“True.” She gives me a shy smile. “You know, all my subscribers think you’re hot and that I should chain myself to your bed for the next twenty years.”
“I wouldn’t object.” I kiss her nose and try to smile. But I peeked at some of the comments earlier this morning, too. “Some of them suggested you should grab me tight and never let me go.”
She drops her gaze. Instantly, I miss looking into her blue eyes. I need to see what secrets she’s hiding behind them.
When I lift her chin with my finger, I see her teeth sinking into her lip again. And tears rolling toward her cheeks.
“Hey.” I dab at the drops with the sleeve of my coat. “I know how hard you worked on your makeup. No need to be upset. I’m really not mad. Anything else we can talk out, right?”
“Maybe.”
That’s better than a no. “I’m just glad we’re talking.”
“I’ve been so afraid to.”
“Because everything happening between us is so sudden?”
She gives me a self-deprecating laugh. “You’d think so. Normal people would be concerned about that. Not me… I like to plan my life, and I never saw this—you and me—coming. But I feel so good when I’m with you. I feel like myself. I’m sorry I’ve been quiet lately.”
“Harlow said you were thinking. But that’s all she said. She didn’t break your confidence.”
Masey’s Mona Lisa smile makes her look even more beautiful. “That’s why I usually talk to her. She’s Fort Knox. But this time, I didn’t tell her much. I honestly didn’t know what to say.”
“Tell me what’s holding you up.” I tuck a dark curl behind her ear. “If it’s not that we’ve somehow developed these feelings in less than a week—”
“It’s not. I could give you a lot of excuses. Mostly, it’s about me.” She sighs. “The thing is, if it took me a decade to figure out what an absolute douche Thom was and he still had to be the one to end it, have I learned enough not to put myself in that position again? And until I do, do I have any business putting someone else’s heart at risk?”
That’s her concern? That never once occurred to me. Maybe it should have. Masey isn’t much of a risk-taker. “You don’t trust your judgment, huh?”
“I don’t exactly have a great track record. And neither do you. I mean, your first and only ‘girlfriend’ was Voldemort.”
I laugh. I can’t argue with that. “All this time, I’ve been thinking your objection was me.”
“No.” She looks at me like I’m spewing crazy talk. “I told you, you’re great.”
“Or my career.”
“Of course not. You love it. It pays you and makes you happy. Why would I find fault with that?”
“Voldemort did.”
Masey looks at me as if the answer is obvious. “That’s why she’s Voldemort.”
“You got me there. What about my past? My choices?”
“With the opposite sex?” She shakes her head. “I can’t judge you for whatever you did before you knew me.”
“What about my son? Ranger is—”
“Precious! He’s no problem at all. I love him to bits. Trust me, he has nothing to do with my reluctance.”
“So…maybe stepping into a mother role someday doesn’t bother you?”
“Not even a little.” She smiles. “Wondering if you’d ever let me kind of has.”
So she’s thought about the future and what that might look like? I smile. “And I assume you wouldn’t hate relocating to Maui?”
“I don’t know. This place is terrible. Nothing pretty to look at. Nothing to do. No good food or amazing people or…” Masey rolls her eyes. “Stop. Like I said, I’ve just been a lot more worried about learning from the Thom debacle and doing better in the future.”
“Honey, there’s no way you spent a decade with Thom and learned nothing. Just like there’s no way I could have spent most of my life playing the field and not learned something, too.”
She shrugs. “Maybe. It’s been a bit of a red flag to have feelings for a guy whose life was basically a series of one-night stands—”
“It wasn’t.”
“But, other than Voldemort, you didn’t have girlfriends?” Masey looks confused.
“I didn’t. But I had long-term friends-with-benefits. Take Caitlyn, for instance. We called each other randomly for hookups for four years.”
“Four years?” She gapes at me. “How was that not a relationship?”
“Trust me, it wasn’t.”
“What did you two talk about?”
“Sex.”
She rolls her eyes. “Other than that.”
“We didn’t. She had her life, and I had mine. Unless we were naked or getting naked, we had