“Is Callie’s dad? Are you two? Is he in the picture?”
In my romance reader mind, I’d been sure he was about to ask if he could kiss me. He hadn’t. I did my best to mask my disappointment. “Oh, um, no. He’s never been in the picture. It’s just the two of us. Well, three, I guess.”
“Three?” His tone was laced with tension.
If I didn’t know any better, he sounded almost territorial. I told myself it was just in my head. “Yeah, me and Callie and Lola, my mom.”
His voice softened. “No lucky guy or girl?”
“No. I don’t really date.”
My chest was rising and falling in short breaths, and I started to feel lightheaded. Being alone with Nick on the rooftop, looking out over the city, and answering personal questions about my love life, or lack thereof, was too much.
“I should probably go.” I said the words, but instead of my feet moving, I just stood there, trapped in place by Nick’s heated gaze.
“Kurt is taking Gary and Naomi home; I’ll drive you.”
“I’ll get an Uber; you don’t have to do that.”
“Iwantto.” A storm of emotion was brewing behind his ocean-blue eyes.
“You can’t leave,” I insisted. “This is your event.”
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you all night. Actually, it’s longer than that. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since I walked into my kitchen and saw you standing in your pink scrubs.”
“Oh,” I responded lamely, not sure of what to say. Even though I knew it was silly, hearing that he remembered the color of the scrubs I was wearing when we met filled my belly with the flittering of butterfly wings.
“I’m not staying here without you. Bella is spending the night at Alex’s, and I have a hotel room down the block. I can take you home, or I can take you there.”
Tell him to take you home. Tell him to take you home. Tell him to take you home,I repeated over and over in my head. The problem was that my vocal cords didn’t seem to be cooperating, and when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out.
“Do you want me to take you home?” he asked, verbalizing the statement I’d been trying to make.
I told myself all I had to do was nod yes, but instead I was saying no, shaking my head side to side.
“Do you want to go to my hotel?”
One more shot at this. All I had to do was shake my head no. I felt my chin dip down in a nod. It seemed my hormones were overriding my head on this. I might have just agreed to go back to his hotel room, but I knew the second I’d said yes to coming up to this rooftop that I’d sealed my fate. I was going to be alone with Nick Locke.
There are worse fates. Ri’s voice sounded in my head.
As we headed down the elevator, I told myself that if I was going to do this, I wasn’t going to overthink it. If I was going to break the rules and give myself one night where I didn’t worry about what the right thing to do was and only worried about what felt right, I wasn’t going to be in my head. I was going to enjoy every second of it. I needed to shut off my brain and just feel. If I could, I’d never done it before, so I wasn’t sure I was physically capable.
The doors opened, and Nick’s hand once again rested on my bare lower back. The skin-to-skin contact caused a shock of bliss to explode in my core. A tremor rushed through me, and tingles spread down my limbs, evaporating any and all doubts. Enjoying myself wasnotgoing to be an issue.
