Page 29 of Make Me Love You

Like kissing. Maybe she would feel as compelled to kiss him there as she had against the barn wall. Kissing was definitely a problem.

“Eli, that can’t happen again,” she blurted out. “The kiss. It can’t happen again. Just so we’re clear on that.”

“Yeah, I know.” He sounded so weary. So...beaten. “It won’t.”

“You shouldn’t have kissed me.”

He came to a standstill, his hands clenching into fists before he relaxed them and rounded on her. “Don’t make me say it.”

She blinked, startled. “Say what?”

“This might be an asshole thing to say. A nice guy would let it go. But I’m not nice. I’m a good man, but I’m not nice. And the truth is you wanted that kiss. You just didn’t want to be responsible for it. Don’t blame me for something that we did together.”

Shame lashed at her. She had grabbed him by the face. What, exactly, had she thought he would do about it? Boop her on the nose? “You know...you know how I feel about you.”

He shook his head, started walking again. “Honey, I don’t think even you know you feel about me.”

The truth of that statement left her breathless. She couldn’t speak for fear she would scream.

But he wasn’t done.

“You’re right, though. It was a mistake for me to kiss you. It won’t happen again. Because next time, you’re going to kiss me.”

Chapter Eight

Eli had always wondered what would have happened if he had actually grown a pair and kissed Emma Andrews all those years ago. In his mind, it would go one of two ways. Maybe she would have immediately pulled back, with some line or other about how they were better off friends.

Or maybe she would have kissed him back and they would have been happy for a few months before everything went to hell and he was left without even her friendship. Even if everything had gone right, and he hadn’t arrested her dad, it wouldn’t have lasted with them. Such was the way of high school relationships, after all.

Even before the shit with her dad, before either of them could even imagine what the future held, he had suspected things between them couldn’t end well if he kissed her.

Now he knew for sure, because he had kissed her and it had not ended well.

To say the least.

But before the ending, in those explosive moments between the first crash of their lips to when she pushed him away...Christ. Good didn’t begin to describe it. He didn’t have words for what that was. It was so far outside his realm of experience, he genuinely didn’t know what to make of it. Sure, he had felt lust before. He had felt anger. But he had never felt them at the same time and so thoroughly consumed with one object. The combination was a potent blend that had made him somehow both forceful and needy.

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