Falling into You

by Abrams, Lauren

  Her head is thrown back and she is wild—her fingers and mouth are everywhere, and we fall to the floor, and she’s on top of me then, head still thrown back. She’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t take it anymore, so I throw her roughly beneath me.

  I can feel her body tense and I slide my fingers lower, touching her where we’re joined together and she’s convulsing all around me. I catch a glimpse of her face, contorted and beautiful and my whole body explodes. I know I’m screaming her name over and over and I can’t stop.

  I’m still shaking minutes later when she pulls herself away from me, grabbing the blanket from her bed and wrapping herself in it.

  Chapter 31

  HALLIE

  I think I’m still shaking but I manage to recovery the tiny shred of dignity that I’ve left myself. I push him away and grab the blanket, wrapping it pathetically around me.

  I’m on my feet and he’s still dazed. I’m wondering whether the campus is deserted enough so that no one would notice a totally naked girl running across the grass. What the hell was I thinking?

  You weren’t, I say. I think those are the first words I’ve said aloud but I can’t be totally sure. We had fallen into each other, like we had since that first night. There wasn’t any thinking involved whatsoever.

  He’s on his feet too. I bite my lip and look away because I don’t want him to say anything to me.

  No matter how earth-shatteringly good it felt to have every piece of him, to let him crawl inside my skin entirely, I still can’t look. When I manage to glance up again, he’s put some of his clothes back on and I’m halfway wishing he hadn’t done that. He crosses to me again and wraps himself around me and we’re there for long minutes just like that.

  He pulls back finally and places hands on either side of my face, trapping me and every other muscle in my body is trying to flee, but I’m paralyzed.

  “No,” he says to me. “No. Not until I get what I came for.”

  He just got what he came for, I think, biting my lip again.

  “I am hopelessly, crazy, absolutely, perfectly in love with you.” His eyes are locked on mine, and he’s not giving me any room to breathe.

  “I love you. I love you.”

  I think he keeps saying it over and over and over. I finally break away and I’m sitting on the floor and he’s holding my hands with his.

  “I am so, so sorry,” he adds, brushing his lips against my fingers. “I just want you to know…”

  I pull my fingers away and raise them to his lips instead. “I know.”

  I know that he’s sorry. And I know that he loves me. The knowledge of it has been sitting in the marrow of my bones for the past week, while I’ve wondered how he could have thrown what we had away.

  I can’t give him the words he wants to hear so I lean in slowly and kiss him. I pull back and try to say what I need to. “Chris…” My voice is hard and cruel, and he’s crumpling in front of me and trying to grab his things. I shake my head, because I don’t want him to leave and I don’t want him to stay and I don’t know what I want.

  “No,” I say, more clearly this time. We are going to have to talk about it eventually, but not now. Not this instant. I pull him close again and the blanket falls away.

  He doesn’t hesitate. A moment ago, we had been crazy with need and crazy for each other. He’s slow and deliberate now, watching me as he traces the outline of my collarbone with his fingertips. He moves them lower over my belly. He slides a finger into me, moaning a little bit and kisses my mouth. I try to reach for him, to pull him closer, but he pushed my hands away and I’m leaning back, sighing. It doesn’t take much before I’m twisting my fingers into his hair and making guttural noises.

  My body is a traitor to my head. He must know how badly I’ve wanted, needed this. He smiles at the look on my face and kisses my stomach and I’m pulling him back to me.

  We move together now, slowly and then more quickly and then slowly again and I feel like nothing could ever be this perfectly right again, even everything else about the two of us is wrong.

  There’s only one thing that I have left to give as his breath starts to shudder and I feel myself giving in to him.

  I grab his face with one of my hands, cupping his chin.

  “I love you.”

  He had to know. I think I’ve known from the minute I saw him.

  I close my eyes after I catch a glimpse of the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. I’ll never recover. I know that he will break my heart irreparably and I am no longer strong.

  But it doesn’t matter. Nothing does, not compared to the feeling of his skin in mine.

  Chapter 32

  CHRIS

  I wake her up twice because I can’t seem to fill my need for her, no matter how many tastes I get. It’s been hours and maybe even days and we’re locked together in her tiny twin bed. I can’t bring myself to wake her up because her hair is in an endless mess of tangles and her lips are swollen and raw and she’s perfect in that moment and in every moment.

  She finally rouses herself and turns to me. “Hey.” She’s embarrassed for a minute before her lips curl into a smile.

  “Hey.” I look around the room and it’s completely trashed. Papers and jars of finger paint and clothes are everywhere.

  She follows my eyes with her own and she’s laughing, too. “Not exactly a penthouse hotel suite, is it?”

  “Well, the furniture is nailed to the ground, so I’d say that’s the first sign that the room service isn’t arriving anytime soon.”

  “It’s probably a good thing the furniture is nailed to the ground.” She pokes me in the gut. “You’re completely insatiable.”

  “I’m blaming this entirely on you,” I say, poking her right back.

  She opens her mouth again and then shakes her head. “Room service does sound good, though. Ugh.” She stretches her arms. “I need a shower.”

