“Mm hm.” She fiddled with his tie, the heart-birds making her so happy.
“I’m early.” He cleared his throat. “Because this date is the last thing on my list, and I just wanted it to get started. Then I could stop obsessing about it.”
Caroline realized he was telling her something important here, and she slid her hands down his chest and around to his back. “Okay.” She tilted her head back and looked at him, waiting.
“I have OCD,” he finally said. Just like that. “Diagnosed. I manage it pretty well, though I do take a mild medication to help with that. I’ve seen a counselor for years to develop coping strategies. I…I know who I am, I guess, and I’m okay with how I do things. I’m hoping you will be too.”
Caroline gazed at this beautiful man, and she couldn’t believe he was the same grump she’d come home fuming about only a few short months ago. My, how things could change when she got to see the layers beneath a person’s façade.
“I will be,” she said.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said. “I know that. It’s…I manage it really well.”
“I’ve never seen you not manage it really well.”
“Well, we’re still new,” he said.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I might have a rule for us.”
“You might? Or you do?” He took her hand and led her out of the kitchen. “We need to get going. It’s going to be busy tonight.”
“I want a picture,” Caroline said. “Do we have time for that?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Belle,” she called, and her sister came out of the guest bath halfway down the hall. “Will you take our picture?”
Belle shone like a new penny, and she kept her smile hitched in place as she took Caroline’s phone and snapped the pictures. Then Dawson hustled them outside and into his truck, and when they’d both belted themselves in for safety, he looked at her. “I didn’t realize we had any rules at all.”
Caroline clasped her hands together as an internal debate kicked off. “I have some,” she finally admitted. “I made them for myself as I was coming out of my divorce fog. As I started rebuilding myself into who I am now.”
“Okay,” he said quietly. “What’s the rule?”
She looked out the window, where dusk had started to claim the light of day. He’d been right about onething—it was easier to talk in the dark. “I require twelve months of dating,” she said slowly. “I want to see how you and your family do things for every holiday, every month of the year. I want you to see how I do those things. I want to see how you celebrate my birthday, and I want to celebrate yours with you. I want time to talk about everything that’s important to us, and everything that’s not, and everything in between.”
Dawson said nothing, but Caroline had to breathe. She did that, only semi-calmed that he hadn’t slammed on the brakes, declared their relationship over, and taken her home. Of course he wouldn’t, but anytime she’d said something Joe hadn’t liked, something that dramatic would’ve happened.
“And a road trip,” she said. “That’s the rule. Twelve months of dating, all the holidays and birthdays and traditions, and a road trip. I need to see how you act when we’re running late, or when we get lost, or when we show up to a hotel and they’ve lost our reservation.”
“I see,” he said.
“And you need to see me in all of those situations too,” she said, so this wasn’t a critique on him. This was aboutthem. This was about truly being able to determine if they were a good fit for one another or not.
She drew in a deep breath. “So that’s the rule.”
Dawson made a turn and then switched his blinker to make another one. “I think I can live with this rule. Ihave a couple of follow-up questions, though, if you don’t mind.”
“I suppose I don’t.” She turned to look at him, glad when he met her eye.
“Does the twelve-month period start from the first date? Or when we met? Like, what are you counting as Day One?” He drove nonchalantly, like he usually did, and Caroline worried she may have given him one more thing to obsess over.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “That’s a great question.”
“Because we shared breakfast together at the diner, oh, when was that? October?”
“It was October, yes,” Caroline said.
“Or maybe it was when you crashed into my office,” he said, grinning. “And thought I was Duke—which was totally insulting, by the way. Duke’s like, almost twenty years older than me.”
