“But you do.”
Ben shrugged. “Given that the committee agrees with me ninety-five percent of the time, I think I do.”
“What does Julian say?”
“He laughed! Can you believe that? Mr. No-Sense-of-Humor laughed at me.”
Amelia chuckled. “Did he say why?”
“He said that I was lucky. I got the mellow version of Dad.” Ben rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t feel very mellow.”
“Maybe your dad is just bored.”
“I have a hard time thinking of my dad as being bored.”
“And it’s possible he has a hard time thinking he has nothing to do as well. Or that he’s useless.”
“He’s definitely not useless,” Ben said. “But if he is bored, I wish he’d direct his need to engage elsewhere.”
“What else does he like doing?” Amelia asked.
“He seems to spend a lot of time helping TJ put Lego sets together.”
“Really?” Amelia appeared to mull that over for a moment. “Maybe you need to buy your dad a set of his own?”
“I think half the fun for him is doing it with TJ.”
“Can’t blame him for that,” Amelia said. “From what I’ve seen, TJ is an entertaining little guy.”
“He is,” Ben agreed. “He must have gotten all of his genes from Kiara because goodness knows Julian isn’t entertaining at all.”
“I thought you and Julian were getting along better these days.”
“Oh, we are,” Ben said. “But we’re still brothers. He laughs at me, and I poke fun at him. Just how it goes.”
“I guess it must be a brother thing. It’s how Micah and Trent relate, though Shiloh, Layla, and I never did.”
“There might be a bit of our previous relationship mixed in there, too,” Ben said. “From back when I was a teenager. We’ve put it mostly behind us, but I’ll forever be the little brother, you know.”
Ben was so glad to see Amelia smiling and laughing. And this was the first time he felt like she had truly let down her guard around him.
It gave him hope that maybe they could be more than just friends. She still held a piece of his heart.
No, that wasn’t true. She held the whole of it. Whether she knew it or not.
Though Ben wanted her to open her heart to him, he could sense that she was very protective of herself. Of her heart. And he couldn’t blame her for that.
He wasn’t sure she was ready to hear how he felt about her now. How he loved her.
His feelings for her now were different from what they had been when they were teenagers. As a boy, he'd loved her with the certainty that their future together was inevitable, mapped out in his mind like the constellations they used to trace with their fingertips while lying on summer grass. That love had been pure but untested, like a ship that had never left the harbor.
Now, however, he understood that love wasn't just about the easy moments. It needed to be an anchor that held fast even when storms churned the waters between two people.
And he wanted to prove to her that their love could be that anchor.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Amelia's chest tightened as Ben's smile reached his eyes, crinkling the corners in that way that still made her breath catch after all these years. No other man had ever affected her this way, whether he was flashing that infectious grin or brooding in silence with his brow furrowed in concentration.
