Page 89 of Most Eligible
Once we’re around the bend of the beach, he stops and turns to me. For a heartbeat, he looks deep into my eyes, then he slips a hand around the back of my neck, draws me closer, and kisses me. I melt into him like sugar in water, fingers tangling in his hair, his hand steadying my back. He tastes like lime and sun and sweat and sand and—
“I missed you,” he growls against my lips.
I lace our fingers together. His jaw ticks, eyes darting to the side. There’s something on his mind.
“What’s wrong?”
He runs a hand through his hair, over his jaw. “You know what’s coming,” he says, voice stuck at the bottom of his throat.
My heart sinks. “The overnight date.”
He nods, then smiles ruefully. “It’s harder than I expected to watch you with him. Guess I finally understand what it’s like to be a contestant on this show. I’m not saying—I’m not asking you to leave. I know you need to be here for your job. I just want to know if…” The back of his neck goes pink. “I want to know if this is real. If you really want this.” He squeezes my wrist, running his thumb over the rose tattoo etched there.
“I do,” I breathe, guilt crashing over me. I may not deserve it—him—but that doesn’t stop me from wanting him so badly it hurts.
“Georgia…” He swallows hard, wiggling his jaw. “It would always be like that—like in Nashville.”
My mind races to his fingers on my waist, hot and heavy in the alleyway. But that’s not what he’s talking about.
“Everywhere I go, someone’s watching,” he says. “I’m lucky to get to do something I love so much, but it’s also hard.”
I frown, finally voicing something that’s been in the back of my mind for weeks. “Why come back then?”
He runs a hand down his face, looking careworn. “I owed Lainey,” he says. “You know what happened now. I made some mistakes, and she helped me keep it quiet. Not so much for me, but for my family. When Cassidy and I got married, the press was all over my mom, and she hated it. If they were coming after me about the arrest, I worried they’d go after my mom too.” He shakes his head, disgusted. “I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t be responsible for her losing her privacy like that. This is the life I’ve chosen, and I don’t want anyone else to pay the price for that.”
“Are you two close?”
He nods and smiles down at our hands, still laced together. “She’d like you. My dad wasn’t… he didn’t deserve her. And I swore I’d never cause her the kind of pain he did. After I got arrested… I was done. That’s why I stopped drinking.”
He looks out over the ocean, then chuckles. Despite his embarrassment, he seems so much freer here, when it’s just us. It must cost him so much to be in front of all those cameras, acting like someone he isn’t.
All that pretending takes a toll on a person. I should know.
“I think I came back to get away from my life too,” he says. “After everything that happened with my dad and Cassidy—and then with you.”
He turns to me, leaning closer until I feel his breath on my nose. “I looked for you every time I was in LA,” he says, voice low. “Every concert I went to. I started to think maybe you didn’t exist, maybe I’d imagined you. But you didn’t give me your real name—I knew that as soon as I looked you up. So I thought it was a good thing I’d left—that you just wanted a one-time thing. Something simple.”
“I don’t want something simple,” I say, tears pricking my eyes. “I don’t want Roland. I want you. I’m sorry I dragged you through this whole shit show. But I only want you, Rhett. It was only ever you.”
I bite back the rest: that his texts are sitting in the hands of a woman I don’t trust, that I put them there. That I’m no better than the paparazzi that chased us in Nashville.
He pulls me into a kiss as waves rush up to our ankles and leave my toes tingling. I reach down, slowly unbuttoning his shirt, tracing the lines of his tattoos, the mountains on his arm all the way across the ocean, the flower of the state that made him. Beneath my fingers, his heart is pounding.
A gust of wind blows along the beach, and I shiver. “You’re sure no one will see us?”
“Positive.” He puts his hands on my hips and smiles. “I think Roland and Addison are a little too busy.”
His hands frame my face, rough edges and soft palms on my skin. He kisses me again, warm and gentle as the steady waves rocking our legs.
Laughter and shouts roll down the beach and I pull back, raking my eyes over the shore for any sign that someone’s seen us.
“Come on,” he says, turning away from the water. “I know somewhere we can go.”
I follow him up the sand, thinking we’ll escape to a more secluded part of the beach, but instead he heads toward one of the cottages along the rocky shore.
“Where are we going?”
“Well…”—he hesitates—“this is the only place I can think of that will definitely be private. But it’s okay if you don’t want to—this is where Roland and Monica spent the other night. They’ve reset it by now.”
