Joshua quirked his eyebrows. “Bob Segar is a wise troubadour?”
“I was referring to Kenny Rogers.”
“You know that song is about a one-night stand, right?”
She hadn’t. Not really. It was just one of those songs she’d known her whole life. While her grandmother had introduced her to classic rock, her parents were more of old school country fans. She’d never listened to the words any further than to memorize them when she was probably no more than six-years-old, and having one night to hook up didn’t really occur to a child.
“Is that what you want?” she asked. “One night together, like that, to say goodbye?”
She wondered if the lights were low enough he couldn’t see the way her face flamed with embarrassment. In her head, she heard one of the nurses at the children’s hospital telling her and some of the other teenage girls, If you can’t say the word, then you don’t need to be doing it.
“I’m not a one night stand kind of guy,” Joshua said, and to Ada’s amazement, the words brought a profound sense of disappointment. “But,” he said, putting one finger under her chin and tilting her face to his, “if I’ve only got one night, I’m not letting you go until dawn.”
Chapter 22
Joshua knew his cabin was out since he shared it with Charlie, Maggie, Jase, Talley, and Makya, and three of those people possessed supernatural hearing. Even though they’d all learned to close their ears on occasion, especially when Jase and Talley were around, Joshua wanted more privacy. He would have taken her to the cabin on the Donovan’s property out in the country, but according to the surveillance cameras, he wasn’t the first person to have that idea. Of course, that left Scout and Liam’s room open, but since they were sharing a cabin with Scout’s parents and Angel, it was out of the question. He was almost to the point of putting out a mass text asking if anyone had a tent he could borrow when Makya dropped a key onto the picnic table where he and Ada were sitting.
“You realize we’re in the same cabin, right?” Joshua said. “But I sincerely appreciate the thought.”
Makya looked enough like a Hagan you knew he was related, but his coloring was darker and features more severe, giving him a harder edge than his cousins. “It’s not a cabin key,” he said in his characteristic I-don’t-give-a-crap-about-any-of-you manner. “It’s to the banquet hall. The event planner left like an hour ago, and I don’t have to let the caterers in until eight in the morning.”
It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing.
“Thanks, man.” Joshua slapped the other guy’s hand and then clasped it in a manly show of appreciation.
“Just don’t screw up the tables and have the key back to me by seven.”
Joshua’s inclusion in planning the wedding hadn’t extended past security measures, so he was properly shocked upon entering the banquet hall. He’d been in the building several times over the last week for various meetings. The room he and Ada pushed into didn’t belong in the same world as the austere conference room he was expecting. The walls were draped in a silk-like cloth that may have been actual silk. The tables were covered with the whitest of white linen table cloths, and each had a show-stopping floral arrangement as a centerpiece.
“Oh, wow,” Ada said, turning in a slow circle with her face tilted up to the Bohemian crystal chandelier a pack from Istanbul had gifted to the Alphas. It was the only light source currently in use, and it caused a soft light to spill over her face with a dream-like quality. “This is beautiful.”
Joshua took her hand and pulled her into position so he could place the other on the small of her back. “You’re beautiful,” he said before sweeping her into a waltz. “I could look at you all day long and never get bored.”
Ada’s laugher echoed off the walls. “Please tell me you haven’t been working on that line for the past sixty years.”
“You wound me, my lady. I only sought to compliment your lovely appearance. Shall I compare your lips to a freshly opened rose? Your skin to the most expensive satin? Your eyes—”
“To baby poop?”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “Baby poop?”
“Baby poop. It’s the most accurate description of my eye color. Don’t even try pretending I’m wrong.”
He spun her around the edge of a table, loving the way her hair fanned out behind her so much he did it again. “Here I am trying to be romantic and woo you, and you’re talking about baby poop. Are you trying to kill the mood, Miss Jessup?”
“I find nothing as romantic as honesty, and honestly, my eyes are the color of baby poop.”
