He didn’t laugh.
“Farley.” He reached up with his free hand and cupped my face, his thumb brushing along my cheekbone. “I spent the entire drive back from Charlottesville thinking about all the ways I wanted to touch you. I sat in that parking lot while you bought eggnog ingredients and planned how I was going to seduce you tonight. And I kissed you in this driveway because I couldn’t stand waiting one more second.”
My breath caught. “Samuel—”
“And now you’re asking me to be your friend.” His voice cracked slightly on the word. “Which is—it’s fine. It’s fine. I’m a grown man. I can handle rejection.”
“It’s not rejection.”
“It feels like rejection.”
“I know it does. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I’m not in a place where I can give you what we both want. But I can’t—” My voice broke. “I can’t open myself up and find out later that I wasn’t enough. And right now, I don’t trust myself to know the difference between genuine feelings and rebound desperation.”
Samuel’s expression softened. He wiped the tears from my cheeks with his thumb.
“Okay,” he whispered.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” He let out a long breath, and I watched him consciously set aside whatever he was feeling—the disappointment, the want, the frustration of being told not yet when he wanted right now. “Friends. I can do friends.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my forehead—chaste, careful, nothing like the fire we’d shared earlier. “You’re worth waiting for, Farley Davenport. Even if you don’t believe that yet.” Samuel pulled me into a hug—a proper one, arms wrapped tight around my waist. We stood there inhis kitchen doorway, surrounded by groceries and the lingering awareness of the kiss we’d shared and the specter of the mice I’d disposed of, and I let myself be held.
“Thank you,” I whispered against his shoulder.
“For what?”
“For understanding.”
“I don’t think I do understand, entirely. But I’m trying.” He pulled back enough to look at me, and his smile was sad but real. “Go home. Prepare for the blizzard. I’ll see you...”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.” He nodded. “Assuming we’re not buried under eight feet of snow.”
I managed a watery laugh. “If we are, at least we’ll be neighbors in the apocalypse.”
“There’s no one I’d rather freeze to death next to.”
It shouldn’t have been romantic. It wasn’t romantic. But something about the way he said it—the sincerity underneath the joke—made my chest tighten all over again.
I stepped back. Took a breath. Remembered how to be a functional human being instead of an emotional disaster in cashmere.
“Goodnight, Samuel.”
“Goodnight, Farley.”
I walked back to the Range Rover. Climbed inside. Started the engine. Because sometimes the right thing to do and the thing you want to do aren’t the same. And sometimes you have to choose healing over happiness, even when happiness is standing right in front of you with sad eyes and a smile that makes you forget how to breathe.
The last thing I saw in my rearview mirror was Samuel turning away, his shoulders slumped as he walked back into his cabin.
And then I was alone on the mountain road, driving toward my empty cabin, wondering if I’d just thrown away the best thing that had ever wandered uninvited into my life.
Purrsephone, I was fairly certain, would never forgive me for this.
I wasn’t sure I would forgive myself either.