  “Go.” A plan starts to take shape inside my head. “Get clean because you’re going to get dirty again.”

  “Glutton.” She groans and extracts herself from the bed. “Dorm showers are the worst.”

  With one last look at me that’s filled with something I can’t quite decipher, she grabs her things and leaves the room. I reach frantically for my phone and start dialing. When she comes back, she flops onto the bed beside me.

  “I’m hungry.” She tilts her head to the side. “I wonder whose fault that could be?”

  “Let’s grab something to eat, then.”

  “We could order in,” she says suggestively, wiggling her hips. It takes every ounce of determination I have not to rip the clothes entirely off.

  “I have a better idea,” I say, wrapping my arm around her waist.

  ***

  A couple of hours later, we’re in the penthouse suite of the swankiest hotel in Atlanta and she’s on the balcony with a glass of champagne in a plush bathrobe. The childlike gleam in her eyes when she saw the lavish surroundings was too much for me, and I had barely made it through the door before throwing her to the ground and taking her with me again.

  Her hair is all wild and she smells like sex and honey. I grab a tray of food because I’m famished, and I set it on the table as I join her and press my lips to the top of her head.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she says, turning herself around to kiss me.

  There are still so many words that are unspoken between us. The past day has been like falling back into a dream, but it won’t last forever and she knows it and I know it. The city stretched beneath us, I groan a little bit and pull back.

  “We need to talk about some things.” I say it but it’s absolutely the last thing I want to do.

  “We do.”

  “I destroyed the trust between us.” My voice is flat. It’s a statement and not a question.

  A sigh. “I had a hand in that, too.” I know she’s referring to the night in the hotel room and I bite back the words on my
tongue.

  She looks me dead in the eye then. “Things happen. You can’t have perfection all the time.” I want to tell her that she’s wrong, that if she can find a way to trust me again, that we can have perfection all the time.

  “It hurt. It hurt so much that I never wanted to see you again.” She bites her lip. “But then you were standing there, at my door and there wasn’t a choice.”

  I yank her to me. “Thank God. I hadn’t really gotten past that part of my plan in my head.”

  Her voice is low, serious. “If you ever pull anything like that again, I will never forgive you. Ever. Room service be damned.”

  “If I ever pull anything like that again, I’ll kill myself,” I say, meaning it.

  She shakes her head. “Nope. I’ve already thought up some creative plans and you’re not going to take that away from me. I don’t want to waste the thousands of hours I’ve spent watching bad cop shows and spy movies. They’ve made me a criminal mastermind.”

  After a long deep breath, she looks at me. “Why, Chris?”

  “When I saw you and Ben on the roof, I just went crazy. The thought of you with someone else…”

  She interrupts me. “Sophia called. For some reason, I decided to listen to her. She also said that she seduced you, and I know Sophia well enough to know that she probably pulled out all the stops to make that happen.”

  Her eyes question me. “She told me that she lied to you, that she told you that Ben and I were together. I’m sorry that you believed that. I’m sorry that you believed I could do something like that.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t, but I saw the two of you and something in me snapped. When you walked in on us, I was stopping it. She was never going to be a substitute for you.”

  I can tell that she believes me, but it isn’t enough. The damage that I’ve caused isn’t going away that easily, despite the magic of the last day that we’ve spent in each other’s arms.

  “I didn’t have to imagine you being with someone else,” she says. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “That’s never going to happen again.”

  Her eyes are on mine for long minutes and I don’t say anything because she’s making a final decision now and I know it. Her face relaxes finally, and she nods. “I know.” She laces our fingers together and I wrap her in for a long hug, only drawing back when she starts to speak again. “Again, I watch a lot of spy movies. I’m pretty sure I could get in and out without anyone ever knowing that I was there. Speaking of movies…”

  I groan. “Don’t remind me.”

  She pokes me, squealing. “Chris Jensen! Chris Jensen! He’s so sexy.”

  “I’m now a tragic hero. I should thank Ben for that. That punch made Marcus extremely happy.”

  She giggles. “He would totally hate that. I’m pretty sure he would try to rip your head off if he ever saw you again.”

  I stay silent. I don’t tell her about his call, his words that I can’t entirely remove from my brain.

  “You’re going to be a movie star.” She thinks it over before speaking again. “You are a movie star.”

  James Ross and Hollywood and Prague and movie sets seem far away now. I’m not sure what else to say.

  “It’s a job.” Those words aren’t quite right, either, and she knows it.

  “It’s a lifestyle,” she counters.

  “Maybe.” I sigh.

  “Have paparazzi been following you?”

  I don’t tell her what it’s been like, that I’ve been barraged by lights and people and cameras and it feels like normal is something of the past. I don’t really believe the next words I say, although I hope for them. “Maybe they’ll leave me alone now that my dad’s funeral is over.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

  “You were. The finger paint.”

  I’m begging her with my eyes to drop it, and she gets the message, like she always does. It’s one of a million things that I love about her. “I hope you’re keeping that card. It’s going to be worth a million dollars someday. It’s an original, you know.”

