Just One Kiss - J. Saman Page 0,28

I haven’t seen him in eight years, and suddenly I’m dying to climb him like one of those big trees out there?

I don’t know, but there you have it, folks.

We enter the solarium that is like something out of my dreams. I wasn’t kidding when I told him I could live in this room and never want to leave. If it had a bathroom and maybe a small fridge, I never would. I stepped foot in here and my mind raced. My fingers itched.

All I wanted to do was sit down, watch the snow fall, and write.

I finished up my last novel that is now sitting pretty with my editor, so I’m free to start something new.

This.

I could write this.

A woman who gets stranded and is rescued by a guy she crushed on throughout high school. Only now, that guy is a totally hot artist. With big muscles. And an adorable smile. And gives the most steamy, panty-melting stares ever.

A laugh bubbles its way up through my chest, pausing on my lips in the form of a crazy smile.

“You okay?” Miles asks, side-eyeing me with a strange expression.

I nod, still unable to rein in my smile. “Yup.”

“Really? ‘Cause you look a little manic again.”

Now that laugh explodes, only proving his point further. “Don’t be rude.” I nudge into his arm with my shoulder because I want to touch him and he’s tall and yeah, maybe I’m slightly manic. It’s either this room or the almost kiss.

No way to be certain.

“Did you want me to light a fire in here?” he questions as we enter the solarium which is at the end of the breezeway thing. “You said you wanted to do that. Sit in here and write, but now it’s really cold. I can grab you a blanket and I have a space heater I can drag in here too.”

My feet pause and I turn to look at Miles.

It’s freezing in here. He wasn’t kidding and a fire and a space heater and even a blanket would be amazing. But first, I think I need to ask him something. Call it research or morbid curiosity, but I can’t stop the words as they tumble out.

“Why did you wait until that night at the bonfire?”

Miles blows out a breath as he looks past me, his expression grim, watching Betsy’s retreating form run up toward the warmer, heated part of the house. But then silence descends upon us and part of me wants to take it back.

To tell him never mind, it’s cool.

But I can’t make the words form because it’s not cool. I need to know.

That one kiss…

“London,” he says my name on a pained whisper. I don’t move. I wait. My breath held deep in my lungs as he works out whatever it is he’s trying to work out inside that mind of his. “You had boyfriends. Were cheer captain. Went to parties. Had a million friends. You were the most popular girl in school, London Canterbury, and I was…” He huffs out a weighted breath, running his hand through his hair as he always seems to whenever frustration or agitation gets the better of him. “You were everything and at the time, I believed I was nothing. I had no parents, not even my mother wanted me. I had no home. No money. No real friends. You were nice to me, but you were nice to everyone. You were a fantasy I knew could never come to life and I…”

“What?” I push when he doesn’t follow that up because the bastard just called me a freaking fantasy.

“I had no confidence. To me, it was easier to want you from afar than to risk trying something and you rejecting me. That would have killed me. I’d already been rejected enough.”

God. His words make me want to find his mother and smack the bitch. I get grief and heartache, but I do not get abandoning your child the way she did. An eight-year-old boy.

I want to kiss him.

So insanely bad, I want that.

I want to take away his pain and fill it up with so many beautiful, special things. Show him just how special and amazing he is and that anyone who was indifferent to that is the one missing out, not him.

But then what happens after I do that?

His vulnerability is written all over his face and this is a man who does not wear vulnerability well.

Even so, now is not the moment to push that. It will come off