All Amity Allows (Fall for You Book 2) (20 page)

Chapter Twenty

Drew linked his
fingers with Amity’s and relished the feel of her silken skin brushing against his. With his other hand, he stroked long, languid paths along her side as images of the last few hours ran through his head again. A contented sigh escaped from his lips. His every desire had been satisfied in every way imaginable—and some he’d never dreamed of. He’d had to call on every reserve to have the stamina to keep up with Amity’s voracious appetite, but already, the need to claim her again was stirring within him. It hadn’t even been a day, and he already wondered how he was going to say goodbye in just seven short days.

One thing he quickly learned was Amity was still trying to perform her duty to Heaven, and to him. In small ways, she guided him to realizations he would never have had on his own. Like trusting his partner. From his very early exploits, he’d learned through experience that it was his duty to ensure his woman was pleased. If she wasn’t, he was at fault. With her surprising rope trick, Amity had shown him that his need to please didn’t mean he had to touch and caress, and rush his woman to the edge. Amity proved that trust and partnership were more important tools in a lover’s arsenal than hands or a mouth.

Eventually, Amity climbed from the bed. He wanted to follow her, but he wasn’t entirely sure his legs would work. They still felt a bit jelly-like after their most recent round, where he’d pinned Amity against the wall as he attacked her body.

Only minutes after she left the room, Amity returned with a tray full of food. As tempting as the platter of fresh fruit looked, it was Amity that drew his eye. Completely naked with her long hair hanging loosely over both shoulders, she looked like the embodiment of the
Birth of Venus
painting.

Despite his protesting legs, he jumped from the bed, grabbed the tray out of her hands, and placed it on the bed. Then he reached for Amity’s hands and led her to the shower for another round.

Amity wished
she was just a little more selfish.

After a week, a blissful week where clothing was sparse and she and Drew had explored each other’s bodies on every surface in the bungalow, as well as down in the warm, tropical water that surrounded the island, it was time to return him to his body—to his real life.

She didn’t want to though. She wanted to stay where they were, forever wrapped up in each other. It was useless though—eventually Michael would look for her. Peter would only keep her secrets so long. A week was nothing for an angel, comparable to less than a few minutes for a human, but one day, her responsibilities would catch up with them both, and Drew would have given up everything for nothing.

She rested her forehead against Drew’s.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said, bringing his lips to hers in a move obviously designed to tempt her not to send him back.

She ran her hands around his waist, anchoring herself to him. “And I don’t want you to go.”

“But you’re still going to make me.” He gave her a sad smile.

“I don’t have a choice. What else
can
I do?”

“Tell me to stay, and I’ll stay.”

“You can’t give up your life for me. Eventually, I’ll have to leave and then you’ll be stuck here alone.”

“I wish there was another option,” he said.

Tears pricked Amity’s eyes. “I can’t tell you how much this week has meant to me,” she said. A sob wracked her chest and took away her last words.

Drew ran his fingers over her cheek, wiping away an errant tear that fell. “To me too. I’ll never forget you, Amity. Never.”

“Promise me you’ll live your life to the fullest. That you won’t be afraid to love again.”

He sighed. “How can I? No one will ever live up to you.”

She clasped her hand over his, pressing his palm to her cheek. “Promise me.”

Just as she caught the regret in his gaze, he closed his eyes. “I’ll do what I can.”

It was the most she’d get—more than she could have hoped for. She didn’t want him to move on, didn’t want him to find anyone else, but neither did she want him to live the rest of his life without love.

Amity pressed her lips to his and forced his soul back to Earth. She didn’t ask if he was ready, didn’t confirm that he’d said all he wanted to say, and didn’t warn him of what she was going to do.

It wasn’t a proper goodbye, but if she’d left it any longer, she wasn’t sure she would have been able to let him go at all.

Chapter Twenty-One

One minute, Drew
had Amity’s lips on his and the sound of waves rolling against the beach echoing in his ears. The next, he had a pounding headache, dry lips, and the clamor of sounds that always echoed around the hospital ringing in his ears.

He hurt. He hadn’t expected his “landing” back on Earth to be so painful, but every part of him ached. With his dry, aching throat, every breath was a lesson in agony. Even opening his eyes hurt, the harsh light piercing against his sensitive retinas. He closed his eyes and wished with everything in him to be allowed to return to Amity’s side. Sorrow rushed through him as he realized that he would never see her again. She’d done her job, maybe too well, and he was well and truly over Becca.

He recalled his final promise to Amity—he had to find a way to move on. Even after only a few minutes, he realized that although the ache in his heart was going to be harder to get over than any agony he’d felt over Becca, some parts were actually easier. Instead of being heartbroken and left to wonder why he’d been undeserving of love, he felt revitalized and powerful that even an angel had fallen for him. Amity had loved him, had helped him, and had opened his mind and heart up to so many things he’d never even considered. He owed it to her not to wallow. To get up, to get back into his life. To . . . fall in love again—as deplorable as that idea sounded to him in that moment.

With great effort, he edged his arm toward the call button and brushed his finger against it. Then he sank back against the pillow as the exertion of that small motion stole his energy. The general exhaustion and atrophy he felt was more than he’d anticipated. After the first day of learning what Amity had done, he’d actually barely given his body back on Earth a second thought. He hadn’t considered what it would be like to wake up to muscles that hadn’t moved of their own accord for over seven days.

Within what felt like seconds, a clamor of voices filled his ears and he winced away from the cacophony. After the relative peace and quiet of the private beach, where the only sounds were the waves and his and Amity’s cries of pleasure piercing the stillness, the squabble of noise was too much. He could barely distinguish the different voices out of the mess of sound, but eventually, he picked his father’s voice and Cathy’s voice among the noise.

