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“Come with me to Saint-Tropez,” he murmured against her neck.
She tensed. Her hands paused their delightful grabby-ness. “What?”
He raised his head and gazed down at her flushed cheeks and kiss-swollen lips. “Come away with me. For Christmas. We can get drunk and lay in the sun, and I can kiss you all over this glorious body.” He demonstrated by kissing the tops of her breasts one at a time. Then he grinned at her.
Her smile was hesitant. Which caused a spike of alarm in his chest. Had he done something wrong?
“Oh, superstar,” she whispered. “I want to say yes so bad.”
“Then say yes,” he tempted with a cheeky grin.
She licked her lips and took a breath like she was trying to find the right words.
Which, again, spike of alarm.
She reached up and ran her fingers lightly over the tattoos on his face.
“I like you,” she said softly, like it was a confession. “I like you in a very big, very not casual way.”
His heart began to thunder in his chest. “I like you too.”
“But you just asked me to go to Saint-Tropez with you for Christmas.” She shrugged one shoulder, sadness shining in her eyes.
“How is that bad? What am I missing?”
“That’s where you take every girlfriend. And then two weeks later there’s some sort of giant, dramatic breakup, and it’s over.”
He blinked rapidly. That couldn’t be true? Was that true? There was no way that was true.
“And I’m going to show all my cards here, but I don’twantit to be over.” She took a shaky breath and pressed a hand to his chest. “I don’t know how you feel. But I know how I feel. I can’t keep doing the casual, flirty, friend thing. I want more.”
He wanted more too.
He wanted all of it.
That’s what he’d been trying to say by asking her to go away with him. So he decided to say as much. “That’s what I want too. I thought it would be easier for us to connect if we got away. Just us. And then we could see if this is what it seems to be.”
She studied him thoughtfully, and he tried not to feel desperate. But for the hundreds of times they’d so easily been on the same page, this felt…off.
“Don’t you want to come away with me?” he asked, searching her face.
She nodded. “I do. Badly. I want nothing more than to run away with you and never look back. But I can’t do that. People are depending on me to show up for them. And if we jet off on a whim, and it doesn’t work, I’ve blown up my entire life.”
He was hearing her words, and most of them were making sense, but it still felt like heavy rejection. Like she wasn’t saying no to the trip, she was saying no to him.
“I don’t want to say no. I want to say yes.” She ran her fingers through the hair at his temple. “But I need to be able to say no to this.”
He pressed his lips together and took several deep breaths. “Let me have a moment to think, okay?”
Anyone else—hell, even Max or Leslie—and he’d have felt bad for asking for that moment. But deep inside he knew that Sabine would never disparage him for taking an extra beat to think it through.
Which helped him get to his conclusion fast.
He could see it. What she was saying. His hurt was still right up front trying to throw a tantrum but he didn’t want to be that guy. He needed to be able to see her perspective. She spent a lot of time seeing things from his way. He could do the same for her.
She wasn’t saying no forever. She was saying that she couldn’t upend her life because he was feeling impulsive.
Which made sense.
