Please, let him in.
Roman wasn’t a guy who had ever begged for anything, but he’d beg for this because it mattered that much. The extent of how much it mattered had seeped into the deepest parts of him.
“And if I can’t?”
“Can’t or won’t?”
He hoped that Sadie would see him. See who he was and who she was to him. See who they could be together.
“Does it matter?” she asked.
He clenched his back teeth and pinched his lips into a line, biting at the inside edges.
“Even if we give us a shot, we both know how it’s going to end. We’ve already been there once. It’ll fizzle. Like it did before.” She didn’t get it.
He needed her to get it.
“It didn’t fizzle. I was an idiot who didn’t take a beautiful woman up on her offer when she laid it all out. That’s not a fizzle. That’s the fault of a guy who didn’t have his shit together.”
Her expression remained unconvinced. She sucked in a breath. “You don’t get it.”
He didn’t.
“I’ve seen this a dozen times,” she said. “Maybe more. A relationship fails. They try again. It fails again. It always fails again. This time, between us, it’ll be spectacular and it’ll hurt. It’ll hurt worse than it did the first time.” Her voice shook with pain so evident that it made his heart beat faster, his body begging him to stop her pain.
Sonofabitch. He hadn’t meant to hurt her.
He’d make it his personal mission not to let it happen again.
“What do you want?” he asked.
As much as it would suck, if she said she didn’t want him—actually said the words—then he’d knock it off. He’d let it go and understand that what he wanted was his problem and not hers.
“What I want doesn’t matter,” she said.
Oh, but it did. It mattered to him.
For the smartest woman he knew, she was proving to be dense when it came to her own desires and the fact that they mattered.
“I’d really like to touch you.” His words sounded like a question.
Roman asking permission to touch her? That clearly caught her off guard.
The bubble that had surrounded them in silence seemed to pop as she moved. Facing him, utter confusion played across her features.
“This is your show,” he continued carefully, wanting her to understand more than anything that she was the one in charge. “Everything that happens from here is your call.”
She could call it off at any point.
“But if you decide to let me in, I swear you won’t regret it. I’ll do everything I can to make sure you’re happy.”
Her top teeth nipped at her bottom lip. He was nearly there. She got him.
“So I’ll ask again, can I touch you?” he asked.
“What does it matter if I say yes or no? You’re a Dvornakov, won’t you just do what you want to do anyway?”
Absolutely not. If she said no, he’d honor it. Because he knew they both understood that they were either making a promise to each other or they were going to move on without each other.