“Your eyes are the color of an early autumn evening,” Joshua said, staring into the swirl of browns, dark greens, and gold. “September twilight. That is what color your eyes are, and that’s the honest truth.”
He loved the way her cheeks turned into perfect little spheres when she smiles. “Let me guess, you have an MFA in poetry, or you spent a year tooling around with Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“One, Emerson died like fifty years before I was born, and two…” He stopped dancing and captured her lips with his. Her response was immediate and enthusiastic. Her teeth raked his bottom lip and he almost went to his knees from the pleasure of it.
“What was two?” she asked when they finally came up for air.
“Two what?” Was she asking for a second round of kissing? If so, he’d be happy to oblige.
“You said one was that Emerson died before you were born. What was two?”
If she could still remember the conversation they had been having he hadn’t kissed her nearly hard enough.
“Two was the kiss. It was supposed to distract you from the fact I didn’t actually have a number two.”
“Hmmm…,” she said as her hands slid up his neck and delved into his hair, causing goosebumps to race down his spine. “I think I might need a bit more distraction then.”
She felt perfect in his arms. Her body was soft curves against his hard angles. As he kissed along her neck and shoulder, she made little noises in her throat he would have gladly killed entire armies to hear again. But every make out session has a point where it either has to end or lead to something a bit more naked, and Joshua reached that point way more quickly than he wanted.
“Wow,” Ada said as she gasped for air. “That was… wow.”
“Yes. Wow.” It wasn’t the smoothest of lines, but it was all he could manage since he was as out of breath as Ada. She was still pressed up against him, which was more than a little embarrassing in his current state, but he couldn’t bear to push her away.
“So… what do we do now?” Ada asked once her breathing was back to normal. “Raid the kitchen? Look for a Parcheesi board?”
“I wish we had a bed.” Ada’s eyes snapped wide open. “Not that I want to… I mean, obviously I want to… but I don’t think we’re going to…” Joshua cleared his throat. So much blood had rushed to his face he couldn’t imagine how there managed to be any anywhere else. “Tomorrow is going to be really busy for me,” he said, trying to regain some sort of control over his mouth. “It’s the big day and all. Lots of security issues, most of them involving keeping the bride from freaking out and running away before the ceremony. I’m going to need a few hours of sleep.”
He loathed to give up any of their hours together, but he was operating on less than three hours of sleep as it was. Without a quick nap, he would be putting his friends in danger with his exhaustion when it truly mattered. Anyway, there was a certain appeal to falling asleep and waking up with Ada in his arms.
“A bed, huh?” The mischievous smile she gave him made him want to kiss her again, so he did. “It’s you’re lucky day,” she said once she had the sole possession of her lips again.
She walked across the room with determination and he followed, his curiosity peaked.
“One of the advantages of breaking into a building with someone who works there,” she said as she slid a Super Mario Brothers wallet out of her pocket and pu
lled out a plain white plastic card, “is they have keys to all the mysterious locked doors.” She tapped the card against a reader on the wall. “Take your pick, although I’ll warn you, they all suck.”
A line of rollaway beds filled the back wall of a large storage room. “I don’t suppose there are sheets and stuff stashed around here anywhere?” he asked, finding nothing but beds, battered night stands, and some toilets arranged like Stonehenge.
“One step ahead of you,” came Ada’s voice from further away than he was expecting. By the time he rolled the bed over to the dance floor and successfully unfolded it, Ada was back with sheets, blankets, and pillows.
They worked together to get the unwieldy sheets on the mattress. Once the bed was made, pillows and blankets carefully arranged, they stood on either side, carefully avoiding each other’s eyes.
“So… ummm…” Joshua cleared his throat and tried to think of something witty to say. Unfortunately, every thought he’d ever had decided to abandon ship and leave him mute.
Ada let out a strangled laugh and threw a hand over her eyes. “This is so awkward.”
Somehow by saying it, she made it decidedly less so.
