“Don’t stop.”
I lifted my hand and brushed two fingers along the edge of her jaw. She closed her eyes. I leaned the rest of the way in.
The first press of my mouth against hers was warm and slow and soft, a question rather than an answer, a first kiss that was almost chaste if you did not know how long the two people involved had been building toward it. Her mouth was warm. Her breath caught. She did not move. I held the kiss, then I pulled back just enough to put a half-inch of space between our mouths.
She opened her eyes. They were wet around the edges and huge in the yellow light.
“Cara.”
“Yeah.”
“I am going to walk down those stairs in about thirty seconds.”
“Don’t.”
“I need to. I promised myself I would walk you to your door tonight and not come inside. I am a man who keeps hispromises. I am going to keep that one. But I need you to understand something before I go.”
“What?”
“I need you to understand that I don’t want to. I don’t want to walk down those stairs. I am doing it because it is the right thing to do and because you said out loud that you are not inviting me inside, and I am not going to be the kind of man who pretends he didn’t hear you. I am going to go.”
“Jasper.”
“But I need you to understand one more thing.” I lifted my other hand and cupped the side of her face so that both my hands were on her now, one on each side, and I rested my forehead lightly against hers the way I had in her shop, except everything about it was different now. “I am going to think about this kiss every night for the rest of my life.”
Her breath hitched.
“Jasper.”
“I mean that literally, Cara. I am not being romantic. I am going to go home to my cabin, and I am going to lie in bed, and I am going to think about what your mouth felt like against mine for the first time, and I am going to do that tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that.”
I stopped.
Because underneath all of it—the warmth of the stairwell, the way she was looking at me, the taste of her still in my mouth, and the fact of her right there—something had been sitting in my chest all evening, and it was sitting there now, heavier for the perfection of the last few hours. I had let tonight be everything it was. I had let myself have it fully and without apology. And she had given me everything she had to give tonight—and I had not given her the same in return.
Not entirely. Not yet.
She deserved to know about the job before this went any further. She deserved to make her choices with the full picture. I was waiting for the right moment to tell her, but there was no right moment. The longer I waited, the worse it became, and I knew that. I was going to have to fix it.
But not on this staircase. Not tonight, when she was still warm from dinner, and her hair was down, and her eyes were bright, and everything between us was new and unhardened. I was going to tell her. Soon. In person. With enough time to answer every question she needed to ask.
I looked at her for a long moment.
“I want you to know exactly what you have done to me,” I said. “And I want you to know that I am going to walk back down these stairs because you deserve someone who comes to you with everything on the table. Not most of it.” I held her eyes. “I’m not there yet. But I’m close. And I need you to trust me with that for a little longer.”
Confusion crossed her face, and then something more careful, reading me, trying to understand what I wasn’t saying. She didn’t push. She just looked at me steadily and nodded once, and that quiet trust was almost harder to stand than anything else she could have done.
“Okay,” she said softly.
I pressed one more kiss to her forehead, slow and deliberate.
She made a small sound that was not quite a word.
“I’m going to kiss you one more time. Slowly. And then I am going to walk down those stairs. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
