Page 115 of Romeo

Fiona

I spent entirely too much of the night thinking about a forehead kiss.

Which was pathetic.

Jasper had ridden fifteen hundred miles to take me to prom. He’d shown up in a tuxedo with a corsage, danced with me for hours, sat on Granny’s porch long after he should’ve left, then whispered something in French he refused to translate.

And somehow, my brain had latched onto the fact that he’d kissed my forehead.

Not my mouth.

My forehead.

I lay beneath the covers staring at the ceiling while the whole night replayed itself in fragments. His face when he first saw me in the dress. His hand at the small of my back. The way he’d looked at me when I thanked him for coming.

And that moment at the door.

I hadn’t imagined it.

His eyes had dropped to my mouth.

Hadn’t they?

Maybe.

That word was going to make me insane. If he wanted to kiss me, why didn’t he?

The answer I liked was that he was holding himself back because he wanted me too much to rush things. The answer I liked considerably less was that he didn’t see me that way at all.

Forehead kisses were safe. Affectionate. The kind of kiss you gave somebody you cared about without crossing any lines.

I groaned and rolled onto my side.

He’d ridden across half the country for me. That had to count for something.

Kind men did kind things. That argument had sounded much more convincing before Jasper showed up at my door in a tuxedo.

By the time morning light started edging around the curtains, I’d managed to turn one wonderful night into seventeen different reasons I might’ve misunderstood it.

I got out of bed before I could invent an eighteenth.

After pulling on jeans and a sweater, I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and headed downstairs expecting to find Granny alone in the kitchen.

Instead, Jasper sat at the table with a coffee cup in his hands.

I stopped in the doorway.

His hair was slightly mussed and his shirt looked like he’d slept in it, but he was very definitely there.

“Morning, Cher,” he said.

Granny turned from the stove with an entirely too knowing smile. “Good morning, sweetheart. Coffee?”

I stared at Jasper. “You’re here.”

His smile came slowly. “I wanted to take you to breakfast before I left.”

“I thought...” I glanced toward the window as if that might somehow explain the situation. “I thought you were leaving last night.”