“What we need,” Joshua said, “is a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Yes, a plan. Some parameters about what we do and don’t want this to be.”
Ada’s eyes shimmered, and he knew she was laughing at him. “Joshua, have you ever, you know, been with a girl before?”
Again he felt all the blood rush to his face, which was ridiculous. He wasn’t some inexperienced kid, which once he thought about it, was probably where his embarrassment stemmed from. “I lived through the sixties and have been to college multiple times,” he said by way of explanation. He didn’t want to think about all the other girls he’d used to push away the loneliness over the years. Not when he was here with Ada whose name and face would be etched on his heart until the aliens came and destroyed the earth, and possibly even after.
One night with her before enduring an eternity without her. He wasn’t going to waste it because he was too nervous to get into the bed.
“What do you think?” he asked as he toed off his shoes. “Clothes stay on?”
“All of them?” Ada’s gaze raked over him, causing his body to go up in flames. He couldn’t answer her without his strangled voice giving away too much, so he raised his eyebrows in question. “It’s just…” She chewed on her bottom lip, and he thought she wasn’t going to finish, but then she said in a rush of words, “I feel like I can’t breathe in these jeans.”
Oh dear sweet merciful God whom he served, she was going to be the death of him.
“Underwear?” His voice was just as rough as he was expecting it to be.
Ada nodded. “Underwear stays on.”
“Anything else?”
“If I snore, you’re going to pretend like you don’t hear it, right?”
Joshua placed a hand over his heart, the corners of his mouth twitching as he suppressed a grin. “I swear it.”
“Good.” She gave one quick nod of her head as if that settled everything. “Well, then. Let’s get this show on the road, or the bed as it may be, shall we?” She took a deep breath, and Joshua noticed the hands hanging at her sides were trembling.
“Could you?” She spun a finger in the air and he obliged, turning to face the wall so she could have a moment of privacy. As he stood there, he tried to decide what exactly he should be doing. His hands went to the waistband of his jeans, but he changed his mind before undoing the button. A quick sniff test told him removing his shirt was probably in everyone’s best interest. He was in the middle of shucking it off when she said, “Okay.”
He turned back around and any breath he had in his lungs evaporated. She was under the blanket and her shirt was still on, so it wasn’t exactly like he was seeing anything more than he’d seen before, it was actually much less since she had the blanket pulled up under her chin, but it was still Ada lying in a bed waiting for him. In all his life he hadn’t seen a more beautiful sight.
If he was a more noble sort of person he would have kept his eyes on her face as he pulled back the blanket, but he was a nineteen-year-old guy whose hormones didn’t stop surging when he became an Immortal, so he took in his fill of her tanned, girl-shaped legs and regretted his decision to keep his pants on. Of course, imagining how her silky smooth legs would feel rubbing up against his was torturous enough. Experiencing the real life thing might have driven him well past the point of sanity.
The bed was so narrow they had to share a pillow. He laid his head next to hers, mere inches separating their noses.
“Hello, Miss Jessup,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Her thumb brushed against his bottom lip. “I can’t decide if this is the smartest or dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” Her lips followed her thumb and Joshua had to close his eyes against the maelstrom of emotions her touch caused.
“Definitely the smartest,” Joshua mumbled as her mouth moved across his cheek and settled on his ear lobe. “Very, very smart girl.” Needing to explore her like she was exploring him, he rolled, pulling her beneath him. He fought to keep his kisses slow and tender, wanting to savor every taste, every sigh. Once they were both breathless, he pulled back to simply look at her. Her eyes practically glowed in the low light and color warmed her skin and lips.
“I thought you said you had done this before,” she said, noticing the way his hand shook as he ran it down the silky smooth strands of her hair.
“I have, but not with you.”
He could have told her how she was more beautiful, inside and out, than all those other girls put together. He could have told her he loved her. He could have told her a week was enough time to realize she was the person he wanted to spend all of eternity with. But tomorrow she would go back to her life and the family she loved, and he would return to his duties and the vow he made, so he didn’t. Instead, he kissed her and hoped she could feel the truth of all the words he couldn’t say.