He blinked, trying to focus on the dark shapes moving throughout the light. The sensation of skin touching his palm jolted him to attention and made him focus on the sensation.

“Drew, can you squeeze my hand?” his father’s voice asked.

He flexed the muscles in his arms, trying to force the strength in his arm into his fingers. It had never been so hard to do something as simple as form a fist before. As he closed his eyes once more, he realized it was going to be a long road to recovery, but as he recalled Amity’s touch, he knew the time with her was worth every painful second of rehab.

As soon as his fingers closed around his father’s, there was a round of applause in the room and what sounded like a hundred voices broke out into bouts of excited whispers. Amongst the noise, he thought he picked out Becca’s voice, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Then another sound filled the room, one which caused him to shake off all of his lethargy and forced his eyes to snap open again.

Amity’s voice whispered around him. “Goodbye, Drew.”

He lifted his head as much as he could, and looked around at the half-dozen nurses and doctors filling his private room, trying to spot the platinum locks that his fingers had spent the better part of a week buried in. His heart pounded faster, and the monitor attached to him sounded off at a faster rate in response.

“Relax,” Cathy said as she placed a steady hand on his shoulder. “You have to keep calm. You’re in the hospital. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Amity,” he croaked, trying to glance around Cathy’s concerned face and find his angel. Already, the crystal clear images of their time together were fading like the wisps of a dream.

He fell back against the bed when he realized that Amity wasn’t amongst the small crowd. Obviously, his mind was giving him some form of final wish fulfillment. As Cathy took all his vital signs and tried to get him to interact, all he wanted to do was sink back into his the dream.

What if that’s all it was? he wondered.
What if it didn’t really happen
?

It took hours for Drew to convince everyone he was fine, but they still didn’t release him from the tiny room. Even after the occupational therapist had come and worked with him for over an hour, finishing by saying he was making great progress considering, he wasn’t allowed to leave. No doctor was willing to be the one who discharged the chief of surgery’s son prematurely; not after he’d been unresponsive for over a week.

By early evening, Drew had been scanned, prodded, and poked, and was more than ready to leave. He’d read his medical charts, and knew they had yet to find anything of concern. Drew was satisfied that, other than a need for some minor ongoing physical therapy to rebuild his muscle strength, he was in perfect health.

He was about to sign himself out, and leave against medical advice, when his father came in and told him in no uncertain terms that if he left under those conditions—before the neurologist, psychiatrist, occupational therapist, and any other ~ist who wanted a piece of him was done—Drew would be unable to return to work. In short, he had to stay in the hospital or he’d be out of the hospital for good.

As if the fact that he was a patient, walking around in his damn pajamas most of the day, wasn’t embarrassing enough, he was forced into seeing the psychiatrist Dr. McGregor. The shrink was most interested in discussing the possibility that Amity wasn’t real. He argued that Drew’s increasingly erratic behavior in the weeks after his break-up with Becca could be seen as symptomatic of a trauma response to the rejection by the subject of Drew’s long-term idolization. The more Drew argued that Amity
was
real, the more insistent Dr. McGregor became about the fact that she wasn’t.

“A few people have mentioned you talking about this, Amity, but not one person has seen you with her.”

“We went to the bowling alley. We went for ice cream. We’ve been out for dinner on a number of occasions all over town. She was living with me, goddammit!”

“Your father was at your house shortly after you collapsed. There was no one else there.”

Drew could hardly say that she couldn’t have been there because they were in Heaven together. There was no way the doctor would think him sane if he started saying things like that. As the memories of his time in paradise with her became ever more dream-like, even he started to question his sanity.

“There was no evidence of anyone else ever having been in the house though either,” Dr. McGregor insisted. “No clothing. No female toiletries. Nothing.”

Drew blew out a breath. “We had a fight the night before. I told her I didn’t want to see her again—she probably moved her stuff out while I was at Dad’s.”

After talking around in circles, Drew finally got Dr. McGregor to agree to sign off on his part of Drew’s father’s list to allow for Drew’s release, on the proviso that Drew go for another appointment in a month.

So it went for the next twenty-four hours, with Drew having to argue, convince, and all but bribe his colleagues to get them to satisfy his father’s ridiculous list. When he was finally free to leave, his father insisted Addy drive him home. Thankfully, she left him minutes after she’d dropped him at home—more than willing to give him the space he now craved.

Looking around the room, he was flooded with doubt over what was real and what wasn’t, but equally engulfed by regret at taking Amity’s offer.

If there ever really was an offer, he thought as he sank into his sofa.

He leaned forward and buried his head in his hands.

“Amity,” he murmured, almost in prayer. “I wish things could have been different.”

I do too
, Amity thought as she heard Drew’s words.

She’d watched him carefully from the moment he’d woken in the hospital bed. She’d seen his frustration as he wanted to leave; watched him struggle to take a few steps on shaky legs; heard him defend her against the psychiatrist who was determined to make Drew believe that she didn’t actually exist.

She sat on Drew’s coffee table watching as he murmured words intended for her. His quiet utterances, whispered in prayer as they were, would have reached her ears even if she was on the other side of the globe. Being so close to the source though, seeing all of the emotions that he experienced, made her long to reach out to him. She wanted to assure him that she
was
real. That she had cared for him. That she regretted their split just as much as he did.

As he pleaded with her for some sort of sign, some sort of proof that what they’d shared hadn’t just been a coma-induced dream, she longed to be able to give it to him. Only she knew she couldn’t risk a single word. If she did, she wasn’t sure she could walk away again.

The smart thing to do would have been to put some distance between them, to turn from him without looking back, like she’d asked him to do, but Amity had never really been one for doing the smart thing.