Tell Me You're Mine (The British Billionaires #1) - J. S. Scott Page 0,103

tilted my head and got lost in Damian’s wild eyes. He looked like a feral animal in pain, and I had to stifle the urge to soothe him.

He kept going like a floodgate had opened, and he couldn’t stop the words from flowing out of his mouth. “You want to leave? You’re calmly telling me you’re ready to walk away from me, from us, from this crazy attraction that’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my entire life? Well, it’s not happening. How many ways can I tell you that I love you, Nicole? That if you leave, you’ll be taking my heart with you, and I probably won’t survive it? I’m not good with words, and fuck knows I’m not used to expressing myself, but I’m willing to find every way possible to make you believe that I love you. I need you, and there’s no way in hell that I’ll ever be happy if you aren’t with me. Just give me…some time. I’ll figure out a way to make you believe all of it. Every. Single. Word.”

Damian’s chest was heaving by the time he was finished. His eyes had turned a stormy green, and my heart tripped as I said breathlessly, “You’ve never once said that you loved me. Yeah, we’ve always had this intense sexual thing going on—”

“It’s not just sexual. Not for me,” Damian growled. “Granted, there isn’t a single day that I don’t very much want to fuck you until neither one of us can move anymore, but it goes way beyond that. The second you walk into a room, and I see you, I feel like the whole damn world looks different for me. Brighter. Happier. Like I’ve finally found someone who sees the real me, and not Damian Lancaster, billionaire duke. And you actually seem to like the man you see. Could I have been so wrong about us, Nicole?”

Tears started to clog my throat, and I couldn’t contain the endless stream of them pouring completely unchecked down my face.

Damian Lancaster loved me, and my world was never going to be the same because of it.

I hated the way he was hurting right now, but he’d put his whole heart out there, completely vulnerable and raw, to try to explain how much he loved me.

He’d actually laid his heart at my feet twice in less than twenty-four hours, but I’d been too damn guarded to see it.

I shook my head. “You weren’t wrong, Damian. I think I fell head over heels in love with you the moment I tumbled into your lap on that plane. I think it was that damn kiss. I’ve just been so afraid because I felt too much—”

“You can never care about me too much, Nicole,” he interrupted. “Never. I’m always going to want more. I’m obnoxiously greedy when it comes to you.”

I started to sob all of my relief into the button-down shirt he was wearing, and Damian simply wrapped his arms around me and let me get it out. “Christ! I hope this is a happy cry,” he muttered against my hair. “Fuck! Never mind. I think any time you shed a tear, it’s going to kill me, happy or not, but I can live with that. Just marry me, Nicole, and put me out of my misery. I’ll make sure you never feel broken again.”

I sobbed harder.

He stroked my back. “Wrong time to ask you to marry me?” he asked in a concerned voice. “We can work it out somehow, love. I’ll live in the States with you if you don’t want to stay here. Or we can divide our time to be in both countries for part of the year. We’ll figure it all out. Just please fucking say yes.”

He sounded so damn nervous that I was going to turn him down that I pulled back and started swiping the river of tears off my face. “Yes. Of course I’ll marry you, Damian. Now that I know you love me, nothing can drag me away.” I put my arms around his neck.

Relief flooded his expression. “Not quite sure how you missed it. I thought it was perfectly obvious.”

I tilted my head to look at him. Maybe, if I took all of the clues together, I would have concluded that he could possibly be in love with me. I guess it was just too farfetched to imagine that someone like Damian Lancaster could ever be madly in love with me. “You’re Damian Lancaster, billionaire Duke of