Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Beg her to love me again.
“That’s not true.” She ripped her stunned gaze away from the ring and lifted it to meet mine.
“You said no.” I had enough practice saying the phrase that it didn’t eviscerate me anymore. Instead, the words were more like a piece of sandpaper over a raw wound that refused to heal.
“I didn’t say no!” She reached for me, and I sidestepped past her.
If she touched me, all bets were off. I was at the edge of my self-control, torn between doing whatever it took to push her away and pulling her close. She wasn’t engaged to Dickface anymore. She wasn’t his. But she’d still given him the yes I’d never received.
“You said, I can’t,” I reminded her. “And I might not have a Georgetown Law education, but I’m pretty sure I can’t and no are pretty fucking synonymous.”
“But they don’t mean the same thing!”
“We’re seriously going to argue semantics?” I walked to the window and checked the courtyard again. Somehow it looked like there were even more people in it now.
“About this? Absolutely,” she retorted.
I turned to face her. “Okay, even if you want to debate the meaning of I can’t, then we’re still left with me telling you that you were the only woman I had ever loved or would love, proposing to you, and then what were your other phrases?” Glancing at the ceiling, I recited them all from memory. “This isn’t right. That one hurt, but let’s not forget my personal favorite, You can’t seriously be proposing right now.”
Her mouth snapped shut.
“Yeah, I remember every single word you said while you blatantly told me that I wasn’t what you wanted. I wasn’t what you chose.” Ugly, gut-twisting feelings beat at me, demanding to be let out of the box I’d kept them in for three years. “Was it because I did it wrong? What did Covington do right? Did he make some grand public gesture? Take you to some exclusive restaurant where everyone notable could watch, or some jumbotron where his commitment was blasted to the world to see?”
“No, Nate.” She shook her head and looked at me like she had any right to act like the injured party.
“Was it the bigger ring?” I studied every nuance of her expression, looking for a lie. “The bigger bank account? The bigger family connections? The fact that your parents actually approved of him? Or the fact that he had a family jet to come rescue you in?”
“How could you even think that?” Her cheeks flushed again, turning the tips of her ears red. “You know me better than that!”
“I thought I knew you better than that,” I admitted. “But then I’m standing on a tarmac, told that it’s my job to keep you alive, and you’re wearing a ring that could signal a plane from thirty-two thousand feet, doing a job you swore you’d never do.” How had it only been nine days since that moment? “And I could have lived with it if he’d been a decent guy, but Dickface?”
“Oh. My. God. Will you shut up for half a second?” Her voice pitched upward.
“Sure. I mean, whatever you have to say to me can’t be worse than what you already have.”
Her eyes narrowed into a glare. “I never said no.”
“And we’re back to this again.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“And I sure as hell never said that I didn’t love you.” She walked forward slowly. “I know, because I’ve never lied to you. Not once. Can you honestly say the same?”
I winced. “I’ve told you what I can.”
“In our lives, we’ve spent what? Twenty days together?” She swallowed.
“Twenty-seven, actually, and if you even start to tell me that proposing marriage after those days was too much, then I’ll remind you it had been seven years of knowing you and four years of loving you.”
Her lips parted. “That wasn’t what I was going to say. We’d spent less than twenty days together, and I was so in love with you that I couldn’t fathom what my life would look like without you in it.”
“You loved me, but you turned me down?” I stared at her and waited for whatever excuse she had teed up.
“Telling you that I couldn’t accept your proposal had nothing to do with not loving you, Nate. That was never an issue. Not for me.” Her brow furrowed.
“Was it because I stood you up in Palau? Because I wouldn’t let you in when you asked when we were in Fiji?” My chest constricted. Why the hell was I poking her for answers now? Why had I opened the box marked Isabeau Astor in my heart?
“No—it didn’t have anything to do with that.” She took a single step. “Did I want you to let me in? Absolutely. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, but it didn’t—”