Page 72 of You'll Be the Death of Me

“Together?”

“Yes.Together,” she emphasized with a nod.

Cole gazed at nothing over her shoulder. “Hmm,” he hummed in thought, but it was more like a little growl. Then his eyes lit. “Is this why you asked me if I liked snow earlier?”

“Yeah,” she said with a soft laugh, surprised he remembered. “It all feels so real, but I’d remember if it was. Especially because in every one of them, it’s like we’re about to—” She cut off in embarrassment. Her face warmed.

“We’re about to what?” Cole asked with an eagerness in his eyes she couldn’t deny.

“Kiss,” she confessed. “It’s like we’re about to kiss.”

“Oh,” he said, his voice a soft, yearning rumble. “And we haven’t? In your visions?”

Dell shook her head. “No. It always ends before we get to it.”

Was it her, or did he just move closer?

Cole bit his bottom lip again. He’d definitely moved closer. His thigh pressed into her shin where her leg was bent in front of her. She could feel his breath on her face. “Maybe we should?”

“Maybe we should what?” Dell said, lost in his proximity and the honey-warm tone of his voice.

“Kiss,” he said. “To see if it helps jog any memories. For either of us.”

“Good idea,” she breathed without giving it any more thought. She was halfway gone before he even touched her.

Cole reached out and curled his fingers around the nape of her neck to slowly pull her mouth to his. Dell almost gasped at the jolt she felt when their lips touched. In everything that had gone wrong, kissing him felt supremely right.

Dell leaned into it, nearly climbing into his lap and shivering at the soft moan he made. It sounded like relief and trust and longing—she could describe it only because she was feeling the same things.

Cole wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her closer like he needed more. Dell swung her legs up to hook over his thigh and threw her arms around him. She’d never felt a kiss like this before. Searching and searing and also somehow familiar. She opened her mouth when she felt his tongue tracing her bottom lip.

Cole Lewis could kiss like he held an advanced degree in it.

Her fingers found their way to his tousled hair. He softly moaned again when she tugged on it, and she thought she mightcome undone at the sound. He kept one hand on the nape of her neck and swooped the other down to squeeze her thigh. His hot palm landed below the hem of her nightgown, and she wanted him to reach higher. To keep going right up to the center of her and find the place that would take her apart completely.

Dell inhaled him as he deepened the kiss, giving herself over to him. She was trying to search for a spark of memory, but his lips and tongue and the soft, warm sounds rumbling from his chest had her brain full of fuzz. That minty freshness she’d been smelling since she met him became stronger. It curled into her nose like it was emanating from his skin, and she wished she could bottle it up and keep it. It was fresh air and pine and—

Dell suddenly pulled back with a gasp. “Oh my God,” she said.

Cole was flushed and dazed and blinking at her in confusion. “What? What is it?”

She stared at his handsome face, the angles and curves of it. The swell of his kissed lips. The kink in his hair from where she’d tugged on it. Pieces were snapping together in her clouded mind.

“It’s snow,” she said.

Cole’s brow lifted. He looked around as if to check if the weather had changed. “Snow? Dell, what are you—?”

She cut him off by grabbing his face and kissing him again. Deeply. She inhaled through her nose and closed her eyes, searching deep into that familiar smell for the answer to a question she wasn’t sure made any sense at all, but she had to ask it.

Could it be possible?

She continued to kiss him, letting the smell and taste of him flood over her. Cole was more than happy to abide her experiment.He kissed her back with as much want, as much need and desperate longing.

And there it was. She saw it. Among the visions of them in a cabin, Cole laughing in the snow, him delicately pinching a snowflake off her eyelash, she saw a memory. Arealone.

That day on the slopes in Tahoe last year. A tall, uncoordinated man on skis had crashed into her. They’d lain in the snow after, awkwardly untangling their skis and their bodies. He’d apologized profusely and left her with a giant bruise on her thigh. At the time, she’d paid more attention to the pain she was in and to trying not to get hit by anyone else than to his face. But looking back at it now, it fit. She was almost sure of it.

Dell pulled back from their kiss once more. “It was you,” she said, still holding his face.