His long, dark blond hair is pulled back in a tangled ponytail, his green eyes look bruised from lack of sleep, and he has his patchy, golden version of five o’clock shadow, but I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful than he is to me at this moment. The second our eyes meet and he smiles that crooked grin, I know it’s not too late. It’s not too late for me, and it’s not too late for Danny and me to have the fresh start I’ve been praying for since I woke up New Year’s Day.
I still love him. I love him so much that, by the time he crosses the carpet in three long steps and scoops me up in one strong arm, tears of relief are streaming down my face.
“Thank God,” I mumble against his neck. He smells so good. So safe.
“Damn, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve missed you so much,” he whispers into my hair, hugging me so tight my feet leave the floor and my breasts flatten against his thickly muscled chest.
By the time we were seventeen, Danny had five inches on me, but it’s only in the past two years that he’s become the kind of man whose chest turns heads when we walk down the beach. If someone had told me when I was thirteen and still capable of pinning Danny to the sand when we wrestled that one day he would have fifty pounds of pure muscle on me, I would have laughed.
When we first started dating, Danny and I were both five-three and I outweighed him by ten pounds, no matter how vehemently he insisted he weighed in at one forty. He was the runt of our junior high school, even shorter and skinnier than the two genius kids who’d skipped a grade.
But he isn’t a runt anymore. Working as an extreme-sports tour guide has made him strong, strong enough to hold me in one arm and his giant backpack in the other. Hopefully, strong enough to slay the demons that have kept me awake for forty-eight hours as I ran from the nightmare my life in Los Angeles has become. If we can just get on that plane and on our way to the opposite hemisphere, everything might still be all right.
“Come on,” I say, pressing a swift kiss to his scruffy cheek before pushing on his chest. “We’ve got to hurry, or we’ll miss our flight.”
His eyebrows lift as he sets me down. “Where are we going?”
“New Zealand.” I take his hand and pull him toward the gate, feeling like my heart is going to explode with relief when I see the door to the Jetway still open. “I’ve booked rooms for our first four days,” I say over my shoulder. “After that, we’ll see where the adventure takes us.”
“I thought we had to wait until after you graduated,” Danny says, even as he picks up his pace, hurrying toward Gate 7 beside me. “Did your dad change his mind?”
“No, I changed my mind,” I say. “I have some savings and I decided it was past time to use it.”
“Sam, wait.” Danny slows and his hand squirms free of mine. “I can’t let you do this. The tickets must have cost thousands of dollars, and I told you, I’m cash poor until the business—”
“I don’t care,” I say, snatching his hand and holding on tight. “You can pay me back later. Or never, I don’t care. I just need to do this. Now. With you.”
“Why?” His tired eyes narrow as he searches my face. “What’s going on Sam? Why haven’t you returned my calls? I swear, I was starting to think…”
“Thinking is overrated,” I say, throat tightening as panic threatens to take over again. We have to get on that plane. Only when we’re strapped into our seats in row twenty-two will I finally be able to take a breath without feeling like it might be my last.
“I don’t know,” Danny says, hurt clear in his voice. “I knew you were okay because your dad said he’d talked to you, but I—”
“I’m so sorry.” I cut him off before he can say what I know he’s thinking. I can’t stand to hear him say he thought I was going to end it, or think about how close I came to telling him I never wanted to see him again. “I should have answered the phone, I’ve just been…really upset.”
“I thought I was the person you talked to when you were upset,” he says, the furrow between his brows deepening. “Or has something changed?”
“Nothing’s changed,” I lie, forcing a brittle smile.
I reach up, smoothing away the line between his brows the way I always do, even that simple touch reminding me that we are us. We are Sam and Danny and together we’re bigger and stronger than anything chasing me.