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“Don’t they say to eat dessert first?”
“Good idea,” he said, but just as his lips were about to touch hers, he pulled away, his breathing ragged.
“Emma, we need to talk.”
Oh God, this was the end, just as she had feared. Even their shared passion wouldn’t help her this time.
Here she was the one who’d been wanting to revisit their past, and now that he was actually making them do it, she wanted no part of it.
“Okay,” she said shakily, wishing she could run, but knowing she’d never be able to live with herself if she acted like a coward again. At twenty-one, she’d had the excuse of being young and naïve.
At thirty-two, she was all out of excuses. It was time to face the music.
“Why are you here?” Jason asked.
She stared at him. Was she brave enough to admit the truth? She wasn’t sure she was, but he deserved nothing less from her, especially given how welcoming he’d been, when she had no where else to go.
“I wanted to see you.”
He shook his head, a quick side-to-side motion that told her she’d have to do better than that.
“You’ve had ten years to come and see me.”
She looked down at the blanket, at the lake, anywhere but at him. “I know. And I should have come earlier. But I couldn’t.” Finally meeting his eyes, she admitted, “I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”
But he didn’t want to go there, they weren’t talking about him, she could see that clearly stamped across his face. Right now, this was about her.
“You didn’t know if I’d want to see you on Sunday either. That’s not what this is about.”
“Not entirely,” she admitted.
“Steven was at the reunion with a young blonde. I’ll bet that bothered you, didn’t it?”
Her eyes opened wide with surprise. “You saw them?”
“They were hard to miss. Between his loud voice and her enormous, fake…”
Jason didn’t finish his sentence but they both knew what he’d been about to say. Emma almost smiled then, but nothing about this conversation was funny. Not even her ex-husband’s taste for extremely young silicone br**sts.
“It didn’t bother me,” she lied.
Of course, he saw right through her. “Wanna try that answer again?”
His words should have been harsh, but there was an underlying softness that drove her to confess,
“You’re right. It did bother me. But not because I want him back.”
“You don’t?”
She shook her head vehemently and held her hand over her heart. “No. You have to believe me. It was a shock when he asked for a divorce, but I definitely don’t regret it.”
“Then what do you regret?”
The corner of her mouth quirked up. “That I never knew how young, blonde, and well-endowed he
wanted his women to be, I guess. Including me.”
Something changed in Jason’s face. “Would you have changed for him?”
Emma thought about it for a moment. It was a good question. “No,” she replied honestly. “I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. That’s not who I am.”
Because even though she’d been trying to act like a Playboy bunny with Jason, she knew how far from her essence that über-sexy caricature really was.
“So you didn’t come up here to try and make him jealous?”
“No. No way.”
“To prove something to him?”
To herself, maybe, but she couldn’t say that. “I’ve got nothing to prove to him. I hope he’s happy and now I can see that we weren’t meant to be together. No matter what my parents thought.”
“Ah, your parents.”
Jason got that grim look that she remembered from the one family dinner she’d invited him to in college.
She’d known he’d been uncomfortable, that he’d felt horribly out of his element, but she hadn’t known how to fix things.
“I’m sure they’re thrilled that you’re in Napa with me, aren’t they.”
She took a deep breath. “They don’t know.”
One dark eyebrow went up, clearly mocking her. “Of course they don’t.”
“That’s not fair. No one knows where I am. Only Kate.”
“So you’re running away. That’s what these past few days have been?”
She didn’t have anything to say to that, it was too close to the truth. A truth she didn’t want to own up to.
But even if she couldn’t be honest about how she felt about herself, she could be honest about how she felt about Jason.
“Do you want to know why I came up here? Why I left my parents in the middle of Sunday brunch,
praying that you’d be at your restaurant and that you wouldn’t take one look at me and kick me back out onto the sidewalk?”
The set of his lips was hard, but his tone was soft. “Tell me why, Emma. I need to know.”
Her voice on the verge of breaking, she said, “Because when you walked into our reunion and I saw you again I knew that I had to be with you. That I’d made the worst mistake of my life in college. And then in the lake…” She swallowed, but wouldn’t let herself wimp out. Not this time. “When you touched me, I remembered. Everything. How you made me feel. How wonderful you were. It’s never been like that for me, Jason. Like this. So incredible. Not with anyone. Only you.”
She thought he was going to reach for her then, but he didn’t and so she kept filling the space with words.
“I’m here because I want to be with you. To see if we can make this work, whatever it is we’re doing. All I know is that when I’m with you, I feel whole.” A bird chirped above them, but it didn’t break the spell, nothing could. “I’m happy. Please believe me. I may not have any other answers, but the one thing I know for sure is that I want to be with you. You’re the only thing that makes sense.”
A mix of expressions moved across Jason’s face, through his eyes. Disbelief warred with hope, desire with pride. She could see it all and she didn’t blame him. How could she? She was asking him to trust her. Now all she could do was pray that he would risk even half of what she was risking on him.
Because Emma already knew that this time, she was risking it all.
The smart thing to do would be to get up, head back to his restaurant, bury himself in work, and forget all about Emma. She was no good for him, she never had been, even if his heart—and his cock—wanted so badly to believe differently.
