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She swipes at her runny nose and glares at me. “Nothing.”
Okay, then. Me first.
I rub my thumb gently over her cheek. “The night before you left Hawaii, you told me you wanted someone you could count on—someone whose word you could trust, someone who did what they said they’d do. Remember?”
A sniffle. “Yeah.”
I lift my other hand, cupping her face gently. “So. Had I left the show, had I broken my contract, what would you have thought of me?”
“Um…”
“Ellie, the last thing I wanted you to see was the guy who changes course the second a pretty girl caught his eye. There’s nothing I wanted more than to tell the Jilted crew to shove it so I could go chase after you, but here’s the thing: I know you Ellie, and I know that after the romance of that grand gesture faded, you’d have realized that it merely proved everything you ever worried about with someone from Hollywood—that we’re self-indulgent divas who dance from one sparkly thing to another.”
“A sparkly diva, huh?”
I refuse to be sidetracked. “Same goes for the movie. You think I wanted to be in Dubai when I wanted nothing more than to come to San Diego and make you mine? Hell no. I want you to want me, Ellie. I want a hell of a lot more than that. But I need you to trust me first.”
She studies my face. “You dated more than two dozen women on national television and then spent weeks on the other side of the world…so that you could show me that you keep your commitments?”
I wince. “Not gonna lie—this whole thing played out a lot more romantic in my head.”
Ellie smiles and moves closer. “At the end of the show, you told both Brooklyn and Paisley that you were in love with someone else.”
I brush my lips over hers. “Yup.”
“Me?”
I open my mouth to tell her, but my heart stutters, and I realize rather abruptly that I haven’t spoken these words to anyone since I said them to Layla close to a decade ago.
But what the hell. She’s worth it.
“Yeah, you,” I say, kissing her again and then holding her gaze with mine. “I love you. The all-the-way, forever kind of love, Ellie. And look, I know I’m not the boring nine-to-five guy you want. I’ll be gone on set a lot, there’ll be the occasional red-carpet crap, and the tabloids will always speculate whether you’re pregnant or I’m cheating, and that’ll suck. I can’t offer you the white picket fence, but you’ll have my love, my loyalty—”
Ellie flings her arms around my neck, and I catch her reflexively. Now this is more like it.
“I don’t need the white picket fence,” she whispers.
I run my hands over her back. “No?”
She shakes her head.
My fingers tangle in her hair, tugging her head back so I can look in her eyes. “Why’s that?”
I hear the desperation in my voice, but I don’t care. I need to hear it. Need her to say that she’s mine.
“I love you,” she says, pressing her mouth to mine. “I love you so much, and I thought I was going to die if you married one of those other girls.”
“Never even thought about it, although if we’re going to talk about marriage…”
I pull back and, before she can freak out, drop to one knee, pulling the jeweler’s box out of my pocket as I do.
Ellie freaks out anyway. “Gage!”
I flick the box open. “Ellie.”
“Gage,” she says, trying to tug me up. “You can’t—we’ve only known each other a few weeks. We’ve been apart for most of that!”
“Well, here’s the thing, Ellie,” I say, capturing her hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it. “My whole speech about not breaking commitments—”
