Page 87 of Actually Yours
“Did you think it would be bad news?”
His mouth twists. “I wasn’t sure.”
I feel a literal twinge in my heart that he’d gone all this time thinking that I’d run away from him and that my message meant I wanted to keep running.
It’s time for me to be brave.
“I need to be clear with you.” I pause, gathering my thoughts. It’s now or never. “When I stopped all the lovely kissing.” He lights up. “It wasn’t because I wanted it to stop. It’s because I didn’t want it to stop.”
He looks confused.Do better with the explaining, Amelia.
“The intensity of what I was feeling in that moment scared me.”
There. That should be clear enough.
“It scared me too. Everything about you scares me.” His voice is gruff and I shuffle closer to him. “But I had hoped you may have felt safe enough with me to at least stay and talk it through. I’ve never given you a reason to doubt me, Millie.”
There is well-deserved reproach in his voice. “I know. And I know I messed up, but that’s who I am. I’m the girl with a bucket load of emotional baggage who gets scared sometimes.”
He smiles, edging closer to me. “I happen to be very good at carrying heavy loads. Maybe I can help you with that?”
“I’d like that.”
Jake’s handsome face, made more delectable by his two-day-old stubble, inches slowly closer to mine. So slowly that I want to grab it and plant my lips on his.
So, I do. After five days of not kissing Jake, I allow myself to get lost in the feeling of it. Of his lips moving against mine, so perfectly perfect that I can’t hold in a sigh. A sigh of pure contentment, of being lost in the moment, of—
“What the hell is going on here?”
An angry voice tries to penetrate through the bliss I’m feeling and, determined not to let anything ruin this moment, I ignore it. And keep kissing this man who I love so much.
“Jake? What is this?”
Jake pulls his lips from mine, jumps to standing, and flushes a deep shade of red. I press my fingers to my lips, wishing they were still on Jake’s lips, and turn to face the source of this interruption so we can get back to all the kissing.
Robby.
Oh no.
“Robby,” Jake starts, backing away from me in small steps. “I—ah—we.” He stops.
“Were you and Amelia kissing?” Robby spits out the last word with disgust and disbelief, and I gulp in a mouthful of air.
“I—ah,” Jake tries again. And fails to say anything.
Looks like I’ll be doing the talking.
“Hi, Robby.” I wave to get his attention from where it’s currently trained on Jake with furious intent. “Yes, I was kissing your brother.”
Robby’s face twists with fury. “What is going on? How long has this been going on? Were you two together behind my back when we were dating?”
That he would even think this, let alone ask this of the two of us, illustrates clearly how little he knows his own brother. And how he clearly never knew me.
“Of course not,” I tell him while Jake continues to look on, frozen in place. “And I’m sorry you had to see that, but this just happened. And you and I? We’ve been done for a long time.”
He shoots his brother another filthy look before stepping towards me. “Amelia, this can’t be right. You and him? He’s my brother…”
I give him a hard stare. “So?”