  “It’s being framed as we speak.”

  She looks just the same as when I met her then, beautiful and laughing and open and honest. I kiss her a hundred times, a thousand times.

  There’s one question let unanswered. “I have to know—why did you run from me that night? What happened? I thought it was that you were with him, but…” The memory of Ben saying “to hell and back” and the pain in her eyes in the hotel flits across my memory.

  “It wasn’t you.” She’s still hiding something and the fact that she won’t share it pains me. “Some things are better left alone.”

  “No secrets, right?”

  She sighs. “Everybody has a sad story, Chris. Everybody. Even me. But it’s an old sad story and I don’t want to tell it. I want to think about tomorrow and the next tomorrow and I can’t do that if I tell you a long, old, sad story right now.”

  I’m not satisfied and she can tell, so she spins me to face her and continues. “I was broken a long time ago. That night in the hotel room, I remembered something that I didn’t want to remember and running seemed like the only feasible option at the time. Hey. Hey.”

  I realize that I’ve been turning away from her but she pulls me back so that we’re looking at each other in the eye. “I want to…I need to move on with my life. It’s been a long time coming. And you know everything about me that’s worth knowing and I love you. I love you so much.”

  I breathe into her hair. “I love you, too.” She’s locked whatever it is up and away. I can’t get the thought of it festering between us out of me, but her eyes are focused on me, big and blue, and she is so beautiful that I push it away. It’s enough for now. And I still haven’t asked the most important question. I don’t phrase it that way, because I want to make absolutely sure that she doesn’t say no. “I want to be with you forever.”

  She takes a long breath. “Forever’s a really long time.”

  “Not long enough. Be with me. Now. Always.” My voice is softer, and I’m asking.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not a James Ross-approved statement,” she teases.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m not James Ross.”

  “Yes.” She’s looking deep into me and a smile is creeping slowly across her face and her whole body is radiating warmth.

  “Yes to what?”

  “I want to be with you. Now. Always. I want to come to LA and Prague and I want to be with you.”

  I grasp her to me. “You won’t regret it.”

  “I better not. Spy movies, remember?”

  I kiss her over our laughter and I remember her words that I’ve never been quite able to understand. “I think I could get used to this whole perfectly happy thing.”

  She smiles, but there’s a flicker of a shadow in her eye that I try desperately to ignore.

  “Perfectly happy sounds pretty damn good.”

  Read on for a sneak peek of the sequel to Falling Into You.

  New York

  7 Years Later

  Hallie

  I rush down the sidewalk, clutching my bag and tucking away a few loose strands of hair that won’t stay in place. I’m late, because I spent the last hour deciding whether or not I would be able to leave the hotel room.

  Eventually, through sheer hope that this meeting wouldn’t be as bad as I knew it was going to be and knowing that it couldn’t be avoided, I put on my shoes and walked out the door. I glance up at the cool gray façade and let out a long sigh. I look down to see the flash of a diamond catch the light.

  This is for him. It’s what he wanted. Not for you, I remind myself.

  An impossibly beautiful girl with black hair greets me. “Can I help you?”

  “I have a meeting at noon with Mr. Rivers.”

  “Name, please.”

  “It’s probably under Hallie Caldwell.”

  She pages through the list, checking it and then smiles up at me. “Righ
t away, Miss Caldwell. I’ll tell him that you’re here and he should be down shortly. Is there anything that I can get for you while you’re waiting?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you very much.”

  My hands dance in my lap and I try to calm them. The feeling of dread that’s fallen over me ever since I got off the plane is heavy now. I twist the ring around my finger in endless circles, trying to remember why I had ever agreed to this in the first place.

  “The elusive Miss Caldwell,” a booming voice announces. I look up to see a bear of a man hulking into the lobby.

  I stand up, stumbling on my feet a little bit. Stupid heels.

  “Hello.” I’m trying to be professional, grown up, but my voice and hands and body are all trembling uncontrollably. He doesn’t seem to notice, instead taking both of my hands into one of his and placing the other at the small of my back.

  “I’m Jeff, head of production for FFG Studios. It’s nice to meet you in the flesh.”

  He eyes me, his tongue running over his lips. “Come this way.” He ushers me into an elevator and presses 47. “How’s the trip to New York? The hotel treating you all right? If there’s anything you need, just tell me and I’ll put someone on it. How long are you here for?” His questions all run together, like he’s used to doing the talking and not so much used to asking.

  I open my mouth to say something in response, but he continues. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but we love the script. We’re basically willing to sell our souls to get it,” he whispers conspiratorially.

  My lips curl involuntarily into a smile. “You were definitely not supposed to tell me that.”

  “She speaks! You should keep doing that, honey. It looks good on you.”

  I try to smile but I’m pretty sure I come off as disgusted. He shakes his head and clucks, and I see Ben’s agent (my agent—I correct myself) sitting in a chair outside of a conference room with a long table.

  Jeff looks at her and then back at me. “You two probably need a minute to talk. Don’t take too long.” The flash of his smile reveals even rows of too-white teeth.