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“You get what? Open the door.”
Fine. If we had to do this, we would. I reached out and undid the deadbolt, then the other lock, and yanked the door open.
Only once I was staring at him face to face did I remember that my own face was a mess. “Excuse me.” I turned and walked into the condo, calling back, “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back.”
I went into the bathroom and shut the door, pushing my butt up against it. Not that he was trying to break it down or anything. I just needed to know I had this space between us.
When I moved in front of the mirror, I gasped at what I saw. I took a good few minutes to clean it up, which meant washing all the makeup off my face. That was fine. He was dumping me anyway. If he was just here to let me down easily, there was no point in trying to look good for him.
Nic was pacing the living room when I exited the bathroom. The ice cream I’d tried to eat was melting a couple of feet from his path.
“It’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to give me some speech.”
“What’s fine?” He turned and looked at me. “I don’t understand.”
“When we were standing in that restaurant, it hit me.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “I flashed back to something Taylor and Carly said. You’re a Pleasure Valley Playboy. There’s a bunch of you.”
He’d stopped pacing by them, but now his entire expression changed. His jaw dropped and his face looked more drawn. Weary.
“And you didn’t think to talk to me about that?” he asked.
He didn’t sound mad. But there was a distance between us I didn’t like, and I was the one who was creating it.
“I told them what we had was different,” I said. “But then when I started to tell my father what was happening, those words came back to me. I was worried you’d think I was getting too serious too fast. I wouldn’t blame you. We slept together once. We haven’t even been on an official date.”
“Not for lack of trying,” he said.
“I told myself I was foolish for believing someone like you could fall for someone like me when you’ve avoided falling for women for years.”
“And what exactly do you see as ‘someone like you’?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at me. “A beautiful, incredibly smart woman with everything in the world going for her? A woman I felt a connection with from the first time I laid eyes on her? A woman who has been right here in this city all this time, but I’m just now meeting her?”
He took a step closer to me, then another. I held my breath, not sure where this was going, afraid to believe that he might be saying…
“There’s a reason I never could get serious about anyone before I met you,” he said. “I hadn’t met you yet. I wanted to find this with someone. I never could. We’d get a few dates in and it would become clear it just wasn’t right. It was missing…this. This thing I feel every time I look at you.”
“Oh.”
That word slipped out. I couldn’t seem to form any words beyond that.
“I know it’s early, but I’m definitely falling in love with you,” he said. Then he took another step closer. “And the reason I didn’t say anything in front of your father was I was worried you’re just doing this to rebel. I know now that was silly, but I guess I suffered from the same bad thinking you did. I had a hard time believing someone like you would have feelings for an old crank bucket like me.”
“You’re not going to be a crank bucket anymore.” A smile forced its way across my face. “You have a reason to wake up every morning.”
“And someone to sleep next to at night,” he said. “If, that is, you’ll have me.”
I closed the remaining distance between us and wrapped my arms around him, holding him as close as possible. His embrace was like coming home. Nothing could tear us apart. Not even my father’s rivalry.
EPILOGUE
HARLEY
“I messed up,” I admitted to my husband the second I walked through the door.
It was our fifth Christmas together, and I’d taken the morning off to go to my dad’s work Christmas party. His logistics company was one of our top vendors, so it made sense for me to go, but I would have gone anyway. My dad and stepmom meant the world to me.
“What did you do?” Nic asked.
He was working at the kitchen table, as he liked to do these days. He’d hole up in his office for work calls, but when he was putting together reports or checking email, he preferred to be out in the middle of everything.
