Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,79
the nuts and bolts of it made clear.”
Cam’s eyes moved to where I sat, and I sucked in a breath as he stared at me.
“Connor and Maddie are an amazing couple, and from them I’ve learned that it’s useless to let fear get in the way of love when you find it. They’ve demonstrated that finding the truth—the true nature of the person you love and your own—and letting that truth be exposed, is the only way to find the kind of connection we all want. You have to love fearlessly, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and exposed because the real beauty of true love is that when you’ve put yourself out there to be hurt like that, the person who truly loves you will step up to protect you.”
Cam turned and faced Maddie and Connor, but his words stayed in my mind and I wondered if they’d been meant for me, directed at me. I thought I knew the answer, but I was afraid to hope.
“To Maddie and Connor,” he said, raising a flute of champagne. “May you continue to love fearlessly and show others how to do the same.”
“Hear hear,” someone in the crowd shouted.
Maddie and Connor drank and then put down their glasses and kissed, causing a ruckus of cheering and hooting to erupt from the crowd. Once Maddie had thanked her brother, the music came on again, and the DJ called for the happy couple to take the floor for their first dance. I watched as they did, both of them smiling, their faces flushed and happy. They held one another close as they spun and twirled to Ed Sheeran’s voice singing “Thinking out Loud.” Toward the end of the song, though, the DJ began spinning something else, letting the first notes of the new song weave through the end of the first. The space quieted to listen because the two songs didn’t exactly mesh, and I watched Maddie’s face turn from mild confusion to surprise and maybe a little annoyance as Europe’s “The Final Countdown” blasted through the space. She whacked Connor on the shoulder, laughing, as he grinned down at her, and after a minute they stopped dancing altogether and were kissing as if no one else in the world was around.
My heart melted a bit inside my chest, and that was how Cam found me, pulling me from my seat by a hand and guiding me to the far edge of the deck to stand beneath the twinkling lights we’d strung under the ancient trees. The speakers were aimed away from us and it was quieter here. Cam held me lightly by both hands, our bodies close but not quite touching. “Do you mind if I occupy you for a few minutes?” he asked, his eyes darker than usual as he looked down at me.
“Of course not,” I said, my heart hammering fiercely in my chest.
“First of all, I owe you an apology.”
I felt my eyebrows draw together in confusion. “For?”
“For a lot of things. Mostly for being too afraid to be honest with you. For letting that feel like a rejection.”
I waited, hope bubbling inside me.
“You were never anything but honest with me, Harper. From day one, you were clear about your feelings, about your hopes for what might happen between us. And I was a coward, and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for the time I wasted, the time I let go by when we might’ve been together. And I’m sorry that it might be too late now, but I can live with that, I guess. What I realized—too late, maybe—is that I can’t live without telling you exactly how I feel. I can’t let you leave believing me a coward, or worse—believing I don’t feel anything for you.”
He stopped a minute and I didn’t say anything, though the part of me that knew how to comfort people wanted to fill the space with words, wanted to alleviate any uncomfortable feelings. I knew Cam needed my attention. And I knew I needed to hear whatever he might be about to say.
“From the moment you arrived here, you challenged me, Harper. In all the best ways. You questioned the way I shielded myself, my heart. You pushed at the walls I’d put up and helped me see how useless they were, how they kept me from really living.” He took a deep breath. “You kept coming close, even when I pushed you away—God, I’m a moron. Why would anyone