Fucking beautiful.
He raises his hand to interrupt. “She’s with me,” he says in his extremely beginners’ Greek, and a long-suffering guide named Yiannis rolls his eyes and heads back down to the tourist paths.
Bianca smiles at him, but he can see the hesitancy in it, like she’s unsure of her welcome, and honestly, he doesn’t have it in him to be anything other than completely gobsmacked (except maybe also a little bit turned on).
“How . . . how are you here?” he mumbles, moving closer to her, trying desperately to keep his hands at his sides and not reach out for her.
“I flew.”
He lifts a hand to the back of his neck, already sunburned from nearly a week at work in this heat, and rubs at it. The flash of pain tells him that this is real. She’s real. “That’s not what I meant.”
She just hums at him and looks around, taking it all in, and then raises a curious eyebrow at him. “So when you said you weren’tactuallyIndiana Jones . . .”
“I don’t wear the hat.”
“Xavier.”
“I might have lied,” he admits with a shrug.
“You think?”
The silence stretches between them, long and uncomfortable as she looks absolutely anywhere but at him and finally, he can’t take it anymore and he blurts out, “What are you doing here, Bianca?”
And that came out way sharper than he meant it to and he cringes as he watches her shoulders fall and her nose crinkle,like she knows she’s tilted his world off its axis and sent him spinning into an entirely new orbit. “I told everyone the truth, after you left.”
“Okay . . .” He trails off. That’s . . . well, it doesn’t matter really, since he’d outed them before he got on his flight, a decision that had gnawed at his gut for days. He’d waited, half terrified that every text he got was going to be from her, raging at him for giving away their secret, but it hadn’t ever come. And that was worse somehow, he’d rather her be pissed off at him than completely indifferent.
But instead, she’s here. In person. Flesh and blood and absolutely beautiful, right in front of him.
And she probably didn’t fly halfway around the world just to yell at him, so . . . why then?
She answers the question without him having to ask. “They told me that I was an idiot for letting you go.”
He barks out a laugh at that and she rewards it with a smile, a real one now, wide and true, and his stomach does a somersault. “Somehow I don’t think that’s how they put it. Unless it was Frankie. She might have put it like that.”
“Okay,” she admits, “maybe they . . . they thought that I let you leave without telling you . . . or that you left because I didn’t tell you . . . and that wasn’t fair, to you or me . . .”
Whatever they thought she should tell him, it’s still not something she can easily say, and if that’s the case, then whatever it is is important enough for her to fly out here to do it, so he takes a wild guess and hopes he’s right.
“Boss?” he cuts her off.
“Yeah?” she asks, hating the half-hysterical note in her voice as she looks up into his eyes, and what he sees there – equal parts hope and fear – fuck, he can’t take that, has to ease it somehow.
“If I thought for one second you wanted me to stay . . .”
“No, that’s not . . . I didn’t want you to stay.”
Oh. Well, fuck. If that’s not it – and fuck, does it hurt that she didn’t want him to stay with her – then he’s even more confused than before.
“Bianca, I gotta admit, I have no idea what’s going on right now and you know how much I hate to admit shit like that.”
“I’d . . . I’d never ask you to give this up,” she says, sweeping her arms out wide to the ancient temple they’re standing in the middle of, tourists and workers milling around, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding between them. “It’s your dream. I could never get in the way of that.”
“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain . . .”
She cuts him off, looking up, her eyes bright and fierce as she says, “I want to be with you. I came here to be with you. If you want me to stay.”
Xavier has never felt two opposing emotions so strongly at the exact same moment. Joy floods his veins as much as guilt crashes through his gut. “I can’t ask you to . . .”
