"So I take it you liked the note?"
She laughed. "You are the reigning king of understatements."
"I'm an arrogant prick most of the time. I don't know how you put up with me."
She leaned up and kissed me, but didn't dignify my statement with a reply.
I hesitated then smoothed a hand down her back. "I want you to know that I'm serious about all of it. About our forever."
She touched my shaved cheek with her palm. I closed my eyes, relishing the feeling. "Of course, I knew that already. You're always serious about everything, Adam Drake. In fact, some would say you're too serious."
"But you'd never say that?" I raised a brow.
She smiled. "I keep you down to earth when you're getting too uppity." She tilted her head, her smile fading only by a small fraction. "It's so weird, but the entire time I was reading that, I kept thinking of the first day I met you."
The regular weekend crowd had made it to the walking path and were filing around us. I took her hand, and we slowly headed toward the house. "In the game?"
She shook her head. "No. In person. That day in the hotel conference room."
I laughed. "That day was an epic miscalculation on my part. I walked in there determined as hell to scare the shit out of you, my one objective." I took a deep breath. "Instead, I entered that room and saw you, and it felt like I'd stepped off a cliff and was free-falling."
"And I thought I'd been snapped up into a raging storm." A breeze picked up the ends of her hair, and they danced around her shoulders as if they'd been imbued with magic. "Hurricane Adam. That's what I mentally nicknamed you."
"That storm was the future, smacking us the face. And we weren’t aware."
"I keep wondering when I first knew it. Like…knew it without admitting it to myself."
I could answer to that for myself, but said nothing. Instead, I pulled her hand up to my mouth and kissed it.
"Maybe it was our first date," she mused.
I laughed. "What exactly are you calling our first date?"
"That night in Amsterdam." She winked up at me.
"Oh, huh. That night. The night I realized I was in a lot of trouble where you were concerned."
"Really? Tell me more."
I hesitated, wondering how she'd receive any new information regarding that entire trip, especially that night. The night that started it all. But after these past few weeks and the way she'd taken everything else in stride, could I ever be anything less than completely honest with her?
Time to find out. "Well…you remember that phone call?
She took a few steps in silence. I picked up scraps of other conversations around us and the ever-present call of gulls on the beach. "Of course. That phone call is the whole reason that things went on and on between us. If it hadn't been for that call, we would never have— Well, I mean, I know now that you had no intention of…" Her voice faded out when she saw the expression on my face. "Now you've got me wondering if that was more than a mere random occurrence."
I crooked a smile. "You know me. I never leave anything to chance. We weren't going to do anything that night. I'd had some safeguards installed."
"Safeguards?" Her pace slowed as she chewed on that. "Like what?"
"In the limo on the ride back from the dinner and dancing, I texted Jordan and told him to call me in an hour." I gauged her expression. "And then ordered him to keep calling if I didn't pick up the phone. Just in case."
"Just in case you went too far?"
"Yeah."
She frowned. "So…there was never an ill-timed emergency?"
"No." A few more steps. "I invented the emergency. Then I logged into the server to run a routine backup."
We walked on in silence as she continued the pace, continued to hold my hand, but stared down at the pavement in front of us in deep thought.
"Does that make you mad?" I asked.
"No. A little confused. You're not really the type of person who needs to invent an excuse to get out of something he doesn't want to do."
"The phone call wasn't for you. It was for me. And it wasn't about not wanting to do something. It was about wanting it too much." I twitched the hand I was holding, lacing my fingers tightly through hers. "All through dinner, dancing, I realized this might get a little—or a lot—out of my control. I decided to enact a failsafe plan ahead of time."
She laughed, and I relaxed, not even realizing that I'd been mentally holding my breath. "It's hilarious that you enlisted Jordan to purposely cock-block yourself ahead of time, from thousands of miles away."
"Glad you find it funny."
"I didn't at the time." She sent me a glance from the corner of her eye. "I found it incredibly frustrating."
A skateboarder, heading straight at us, swerved at the last minute. I cast a scowl in his direction as he passed.
"That makes two of us. And the beginning of long weeks of frustration."
She smiled wryly. "Not unlike recent events. I wonder why this keeps happening to us?"
My hand tightened around hers. "Let's hope we've seen the last of it."
The breeze kicked up a notch, raising the ends of her hair to form a halo around her head. She released my hand and reached up to grab at her hair, slipping an elastic from around her wrist to form a makeshift ponytail. "It's a small price to pay for the love of a lifetime, right?"
"We'll make up for it, I'm sure."
Two more minutes and we were at the gate to the small bridge that led to Bay Island. I opened it for her, and we crossed in silence.
She stopped at the halfway point over the bridge, gazing down over the water.
I halted beside her. "What's up?"
She didn't say anything for another stretch of minutes before letting out a breath I didn't even notice she'd been holding. "Something that wasn't mentioned in your letter. Something I think we need to talk about."
I turned around to face her, mildly alarmed by her serious tone. She took up both my hands in each of hers. With our arms, we formed a bridge of our own, parallel to the one upon which we now stood.
Her head came up, and I suddenly perceived that she was on the edge of tears. Resisting a frown, I swallowed, bracing myself for whatever it was.