Page 82 of The Last Love Story

We devour each other, my breath coming in short gasps when he pulls back just to get enough air to kiss me again. I run my fingers through his hair and over his jaw, loving the feel of his scruff and how the muscles of his jaw tighten as he moves his mouth over mine.

It could be moments—it could be years. The moment my brain boots back up, I pull back, as thought becomes marginally possible. “Wait. Wait,” I say, and Hux pulls back immediately, setting me down on the ground. He lifts his hands, bracing them over my head as he stares down at me, his chest still heaving in tandem with mine.

“But the copter. Who’s trying to kill us?”

Hux groans. “Can’t we just go back to kissing?”

I shake my head.

“Fuck,” Hux breathes. “I hate you.”

“You don’t, though,” I tease, feeling a smile pull at my lips.

He runs a finger along my cheekbone, like he’s memorizing every contour of me. “I hated you for ruining my mission. And I hated you because it was easier than admitting that I was falling in love with you.”

I reach up on tippy-toes and plant my lips on his, and Hux kisses me back softly. Sweetly.

He pulls away too soon, and he puts his forehead to mine.“I thought we weren’t kissing,” he says, that same smugness in his words.

“Then figure it out, Huxley Finn,” I press. “The faster you figure it out, the faster we can get back to”—I trace a finger along his lips—“other things.”

His eyes go black. “You’re a demon.”

“I’mmotivational,” I press. “Tell me.”

He sighs. “The car was us. I just got you clear in time. For the copter, well, yes, I’d rigged it. But what you saw me doing, I was trying to stop it. When I saw that someone had remoted in, I was trying to find and stop them—when they set it off. I thought I had more time. We had hours on that damn boat. But—something else came up.”

“Something else?”

Hux breathes through his nose, almost like he’s trying to calm himself down. “The Machs have known that someone was trying to access our servers. I was on that boat to figure out who it was and Trojan horse my way back into their system. And I did. Because I’m very good. But I wasn’t prepared for what I found.”

“Which was?”

Hux pauses. “Um. Pictures of you. Footage of you.”

I close my eyes. “It was Callum’s server.”

“I’d hoped not,” Hux says. “But I knew I had to delete the files. It was taking too long—and the White House cybersecurity locked on to me. I knew I should pull out, give up. But I stayed. Deleted all those photos. Unfortunately, theWhite House security was able to send a virus our way. It wiped our servers.”

“The Machs’ servers are wiped?” I ask.

Hux winces. “Yeah.”

I think. “Wasn’t the whole fail-safe plan to kill Graves on that server?”

Hux takes a second, and then nods. “Yes.”

My stomach twists. I still don’t want Graves dead. But we also can’t let him take over our country.

“I don’t understand,” I say slowly. “You were on the yacht to hack Callum. You did that, and you found all his files... on me. How did it get out to the press?”

Hux sighs. “I needed you to know. You deserved to know. I-I tried to delete all the files, send just a few so that you would know what he did. I thought it would be safe to upload them the one place you’d find them—Spindle. I didn’t account for just how quickly someone else would find them. I was rushing, with the encryption. Your story... it has a lot of fans. Who’ve been waiting for the next chapter.”

“Hux,” I breathe. Spindle isn’t designed to take video uploads like that. And it isn’t secure, not anymore.

“You deserved to know,” he repeats. “Even if it meant losing the Machs. Even if it meant losing our chance to finally kill Graves. And I tried to scrub the entire mission, undo the bug on Graves’s copter. I just couldn’t do it in time. You were more important.”

Right. Because the president switched with us, right before takeoff.