Page 35 of The Marriage Playbook

She looked away.

“Tell me why,” he urged. “Was it just the promotion?”

“That’s all it was.”

“Because I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think Alastair would have blamed you if the wedding hadn’t gone according to plan,” he said. “And I don’t think it would have hurt my reputation that much either. You could’ve spun that, right? You’d have come up with a story.”

“I would have said that you were in love, that you did want to get married,” Cara said. “I would have said you got your heart broken. That would turn public opinion in your favor.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’m glad we didn’t have to do it that way,” he said. “But I knew you could come up with something. What happened? Did you think about that idea and decide it wasn’t good enough? That it wouldn’t work?”

“It didn’t come to me on the day of the wedding,” Cara told him. “I didn’t think of it until just now.”

“But you could have, if you’d tried,” he told her. “It wasn’t hard for you to get to that.”

She shrugged and looked away.

And now he did take her hand. For some reason, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “You didn’t spend any time trying to think of any way out,” he said. “The first thing you thought of was to meet me at the altar.”

“I suppose that’s true.” She looked at their joined hands. For a moment he thought she was going to pull away from him, but she didn’t. Instead, she set her glass of champagne down on the coffee table.

He did the same, aware that his heart was pounding.

“No one has ever done this much for me,” he said quietly. “No one has ever been in my corner like this. I know you were trying to help your career, but you could have done that in so many different ways. You didn’t. You decided to get down into this mess with me. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you did that.”

“I guess I realized the best way to get out of it would be if I was in it with you,” Cara murmured. “That way I could see the path for myself.”

“That’s a whole lot of trust, Cara,” Liam said softly.

He raised a hand to cup her cheek.

Now she would stop him. Now she would pull away, tell him this was too much, that they were crossing lines that couldn’t be uncrossed.

She dropped her gaze.

She was looking at his lips.

There had been a few kisses, all of them in front of an audience. The kiss on their wedding day, of course. A couple of staged encounters while they had been on walks, when Cara had suspected a camera might be on them. A few of those moments had ended up in the press. They didn’t look real to Liam when he saw them—all he could think of was the way he had felt in those moments. The strangeness of her lips against his, the way his thoughts had raced as he had tried to figure out where he was supposed to touch her.

Tonight, there were no cameras.

As she leaned in, his breath caught. Was he really doing this? Was she? Why?

But why resist, when I care for her so much? When she’s done so much for me? And here she was, warm and soft and smelling of lilacs…

He closed the last few inches between them and caught her mouth with his.

A flame roared to life inside him and surged through his blood, burning away the inhibitions he had carefully constructed.

All this time he had spent with this gorgeous, intense, exasperating, passionate woman…he hadn’t done this, hadn’t even let himself realize that he wanted to do this. But it had been beating inside him all this time, longing to get out. Longing to claim her.

And she still wasn’t pulling away.

She melted into him, deepening the kiss, and Liam forgot everything—forgot that they were trying to restore his reputation, forgot that they had a professional relationship to maintain. The only thing that mattered now was Cara, and the fact that she was finally in his arms.

CHAPTER 18

CARA