Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,110

“What’s so funny?” She thought he was laughing at her.

I’m laughing because I love you. Yeah, now was not the time for that. That would come later.

Now was the time for an apology. The real one, this time. The big one. And then a proposal. A totally obvious proposal that had been under his nose the whole time.

A person of words and not deeds is a garden full of weeds.

Time for deeds.

“I need to apologize.”

Maya studied Ben’s face. “You’re laughing because you need to apologize.” It had been hard to pull back from his embrace, which had felt like such a haven, even though, objectively speaking, she knew that a hug was not going to solve any of her problems. But now he was laughing at her?

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s confusing. You confuse me sometimes.”

She knew the feeling.

“I’m sorry I ruined Romeo and Juliet.”

She tried to pull away—all the way, this time. “We don’t have to talk about it. It was so long ago.”

He held on to her. Not hard, not enough that she couldn’t get away if she wanted to. And since she didn’t want to, not really, she let herself be held.

She let herself be held. When was the last time she’d done that?

“We do have to talk about it, though,” he said, firmly but gently.

She closed her eyes against his scrutiny. Usually her mission was to stare back at him, to not back down. But this was so embarrassing. That she would hold a grudge so long, that she would let it spiral so out of control.

“I did a shitty thing, and I’m sorry.”

She opened her eyes. “You weren’t in the play.” Sadie was the one who’d actually bailed on the show, so it followed logically that if Maya was going to spend years punishing someone, it should have been Sadie. And yeah, she might not be the president of Sadie’s fan club, but the woman made the world’s best pancakes.

Also, Sadie did not have all-seeing eyes the color of moss. And a stupidly impressive work ethic. And the ability to own her mistakes. And to hold her like she had the power to make sure nothing bad ever happened to her again.

Hooboy, she was in trouble.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I remember Sadie telling me she was in a play. I didn’t really even know what that meant, since that was your first play.”

“Well, how would you have known?” Why was she arguing with him? She had been marked by having to cancel that play, and she had blamed him, so why was she attempting to reason away what he was trying to say?

Because letting him apologize meant admitting how much he’d hurt her. How vulnerable she had been—and still was—when it came to him. She’d spent years sparring with him, showing him her strongest self. It was hard to just…stop.

“Well, I did know,” he said. “But I will say that I only remembered all this recently. I remember that weekend, of course—I’d won concert tickets in Toronto—but the circumstances around it had faded. It wasn’t until Rohan told me the story a couple weeks ago and it all came back that I pieced together that it was your play.” He rolled his eyes. “Which is dumb. Of course it was your play. Who else’s would it have been? Sadie was supposed to play Juliet. We argued about it on the way to Toronto. I wanted to ask her if she’d actually read the play. I was like, ‘You know you die in the end, right? Over some teenage jerk?’”

She laughed. Leave it to Ben to make her laugh in the middle of an apology. He wasn’t wrong about the play. “Romeo and Juliet are both jerks.”

“So why stage it?”

“Everyone loves it. It’s a crowd-pleaser.”

“Like My Fair Lady.”

Yes. She loved that he remembered that. He did that—remembered little things she said.

“I talked Sadie into blowing it off,” he said. “The concert tickets came with a hotel room. I really wanted to go, and I didn’t realize how much damage us going would do here. To you. It was careless. And for what it’s worth all these years later, which I realize might not be a lot, I’m sorry.”

It was amazing what a simple apology could do.

Also amazing was how, now that she had it, she realized she didn’t need it. That Ben Lawson had been kind to her for so long. Which was a confusing thing to ponder, but if you looked at what he