Page 37 of The I Do Over

Maybe not…

His thumbs stroked her cheeks. “I do, Maddie. I know we can’t change where we live and we both need to get back to our regularly scheduled lives, but…I’d like more time together.”

“Knox, I…” She took a step back. “I don’t know what to say. You said this was about closure and…and…”

For a moment, he feared he misread the situation completely. Maybe he was the only one looking for more.

“Um…”

“I can’t believe you’d suddenly be willing to come back to Virginia,” she was saying, and that’s when he felt a little more at ease.

But just a little.

“Well, to be fair, it’s not like you live in our old town or that we’d be spending any time with your parents,” he said and knew right away it probably wasn’t the right thing to say.

Fortunately, Maddie didn’t hold it against him. “No, I realize that. It just seemed like you genuinely preferred not to go back there.”

“I’ve been back, but I tend to just go for brief visits. I think I can handle a weekend.” He paused for a moment. “And what about you? Would you be willing to come back to Raleigh every once in a while?”

She nodded. “I would. I know we went out a few times, but there’s more I’d like to see with you.”

That’s when he allowed himself to relax.

Truly relax.

They could do this.

Looking up at him, she smiled. “So…how do we do this?”

Unable to help himself, Knox closed the distance between them and held her close and knew he was grinning like an idiot. “I guess we look at our schedules and figure out the dates that work best. Chesapeake is…what…a three-hour drive from here?”

Nodding again, Maddie explained, “It’s not a bad drive and I could probably shift my Friday afternoon schedules around on the weekends when I’m coming here so I can leave early and possibly be here by dinnertime.”

“I could probably do the same. We normally have one weekend a month where we do a three-day training exercise. It’s like a role-play situation where clients learn how to deal with things like hostage situations. Very intensive. Unfortunately, right now it’s an all hands on deck sort of thing, so I have to be there along with Daniel and Xander.”

Which was another reason why he and the guys needed to talk about the possibility of hiring more people.

“Okay, but that still typically would leave three weekends a month, right?”

“It does,” he said slowly, only to realize that he wasn’t so sure. “Maybe only two.”

“Oh.”

When he looked down at her, he saw the sadness on her face and felt shitty about it. “We’ll figure it out. I mean, we just now decided to give it a try and it might not all fall into place right away, but it will eventually. Trust me.”

It wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped, and he was sure Daniel and Xander were going to give him a little shit for messing with the schedule, but he’d deal with it.

“Now that we’ve got that covered, what should we do about dinner?” he asked and watched as her expression instantly changed. She took a step back before taking one of his hands in hers and led him out of the kitchen and toward the living room. “Um, Maddie?”

Before he knew it, she gave him a playful shove onto the couch and then straddled his lap. “I think we should celebrate this new plan of ours and then worry about dinner,” she said huskily, leaning in and kissing his neck.

His hands instantly went to her hips and that’s when he realized she didn’t have on panties. He whispered her name like a plea as she rubbed herself against him and suddenly dinner was the very last thing on this mind.

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