They spent the next few hours exploring one another with hands, mouths, and words. They kissed and laughed and bared their souls until Ada dropped off to sleep mid-sentence. Joshua followed her into dreams minutes later, the weight of her head on his shoulder and the warmth of her hand on his chest tethering him more firmly to this world than he had been in decades. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself once again adrift. Ada had snuck out sometime in the early morning hours, taking his heart with her.
Chapter 23
Skipping a treatment, staying out all night, and spending several hours in the humid summer air with God only knew what kinds of smoke wafting through the air hadn’t done stellar things for Ada’s lungs. She’d snuck out of Serenity Shores before the sun came up so she could get home and start her two hour long routine. At least, she was telling herself her morning treatments were why she made such an early, unannounced exit. Some people might have said it had more to do with being too chicken to say a proper goodbye to Joshua, but she refused to own up to it.
There was a knock at her bedroom door, and for a fraction of a second her heart kicked violently in her chest, convinced Joshua had come for her. But when it opened, her father was standing in the doorway.
“Where is your sister?” he asked without so much as a good morning.
Ada pulled the nebulizer out from between her lips and attempted to blow a smoke ring in the air.
“She decided to stay with the Donovans and go to Scout’s wedding today. Angel is loaning her a dress.” She took another puff of her breathing treatment. “She told me she was going to send you a text.”
“Since when did sending a text message count as gaining permission in this house?”
He stood just outside her door. The toe of the dress shoes he wore constantly, possibly even in sleep, were lined up with the place where the hardwood of the hallway met the plush carpet of her bedroom. It had been years since he stepped foot in her room. It was
as if the moment she got boobs and a period he considered her bedroom contaminated. Ada hoped it was because he thought she deserved her privacy, but she knew it was more than likely some stupid, archaic belief that men, including fathers, should never be in the room of a woman capable of bearing children.
“Do you want me to go get her? If so, you’ll have to wait until I’m done here.” She tapped the nebulizer with her finger just in case he decided she meant tooling around on Tumblr instead of doing the treatments that kept her alive. “I’ve still got the vest to do, too.”
She could see her father’s anger growing with every passing minute, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Maybe it was because she was still in an I-stayed-up-most-of-the-night-making-out-with-the-best-boy-on-earth-whom-I’ll-never-see-again haze, or maybe it was because she’d actually listened to Joshua when he said she should let her parents love her for who she was instead of who they wanted her to be, but either way, she didn’t have the desire or energy to put up a front and be the good girl her father expected her to be.
“Young lady, I don’t know what has gotten into you lately—”
Besides Marsden?
The unexpected thought was so inappropriate and hysterical, a startled laugh got caught in her chest. Unfortunately, her chest was already filled with mucus, which didn’t leave anywhere for the laugh to hang out. The result was a non-stop coughing fit.
On the plus side, it kept her father from finishing his thought.
On the minus side, she felt like she was dying.
“Here,” her father said more than thirty minutes later, passing her the bottle of water she kept on her nightstand. “This will help.”
He’d crossed the sacred threshold of her doorway for the first time in over five years when the coughing started. For over a half hour, he’d been beating on her back, becoming a human version of her vest. She knew her so-called friends would think it was weird for her to get sappy and sentimental over her father hitting her over and over again in an attempt to help clear her lungs, but so much of her childhood had been spent this way. Back before the Miracle of Prayer tour and everything getting so complicated, she’d just been a sick kid whose daddy would sing little songs as he pounded out a rhythm on her small back. There was a lot of fear in her childhood, the finality of death most kids couldn’t even comprehend was always at the forefront of her mind, even when she was very young, but when her dad was trying to find ways to make her treatments fun, she felt safe. Even now, after everything, she felt more secure knowing he was there as she fought for breath.
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