness and his smile kicked up in the corners.
“Oh, is that so?”
“Yeah.” Joey ducked her head, but she wasn’t embarrassed about how she felt. She looked up. “That’s so.”
“Well, that’s great news,” Adam said. He chuckled and added, “I’ll come get your car once we have you fed and reading in your bean bag.”
“There is no way I’m letting you drive my car,” Joey said, her resistance to that sitting heavy in her gut.
“Why not?” he asked as he exited the parking lot. “It’s a sedan, baby doll. I’ve driven one before.”
She looked over to him and caught the jumping in Adam’s jaw. “Okay,” she said, letting go of this idea that she could hide any part of herself from him. “I warned her already that I was going to look for a new car this year.”
He swung his attention to her. “Oh, yeah? How’d she take it?”
“She started right up.” Joey grinned at him and reached for his hand. “I want the raspberry barbecue sauce. Can you get some of that?”
“Of course I can,” Adam said, because Adam could do anything. He navigated them to the little roadside barbecue stand on the Northern Highway, and Joey once again waited in the car while he braved the winter wind to get their food.
The scent of roasted, smoked meat and tangy, sweet barbecue sauce filled the car upon his return, and Joey took the plastic bag from him so he could get back in. Her stomach growled, and Adam returned to his house.
“Stay here; I’ll go grab the bean bag, and we’ll head back to your place.” He looked over to her, questions in his eyes. “Okay?”
“You don’t want to eat?”
“At your place, I do.” He flashed her a smile. “Unless you’re starving, then we can eat here.”
He didn’t seem to want that, so Joey simply nodded.
He did too, and Joey swallowed as he ducked out of the car and hurried into the house.
She reached into the bag and pulled out one of the biscuits.
She pinched off a corner of it and ate it, almost in disbelief that she sat in Adam’s car when only a couple of hours ago, she’d been staring into an empty corner and wondering when she’d see him again.
The back of the SUV opened, and Joey twisted to see Adam shoving her fluffy pink bean bag in. “I gotta get the seats,” he said, and he moved to do that, lowering them and then sliding the bean bag all the way to the backs of the front seats.
He panted as he got behind the wheel again, and she handed him the roll. “Oh, sneaking a bite early, are we?”
“I’m a little hungry,” she said with a smile. Nerves bubbled in her stomach over showing him around her humble apartment, but the moment he leaned over and touched his lips to hers, all her worries melted away, the way cotton candy does with a single drop of water.
“I said we could eat here,” he murmured, kissing her again, and then again. He leaned his forehead against hers, and she breathed in with him.
“I want to show you my apartment,” she said. “I can wait.”
“All right.” He backed out of his garage and started the drive back to Coral Canyon. Joey relaxed in the heated seat and let the movement of the SUV and the gentle curves of the Apple Highway lure her to sleep.
She woke to the whip of cold air against her face, and Adam’s voice saying, “We’re here, baby doll.”
Her eyes opened, and the world came into focus, including her gorgeous boyfriend’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said, not sure where the food had gone. She’d been holding it in her lap when they’d left Adam’s house.
Adam smiled at her and backed up a step. He reached for Joey’s hand, and she took it easily. She rose from the SUV, the cold striking all of her exposed skin.
She tucked her scarf tighter under the collar of her coat and said, “So this is the sidewalk.”
Adam burst out laughing, and Joey giggled with him. She led him down the steps and into the apartment. She took a few steps inside and looked into the kitchen as Adam closed the door behind them.
He took a few steps and set the plastic bag with their barbecue on the table. “Let me get the bean bag.”
“Adam—”
“I just want to get the moving done, so we can relax.” He grinned at her and dashed out. Joey pulled out the Styrofoam containers with their food, and moved into the kitchen to get plates and utensils.
A pink wall moved through the door, and Adam groaned as he muscled the formless bean bag through the frame. He continued down the hall, and said, “Come tell me where to put this.”
Joey left the food and moved slowly behind him, grinning as he wrestled the bean bag through the doorway into her bedroom. “Right there in the corner,” she said, though Adam already knew where to put it.
He positioned the bean bag in the corner and stepped back to look at it. “Right there? Yeah?”
“It’s awesome.” Joey moved past him, kicked off her heels, and flopped onto the bean bag. She grinned up at Adam, who beamed at her with the wattage of the sun. Her heartbeat fluttered as she reached for him.
“Come see how it feels.”
“I thought you were going to show me the place.” He took a couple of steps toward her, which was all it took in a bedroom as small as hers. “I’m not going to—”
Joey squealed as she lunged for him, grabbed one of his hands with both of hers, and pulled him onto the bean bag with her.
Adam’s breath huffed out of his mouth as he tumbled beside her, and then the bean bag held him up. Joey curled into his warmth as she slid her hands under his suit coat jacket.
“You should’ve gotten clothes to change into,” she murmured as she looked up at him.
“I’m making so many mistakes these days.” He grinned down at her, his cowboy hat crooked now.
Joey reached up and straightened it for him, her eyes then dropping to his, and then lowering to his mouth. “Welcome to my home,” she whispered just before she kissed him.
He kissed her back, gently pulling away a few moments later. “I love you, baby doll.”
Joey accepted that, letting the words—the feeling—bury deep into her heart.
“I know you do,” she said, trailing her fingertips down the side of his face.
“And I love you—I realized it yesterday when you weren’t here.
I love how hard you work, and how you take care of everyone, and how you’re becoming this wonderful city-cowboy. ”
She smiled at him as the love she held for him grew and multiplied and filled her from top to bottom.
He slid his thumb along her bottom lip. “I love you, and I can’t wait to take you home to meet my momma, and to walk down the aisle with you, even if that’s not what men and women do when they get married. ”
She giggled, and here, in this basement apartment with her secondhand furniture and her pink bean bag and the man she loved, a steady stream of belonging tingled through Joey—and she kissed Adam to remember this moment for the rest of her life.