Page 51 of A Novel Love Story

He breathed in deeply. Then he looked at me with those mint-colored eyes, and I felt my entire body tingle. He was so close to the window that his breath, when he spoke, fogged up the glass. “I’m sorry, Eileen.”

The smallest shiver crawled up my spine.

Eileen.It wasn’t the first time he’d said my name out loud, but it was the first time I noticed him saying it like a song, instead of a curse.Eye-lean, sharp at the front, soft at the end. Maybe that was his character quirk—that he could make any name sound wanted.

“For?”

“Being a bit too harsh.”

“And?”

“Saying those terrible things to you.”

“And?”

He hesitated, thinking. “For … implying Lily’s book was ugly?”

I reeled. “You thought it wasugly?”

“I … feel like I am in a trap,” he observed. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry.”

“Thank you. And I’m sorry, too. For destroying your window.”

“My wh—”

With one final push with the tool, the clasp popped free, and because Anders had been leaning on the window, it swung inward. He toppled through it, onto me, and we hit the ground hard.

Butterscotch squirmed out of his arms, fur standing on end, and went scurrying for the opposite corner of the bookstore with a yowl.

Through the window, the rain began to come down harder.

We lay there for a moment.

Then he said, “Thank you.”

I looked over at him on the floor beside me. I held up my hand, pinkie out. “Truce?” I asked.

He eyed my hand. “I’m not giving you my pinkie.”

“Truce?”

He begrudgingly hooked his finger through mine. “Truce,” he mumbled. “For now.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re such a pessimist.”

“Realist,” he corrected.

“A glass-half-empty sort of guy.”

“No, I’m a the-liquid-could-be-poisoned sort of guy.”

That made me laugh, and if I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought he actually cracked a smile, too, but I must have been seeing things. He finally returned my gaze, and held it. A knot lodged in my throat, because he was closer than I expected, and his eyelashes were darker than I expected, and long, and there was a gray rim around the inside of his irises that looked like crowns of storm clouds surrounding a peridot. His gaze made the butterflies in my stomach shake off their hibernation and want to remember how to flutter again.

Oh yes, he had to be the main character.

Book boyfriend material, once someone fixed him up.

But then: Where was his heroine?

---