Page 447 of Bad Prince
He gives a rough little exhale and glances down for half a second, like he’s deciding whether to risk sounding stupid.
Then he does anyway.
“You know when you serve into the net,” he says, eyes back on mine now, “and Coach makes you do it again until you get it right?”
My throat tightens.
“This is me doing it again.”
He slides one hand up to cup my jaw.
“Tonight, it’s you and me. Newport. The dance. No lies. No hiding. No letting go when it matters.” His thumb brushes once over my cheekbone. “I even got you a dress.”
My whole body stills.
The sea wind moves between us, cool and clean and salted with memory. Somewhere farther off, a gull cries over the harbor.
I just stare at him.
At this impossible, beautiful idiot who flew me across the country and blindfolded me and brought me back to the scene of the first wound not to reopen it—but to rewrite it.
His mouth curves, soft now. Nervous, maybe, beneath the confidence. “And this time,” he says, voice dropping lower, more intimate, “I’m taking you behind those curtains, kissing you, and not letting go.”
My breath leaves me all at once.
There it is.
The thing I have been circling around for weeks.
Maybe years.
Not just lust.
Not just chemistry hot enough to melt every good intention in a ten-mile radius.
Love.
Or the beginning of the kind that matters.
Not grand speeches and flowers and a man trying to impress me with money he didn’t earn.
This.
A guy who remembers the wound and comes back for it.
A guy who waits when taking would be easier.
A guy who sees what broke and makes a plan to mend it with his own hands.
A guy who doesn’t just want my body because he finally can have it, but gives me romance so carefully tailored to my scars that I didn’t even know how badly I needed it until this exact second.
I am lucky enough, suddenly, terrifyingly, to have both.
The lust.
The love.
Fire and tenderness in the same pair of hands.
