Page 61 of The Billionaire's Princess

“Like it?” I say, which is all I can manage.

She has, once again, taken my breath and blown my mind. I should be used to it by now. But getting used to Carly’s presence in my life would be like getting used to a panda moving into your guest bedroom. You do your best and maybe grab some bamboo on your way home, but there’s no real preparing for it.

The best way for me to describe it would be if someone took an abstract painting of a heart and pixelated it. Smudged it. If the painting contained every warm and wonderful color anybody ever saw. All the golds, yellows and fiery reds. All the lovely blues and greens. If you ever saw a color and thought, Wow, that’s gorgeous, that color is in this painting.

And that painting leaps out at me, grabs me and makes me happy.

The same way this woman has grabbed me. And made me ecstatically happy.

I think about how seamlessly we’ve woven our lives together, splitting our time between here and her place. I try to figure out if maybe there’s some hidden part of me that wants to take the limits off this relationship and trust her that last little bit. Which is why I can’t speak. I’m too busy pressing my lips together and pretending I have control over my emotions. Too busy wondering if this is her way of telling me that she’s fallen in love with me, because she probably believes in love even if I don’t.

Too busy doubting whether my luck could ever get that good.

“I just wanted you to have something to thank you for all of your support and help,” she says quietly, staring me in the face. “And to let you know…how much it means to me.”

How much it means to her.

Not how much I mean to her.

Something inside me notes the distinction with a tiny stab of disappointment.

There? See? Just like I thought. My luck could never get that good. I have a statistically better chance of winning the lotto while being abducted by an alien spaceship while it’s being struck by lightning than I do of making Carly fall for me.

You want to know the funny thing?

For a cynical non-believer like me, that’s a surprisingly bitter pill to swallow.

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