A Love Like Ours

Chapter 41

"I'm sweating." Mads reached forward to crank up the air-con in the car.

A blast of hot air slapped me in the face, chasing beads of perspiration down my cheeks.

I turned it down just a bit. "Let's let it cool down before turning it on full-blast, yeah?"

Mads didn't even smile, and I glanced over to find that the hollow of her throat was glistening. She propped her feet up on the dash and leaned her head back against the seat.

I gripped her knee with a smile. "It was worth it, wasn't it?"

She opened her blue eyes, looked at me, and I saw all that we'd just done flash through them. She gave me a sheepish smile, settled her hand on top of mine. "Definitely."

We'd had a major shopping day together, and had just returned to the car after bringing everything up to the new flat and putting it all away. We'd bought lots of stuff for the kitchen—pots, pans, plates, forks, knives, glasses—and a few lamps and side tables for the bedroom. We'd also ordered a few couches and a bedroom set to be delivered before I was meant to leave at the end of the week. It was a lot to do in one day, but after showing her the apartment yesterday, and talking about it with her family last night, we were too excited to wait, and decided we'd rather get at least some of our furnishings together while I was here.

And Mads, of course, had paid for some of it. There was no getting around it with her right beside me.

Now, Mads shifted around in her seat as we sat at a red light, and I glanced over at her from my position in the driver's seat. She caught my eye and smiled, her cheeks slightly pink. "Think I might have gotten rug burn on my back."

I understood her blush then, and aside from enjoying the reminder of our time on the floor of our living room, I felt awful, too.

"Shit, I'm sorry, I—"

"Harry," Mads said with a laugh. "I didn't mean to make you feel bad."

I had to keep my eyes on the road, but felt myself glancing over every few seconds, trying to determine just how uncomfortable she was, all while the reminder of what we'd done played on loop in my head.

Mads reached over, squeezed my shoulder. And when I still didn't say anything, she leaned over, pressed a kiss to my shoulder, and lingered there. "That was worth it, too."

I breathed a bit of a laugh and forced myself to keep my focus on the road, and my hands on the wheel.

We had been in the kitchen. Mads was drying off the dishes I'd just washed, and I was cleaning freshly unboxed pots and pans at the sink so that we could put them away. And the warm water was running over my hands and the suds where swirling down the drain and she was standing on her tiptoes, putting the plates in a cabinet by the fridge, one by one.

It was the kind of hot day where any amount of movement, no matter how minimal, caused you to break out in a sweat, and there had been a sheen of it on her shoulder blades, exposed by her racer-back tank top. Even the air-con in the building wasn't doing enough to cool us, and I was growing warmer and warmer by the moment for an entirely different reason.

She didn't seem to notice my attention as I watched her—the lines of muscle in her legs rippling as she reached up again, this time placing a dish on the lower shelf, then stepping back to stare at her work.

"These should probably go on the lower shelf, shouldn't they?" she asked aloud, making it sound more like a declaration. "Yeah," she answered herself, swiping a wisp of hair from her sweaty forehead. "Of course they should."