Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 108483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
“Something like that.” He runs his thumb over my bottom lip. “Antarctica. Then I’m going to the Amazon. You know 20 percent of the world’s oxygen comes from the Amazon?”
“No shit. You learn something new every day.”
“You can if you wanna.” He laughs. “Then possibly the Maldives, which within just a few decades may be uninhabitable.”
“Wait, like the islands? Like great vacay Maldives?”
“They’re only six feet above sea level. By the middle of this century, parts of the Maldives and even parts of Hawaii may be underwater.”
“You’re serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. The shame is that by the time people start believing how serious this really is, it’ll be too late.”
“How did you get into this? Why is it so important to you?”
“Let’s just say I grew up thinking a lot about our natural resources,” he says with an ironic smile that tells me absolutely nothing. “And didn’t always like what I found.”
“So you’re off to save the planet.”
“And don’t forget I want to make a lot of money.”
“Capitalist,” I whisper, straining up to kiss his neck.
“Crusader,” he whispers his retort over my shoulder, licking and sucking my collarbone.
“We’re going in completely different directions, aren’t we?” I hate the pathetic sound of my own voice—the way my heart constricts at the thought of him in the wilds of Antarctica and the Amazon while I toil on behalf of the future Senator Nighthorse in Oklahoma.
“Yeah, we are.” He tugs on my hand and pulls us to a sitting position on the blanket, seating me between his knees with my back to his chest. “Let me show you where I’ll be.”
“What?” I peer at him over my shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Gimme your hands,” he says, his voice resonating in my back. His arms bracket me as he reaches for my hands, holding them out in front of us.
“Let’s go back to the days when the world was flat for a second.” He places my hands side by side, palm up. “I don’t have a globe, so we’ll make a map. Here’s the good old US of A.” With his index finger, he sketches what roughly looks like the shape of the United States at the far edge of my left palm. “You’ll be there in Oklahoma.”
He draws a line down and across to the far lower quadrant of my right palm and stops at my wrist. “I’ll be all the way down here in Antarctica.”
He moves up a little, leaving tiny needles of sensation across my skin with every touch. “The team will leave from here to get there.”
“Where is that?” I ask, my throat closing up and my eyes stinging.
“New Zealand. It’s closest.”
“I always think of New Zealand as hot, not that close to the coldest place in the world.”
“That’s one of the fascinating things about it,” he says, the excitement piquing in his voice. “There’s this point where tropical and arctic merge. Antarctica is this study of paradoxes. An icy desert. Two things that never should have been together.” He kisses my neck, his breath feathering my hair with the words. “But they fit. Make sense. Belong.”
Like us.
I don’t say it, but I feel it.
He closes my hands on the map he sketched into my palms, holding them together and pulling me tighter to his chest.
“Now you’ve got the whole world in your hands.” He laughs into my hair. “I know. Corny, right?”
“No. Not corny.”
Sweet.
I open my hands again, studying the path he drew from the upper corner of my left palm to the lowest corner of my right. We’ll be at extreme points on the Earth. As far apart as two people could be.
If I was smart, I’d begin putting distance between us now, preparing my heart for his absence. For his ultimate, inevitable departure. But I’m not as smart as I thought I was. I turn to face him, wrap my arms around his neck, and push until he’s on his back and I’m straddling his hips with my thighs. I slide my hands into the luxury of his hair. With every kiss, I brush my palms over it, erasing every mile that soon will separate us. We don’t have long, but right now, I have this.
CHAPTER 21
MAXIM
I miss Lennix already.
I should be reviewing my notes for the team meeting in London, but what am I doing? Looking through pictures of us…of her at the tulip fields yesterday.
This is why. This is why the fuck I don’t do relationships. I have goals. All the things my father thinks I can’t do without him and the Cade name, I’ll do. Yet here I am, embarking on the most treacherous and important trip of my life, and I’m grinning like an idiot at pictures of Lennix in a tulip field. The wind whips through her hair like it did the first day I met her, but her eyes aren’t stormy or teary like they were at the protest. They smile at me, that indefinable gray. There’s a sea of color behind her, countless beautiful flowers, and she puts them all to shame.