Like I’m funny, and he’s finally realized it, and he likes it.
“Daphne—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head.
“Yes, Mr. Grumpiest Billionaire?”
That thing about him smiling being the very worst thing ever?
I was wrong.
Not unusual. I’m wrong regularly.
But this wrong makes my heart stutter in my chest, because now he’s doing something even more wrong, and he’s hugging me.
Huggingme, hugging me.
Tight.
Both arms wrapped hard around my ribs, his head buried in my neck while he breathes like he’s now imprinting the scent ofmeon his soul, the same way he was imprinting the smell of the rain.
“Are you trying to suffocate me?” I ask in the delectable lemon-and-sex-scented heat of his hug. “Because if you are, you’re doing it wrong.”
“I like you.”
It’s eighty degrees outside, and the rain’s not doing as much to cool down the parking lot as it is to increase the humidity levels, but a full-body chill passes through me. “That’s a bad idea,” I whisper.
“Why?’
“Margot—”
“Margot and I are over.Overover. Forever. And I think she’d tell you the same.”
I shiver again. “Look, Oliver, tonight’s been fun?—”
“Ineedfun, Daph. I don’t want to sit on a porch yelling at you to get off my lawn. I want to be the guy being yelled at to get off someone else’s lawn. I want to live. I want to feel things. I want to have fun. I want—I want to know how to be more like you.”
Good thing I already don’t talk to my parents.
Pretty sure they’d disinherit me all over again if they could if they ever found out I was teaching their dream son-in-law how to be more likeme.
He tightens the hug even harder. “I’ll buy you all of the brass polar bears you want. But don’t—please don’t run away because of—because of what we did tonight. I’m not ready to let you go. I have too much to learn.”
I close my eyes and do the same thing I’ve watched him do tonight, and I suck in a big breath full of the scent of him.
He’s a disaster.
But he’smydisaster.
Temporarily.
For now.
It’s not like Archie Westmore’s going to step into my shoes and help Oliver figure out all the little ways he can enjoy a simpler life. Archie would have him on golf courses and yachts and private jets.
Not road trips through small-town America with diners and Lava Cheese Puffs and weird souvenirs.
“Have you done your own laundry yet?” I ask.
“Never.”
