“Fine.” I flip on my blinker and pull into the right lane, preparing to take the next exit, ice running through my veins.
“Colt? What are you doing?”
“Getting ready to take the next exit. I’ll call Brendan and apologize. Make up some excuse. You don’t want to meet my brothers? You don’t want it to be messy? Fine. We won’t go.”
“Colt, no. Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?” The ice is melting rapidly and turning into fire. I want to stay cold. Hard. But I can’t. “Give you what you want?”
“This isn’t what I want!” she yells.
I take the next exit and pull into a gas station parking lot, slamming the car into park once we’re stopped. When I look at her, we’re both breathing hard. “Then what do you want?” I grit out.
She stares at me, her eyes sparking with fire equal to mine. Then she slams her hand on the dash. “Dammit! I want things to be easy. I want my old life back. I want my friends to still be performing with me, and I want my label to not think I’m worthless without them. I want you to care about me, and I want your brothers to like me for real, and I want to not feel like I’m trying to pull one over on them by putting on a show!”
My mouth drops open, and I replay her words in my head a few times, pulling them apart and putting them back together, making sure I really heard what I think I heard. “So you want this to be real?”
Her eyes practically bug out of her head, and she looks like she’s about to choke. She clenches her hands into fists. “Yes, dammit! I want this to be real, and I hate that I want that when I don’t really know what you’re thinking.”
Happiness and relief swamp me. This is what I’ve been wanting since … well, practically since the beginning. Since our first official date, for sure. My hand goes behind her head and pulls her lips to mine in a fierce kiss. When I end the kiss, I press my forehead to hers. “I want that too. This is real. It’s been real for a while. I’m glad we’re finally on the same page. So what’s the problem with meeting my brothers again?”
She hits my shoulder weakly with her closed fist. “Sometimes I think I hate you.”
“Sometimes I think I love you.” I … didn’t quite mean to say that. But now that I have, I can’t unsay it, so I hold her gaze as she pulls back enough to look at me.
Her eyes bounce back and forth between mine, trying to read my sincerity. “Are you serious?”
I swallow the blockage in my throat. She opened this can of worms. And backpedaling won’t help anything, that’s for damn sure. So even though I’m terrified she doesn’t really reciprocate, the fact that she’s already said she wants this to be real bolsters my courage. “Yeah.”
This time she kisses me, pulling my face to hers for a softer, sweeter exchange. “I love you too,” she breathes against my lips.
We release each other slowly, reluctantly. But we’re in a parking lot in broad daylight. And we’re expected at my brother’s house shortly. It’s not exactly the ideal time or place to demonstrate our feelings more physically than kissing.
“So … we’re still going to my brother’s?” I clarify as I put the car in reverse and back out of the parking spot.
She laughs. “Yeah. We’re still going to your brother’s.”
Chapter Thirty
Alexis
Colt parks the car in front of his brother’s house—a two-story white stucco house with a red-tile roof at the end of a winding gravel road. He looks at me as he unbuckles his seatbelt. “Ready?”
Actually, I feel like I might puke. And our conversation in the gas station parking lot, while eye opening, didn’t actually do all that much to ease my nerves. Though at least I don’t have to feel like a liar on top of worrying about whether his brothers will think I’m … I don’t know. A loser? A washed-up has-been? Someone who’d normally be beneath their notice?
But there’s no time to dwell on that now, because Colt is out of the car and coming around to open my door. I’d normally open my own door, but he seems to have noticed my freeze response as I stare at the walnut-colored front door bearing a summery wreath.