“Sorry about that, but I’d been waiting for that call. It was actually about you, so…” He paused and walked in through the patio doors, a broad smile on his face.
“Me?” I drew a hand up to point at my chest in question.
He nodded and then sat back down on the couch, spreading his arms out along the back of the cushions. “I made a few phone calls yesterday to some friends. You have a couple of options, Miss Myers.” His expression turned serious.
“Do I?” I narrowed my eyes as I settled down on the couch next to him, wondering what the heck he was talking about.
“As you know, I’m in the market for an agent. And I think I’ve found the perfect one.” He stared at me, a smile spreading across his face, and I widened my eyes in surprise.
“Me?” I shot bolt upright in shock. “You want me to be your agent?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes. I will only sign with you. So you have two options. One,” he lifted a finger in the air, “you can either open your own agency and I’ll be your first client. Or two,” he lifted a second finger, “you can go to work at the Warren Taylor Agency and I’ll still be your first client.”
“Warren Taylor’s? But I couldn’t just go there and be an agent—” I stopped mid-sentence, my thoughts spinning too quickly for me to keep up.
Walker pressed a finger to my lips to stop me. “They said they would hire you. That I would be your first and only client until you learned the ropes and got some agency experience under your belt. They want to help you grow and they want you to learn from them. They’re completely on board and more than happy to help with this transition period in both our lives. You just have to call them and accept.”
He removed his finger and I smiled as big as my lips would allow. The uneasiness that had settled in my stomach over my career suddenly disappeared. “Oh my gosh, Walker, you’re amazing.” I crawled onto his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Thank you so much. You didn’t have to do that, but I really appreciate it.”
He leaned his body away from me, breaking our contact. “I wanted to.”
I smiled, filled with happiness. No one had ever done something like this for me before. In a town filled with people pulling strings, I never intended to play that way, and was amazed that this agency would do the same. “Do I need to call them now and work out the details?”
He tilted his head. “They can wait. I can’t.”
“Is that so?” I giggled against his mouth as his lips found mine, his hands gripping me tighter.
“Wait.” I pulled away, forcing him to release me as I crawled off his lap and stood. “What if I’m bad at it? What if I’m a terrible agent who makes horrible business decisions?”
“You won’t be. But we’ll add a clause in our contract that you’re not allowed to ruin my career,” he said with a laugh and moved to kiss me again, my mind still racing.
I leaned away. “Wait!”
“Again?” His eyebrows shot up as a smile teased his lips.
“Last thought. I don’t normally mix business with pleasure. This might not be a good idea. What if we don’t last?”
“We,” he said as he shook his head at me disapprovingly and rose to his feet as well, “are never breaking up. And you know it. I don’t normally mix business with pleasure either, but I’m making an exception. And so will you.”
Walker was right.
He was so damn right.
His hand snaked around my lower back as he pulled me toward him and our lips met. I parted my lips slightly and the tip of his tongue teased mine, tentatively at first before going all-in. Happiness swirled around me on every level, and I realized I’d never felt luckier. Or happier.
He lifted me by my ass and I wrapped my legs around his waist. “I’m taking you to the bedroom. You can thank me there.”
I threw my head back and laughed. “I know I should be saying something like, ‘No, Walker, this is too soon,’ but we were in love once before so it doesn’t count, right?”
“Doesn’t count? It all counts. Every moment with you counts, Madison.” He walked us through the double-door entry to his bedroom, and I gaped at the room’s ocean view. I could definitely get used to this.
Walker placed me on the bed before he knelt, straddling my body with his. I reached for his arms, feeling his biceps flexing as I ran my fingers across them, tracing the tattoos that swirled down to his forearms with a light touch. His gaze trapped my own, refusing to release it as he slowly stretched out his legs, lowering his hips against mine as he rested his weight on his elbows. When I closed my eyes at the delicious tingles that began when he pressed all that wonderful male hardness against me, he said, “Open your eyes, babe. Look at me.”
Without conscious thought, my eyes fluttered open as my body reacted to Walker’s words and actions instinctively, no permission from me requested or needed. He asked, and I obeyed. I wrapped my arms around his neck and tilted my hips against his, trying to get closer, and closer, letting him know just how badly I wanted him inside me.
“Don’t rush me.” He focused on me intently, and the determination and passion I could see in his eyes took my breath away. “I plan on taking my time.” A devilish smirk crept across his face and my cheeks heated.
I slid my hands over his back before grasping the hem of his shirt. Tugging on it, I forced it up until he ducked his head through the opening and discarded it onto the floor. I inhaled quickly, the sight of him shirtless even better than I could have imagined. Definitely better than I remembered. His tanned skin was beautiful, all hard and smooth at the same time, and I wanted to lick every square inch of it, especially the tattoo of five numbers in a simple, but masculine script placed above his heart. When I traced the numbers with my fingers, I must have frowned in confusion because he glanced down at it.
“I got this tattoo once I started making money and traveling a lot. I was hardly ever home for a while there.”
“What do the numbers mean?”
“It’s the zip code for Malibu. I thought about getting the coordinates for our beach, but I didn’t like the way it looked. Too many numbers.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “You were going to get a tattoo about me?”
He smiled. “This one’s about you too.”
“It is?”
“Not just you, but yeah, you’re a part of it. You were always a part of my heart, even though I swear you took it with you the day you left. I wanted to carry my home with me when I was far away. My mom, Malibu, the surf, my friends, you. As long as I kept you all right above my heart, you’d always be with me, no matter where on this planet I was at the time.”
My heart did a little flip-flop inside my chest. Everything this guy said to me made me feel like I was fourteen all over again, falling in love for the first time. The past few days had been straight out of the pages of a fairy tale, and I wanted to live my life in it.
“When’d you get so romantic?”
“Birth,” he crooned.
Swooning a little inside, I sucked in a sharp breath, wanting that magical mouth all over me.
As if reading my mind, he tugged my shirt up a few inches, leaving part of my stomach exposed. He shifted back and dipped his head to my abdomen, touching his tongue to my skin in slow, sensuous strokes. From time to time he paused, pressing his lips to my skin, dropping small kisses here and there as he ventured to the next exposed piece of me. I gasped as he gave me a small nip, the excitement building within me almost too much to handle.
“I need this off. Now.” He tugged at my shirt impatiently, then pleaded with his eyes for me to get rid of it.
“You said not to rush you,” I teased, but did as he asked.
When I dropped it to the floor, his eyes gleamed with an undisguised hunger as his gaze drifted over me, dropping to my waistband before traveling back up and stopping at my breasts, encased in a skimpy satin and lace bra. Thank God I decided at the last minute to grab my sexiest lingerie; from the looks of it, Walker liked it. A lot.