Page 58 of Falling For You

"A few years after Lillian died, the crew started trying to set me up. Every week someone had a friend, a cousin, a girl from their gym." I shook my head. "I kept saying no. I wasn't ready. I couldn't go through losing someone again."

I paused.

"Then Gus sat me down at The Lantern one night and told me something I never forgot. He said, 'When you love someone, there's always a risk of losing them. It's always going to be there. Love is knowing there's a risk and choosing to love anyway.'"

Andy smiled. "That's good advice. He got that from a romance book, didn't he?"

I laughed. "Maybe he did." The thought of Gus reading a romance novel behind the bar was enough to make both of us lose it for a second.

"But none of them worked out," I said. "The dates the guys set up. None of them were okay with a twenty-four-hour rotation and a six-year-old."

Andy sat up. She looked at me. "Dating sucks when you're a first responder."

"It really does."

We were looking at each other. The sitcom laugh track went off again.

"Andy?"

"Yeah?"

"Would you kill me if I kissed you?"

She blinked. She stared at me like she was trying to process what I'd just asked.

"Because I really want to kiss you."

Her thumb came up and brushed my jaw. She didn't take her eyes off me. I didn't move away. I couldn't. Every muscle in my body had gone still.

She looked up at me and leaned in.

Her lips were warm and soft and the first thing I thought was that I'd been imagining this moment since the porch and I was wrong about all of it. I was wrong about how she'd taste: like coffee and something sweet underneath. I was wrong about how she'd feel: her mouth was careful at first, then not careful at all. I was wrong about how it would hit me. It hit me everywhere.

She kissed me like she'd made a decision. I kissed her back like I'd been waiting.

My arms went around her and I pulled her closer. She came willingly. Her body shifting against mine on the couch, her hand sliding from my jaw to the back of my neck. I felt her fingers in my hair and my whole body responded. My hand found her braid and I held it gently while her mouth opened against mine.

I wanted to let my hands travel. Down her back, along her waist, across the strip of skin where her shirt had ridden up. I could feel it under my fingers. The edge of fabric, the heat underneath. I kept my hands where they were. Barely. Every part of me was fighting the restraint and the only thing holding me in place was the knowledge that if I moved too fast, I might break whatever this was.

She pulled away. We were both breathing hard. Her forehead was close to mine, her hand still on the back of my neck, her fingers still in my hair.

"Wyatt?"

"Yeah?"

"Walk me home?"

I had her against her front door with my hands under her shirt before either of us had thought to lock it. She reached behind her and turned the deadbolt without breaking the kiss.

Her skin was warm under my palms. I slid my hands up her sides, over her ribs, and she arched into me and pulled me closer by the front of my shirt. The sound she made against my mouth—quiet, involuntary, caught between her teeth—sent heat straight through me.

I'd spent months holding back. Pressing my hands flat against the ground at the campfire. Keeping my eyes on the road while her hand sat on the console six inches from mine. Mowing the same strip of lawn three times because she was reading on the porch in shorts and I couldn't make myself go inside. Standing behind her during the braiding lesson with her neck inches from my mouth, my hands in her hair, pretending my pulse wasn't going through the roof.

All those months of telling myself not to look at her hips in those gym pants, at her bare shoulders in the sun, at the way her braid swung between her shoulder blades when she walked away from me.

I was done holding back.

I pulled her shirt over her head.