“Cole Navarro, welcome to flavor.”
His chest moves beneath my cheek with the faintest laugh. That sound helps.
So does the movie. Not because it is good. It is not. It is aggressively mediocre, and the fake boyfriend has the emotional range of a decorative cutting board. But it gives my mind somewhere soft to rest.
Halfway through, the heroine throws flour at the wrong man, and I laugh hard enough that the popcorn bowl almost tips. Cole catches it without looking.
“Show-off,” I mutter.
“Survival skill.”
“Catching gourmet popcorn?”
“Yes.”
I laugh again, and this time it does not surprise me as much. Maybe that is progress.
By the end of the movie, the fake boyfriend has confessed his fake feelings were real, the bakery has been saved through a deeply unrealistic amount of community support, and the golden retriever has behaved better than every human man in the film. The credits roll, but neither of us moves.
I feel Cole’s heartbeat beneath my ear. I lift my head and look at him. He is not watching the credits. He is watching me.
“What?” I ask.
For a moment, he says nothing. Then his hand rises and brushes a curl back from my cheek. His fingers are careful. Too careful. Like if he touches me the wrong way, everything he has been holding back will spill out.
“I was scared,” he says.
The words are so quiet I almost miss them. My throat tightens.
“You seemed so brave.”
His mouth pulls slightly, but it is not a smile.
“No.”
“So unshaken.”
“No, I was controlled … for the moment.”
“Cole.”
His eyes glass over as he looks at me, and the sight hits harder than the gunshot did in some ways. Cole, who moved like steel when Vanessa pulled a weapon. Cole, who drove me out ofthe line of fire. Cole, who kept his voice calm while the whole world cracked.
Cole looks at me now like the breaking finally found him.
“I love you, Kara Stone,” he says, voice rough and low. “I never want you to suffer like this again.”
Everything in me goes still … the way water goes still when the wind stops.
I knew he cared. I knew he wanted me. I knew he had chosen me in a hundred ways before he put words around it. But love is different when spoken by a man who does not use language carelessly.
My eyes fill.
“You love me?”
His thumb moves once along my cheekbone. “Yes.”
“That sounds like a dangerous thing to say to a woman who has cried on you twice today and made you watch a terrible movie.”
