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Well, except for that night with poor Cindy. But we don’t talk about that.
“To answer your question,” she said, pausing briefly like she wanted to choose her words carefully, “I think this means we’ve loved each other our whole lives, and we clearly never stopped.”
“Well, I knew that on my end.”
“Now you know it on my end too.”
Risking whatever might come from it, I leaned over and brushed a kiss against her cheek. “I think I might have already known that too.”
“Really?” She pulled back to get a better look at me, eyes wide. “How?”
“What, you’re tellin’ me all those love songs you write are about Riley Conrad?”
Please tell me they aren’t. Please tell me they aren’t.
She let out a short laugh. “Just the one. The duet. But it ain’t so much about him as it is another piece of the story we’re tellin’. It’s about movin’ on after heartbreak and findin’ somethin’ new. Which I guess I always wondered about. Like if one or both of us would do that someday. Know what I mean?”
Rocks tumbled around in my gut, but I nodded. I’d had other relationships thinking it might be just that easy—a long time after the disaster of a date with our friendly neighborhood pharmacy tech—so I couldn’t blame her for wondering if we would.
I’d even told one woman I loved her, then instantly regretted it and told her the truth the next day: I was still pining after the woman I’d stupidly let slip through my fingers, and even though we’d been together for about six months and she was a great girl, it wasn’t fair to her to only give her a small piece of my heart when she deserved so much more.
“You know, even if our relationship had been real, I don’t think I coulda loved him like I loved you,” she mused in a small voice.
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and tucked her against my side. “I tried to move on once. It didn’t work out. Probably for the same reason.”
She stiffened a little, then giggled. “Shoot, I was fixin’ to pitch a hissy fit with a tail on it for a second there. How terrible is that?”
“Would it make you feel better if I told you the boys and I used Riley’s face as a dart board? We tacked up that cover of Billboard Magazine.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, we sure did. The rest of the regulars at Oak & Barrel thought it was a hoot.”
Laney gasped. “You did that at the bar in town? Are you nuts?”
“You drive me nuts, woman. It ain’t my fault. Besides, the whole town knows what’s up between us.”
“Did you ever tell anyone?” she asked quietly. “About the proposal, I mean.”
“I told you that night I wouldn’t, and I’m a man of my word. What about you?”
“Nope. Not even my sisters.”
“Wow.”
“Yep.” She played with the ends of her hair between her fingers, staring out at the river. “So, we’ve talked about what this all means to us, but now comes the hard part. What are we gonna do?”
“That depends. What do you wanna do? I think I’ve done my fair share of tellin’ you what you should do, so now’s the time for you to tell me what you really want.”
“I want you, Everett.”
A wildfire raged through me then, and I dipped my head to catch her lips. It started slow, then built in intensity. But before it could reach a full burn, I turned down the firestorm in my gut and pulled back, resting my forehead against hers.
“I want everythin’ with you, Ms. Cole. We just need to figure out the right way to go about it.”
She let out a long sigh and tucked her head under my chin, cuddling up close to me. “I’ll talk to Paisley tomorrow. I’m sure she’ll have a plan for how to break up with Riley in the best way.”
“At least it’ll be good for album sales,” I quipped. Then I swallowed, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. “And uh, good for ticket sales too. You got that year-long tour comin’ up, right?”
