“Well, you weren’t.”
“No I wasn’t.” He admits with a nod. “And maybe that’s because, when I was a kid, I was jumping from one crush to the next. Nothing in my youth was ever that serious.”
“I’m aware. You were such a playboy.” I roll my eyes. “You had a new girlfriend every summer. It’s like you were intentionally trying to torture me.”
“It was not intentional. I was being a dumb teenaged boy.” He tries to enclose me in his arms.
I smack his hand down, still salty about how un-single Nat was from the ages of fifteen to eighteen years old.
“Come on, Riles. Cut me some slack.”
I turn my back on him. “I wasted so much of my tears on you. I should be compensated for the emotional distress.”
Nat chuckles and hugs me from behind. His lips find my ear. “I’ll compensate you.”
“How?”
“I’ll love you,” he says.
My heart nearly explodes in my chest and I think I temporarily black out.
Nat’s grip becomes firm. “I’ll love you ten times more than you loved me and I’ll love you for a hundred years more than you loved me.”
I twist slightly to look at him, barely breathing.
Nat smiles the same way he did back then to snag my heart. “How’s that for compensation?”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
NATHAN
Riley quickly looks away from me, but I already caught sight of her surprise. It’s adorable the way she thinks I would have been turned off by her crush.
I’m honored. Blown away.
I definitely don’t deserve it, but I’ll do everything in my power to make sure she doesn’t regret choosing me so long ago and sticking with me until now.
“Do you mean that?” Riley whispers.
I’m holding her from behind which makes it hard to see her face, so I turn her around and her eyes softly latch onto mine.
Oh man, am I in trouble.
“Of course I mean that.” She has no idea. I felt a tug toward her before I even knew who she was. “That day at the fair, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on.”
A shy, breathless laugh flows from her pink lips and Riley tucks her face against my chest, still trying to hide herself from me.
“Then I found out who you were and I tried my best to put a wall up. You were off-limits and I didn’t want to make things weird. But the more we spoke, the harder it was to hold out. I’d never felt that way about anyone before. So I tried telling myself that I only enjoyed your company as a brother, but that lie fell apart every time you looked at me. I couldn’t hide it.”
My fingers skim her hands and I grip her wrists, pulling her arms up to my neck.
“I wish I’d known earlier how you felt,” I admit.
“You mean, like when I was twelve?”
“Uh, no,” I say quickly.
Riley buries her face in my neck and laughs.
