Page 89 of Tough Nut to Crack

Her face is flame-red when she turns back to face me.

"You didn't assault me."

"You wanted me to stop."

"I wanted you to slow down. I couldn't go from my first kiss straight to second base without a breath."

"First kiss?" I ask because there's no damn way.

"First kiss, Mac."

I swear my body loves the fucking sound of that.

"I feel like I'm in some sort of alternate reality. You wanted to kiss me?"

"And touch your breasts," I clarify. "Every guy in the locker room did. You've got great tits, Riley."

She huffs a humorless laugh, but I have to continue in the name of full disclosure and all that.

"What I didn't consider was our age difference. Now that I think about it, Corbin probably said that to me to get me out of the way."

"He had a girlfriend," she mutters, rejecting the idea.

I point to her breasts because, honestly, they explain everything. "Teen boys are idiots, but nonetheless, I let him get in my head, and I figured you hated me. I think after you didn't speak to me after that, I figured you hated me. I've avoided you ever since until that night at the bar."

"This is…" she pauses, blinking at me as if I'm some sort of anomaly. "Do you have any idea how different things could've been?"

I pull in a slow breath. "I'm well aware of the time we've lost because I was out of line."

"You have to let that shit go. You're not that much older than me."

"The age difference doesn't matter now, but it did back then. Your dad would have beat my ass."

"My dad wasn't present enough to care," she mutters, and I can feel years of pain and abandonment in her words. "I don't want to live in the past."

"I don't want to either."

A brief silence settles between us as we watch the other's face, and I feel content to just be sharing the same space with her, but I'm here to have the hard conversations. What happened in high school doesn't matter any longer, no matter how much it shaped who I am today.

"Nothing has changed for me, Riley," I confess. "I want you more now than I did back then."

"Because I have great tits," she blurts with a scoff.

"I find you utterly irresistible, but I know there's so much more to you than your luscious body."

"My cooking," she adds.

"More than that."

"I don't know what to do with all this information," she whispers. She walks toward the sofa and takes a seat as if she's been holding up theweight of the world on her shoulders and she just can't manage the strain any longer.

"It's simple. Tell me how you feel."

I expect a smile, but what I get is her scrunching up her nose and looking at me like I have a second head growing out of my neck.

Chapter 37

Riley

---