Page 29 of Nailed

The stupid tears I didn’t want him to see start to leak out and fall down my cheeks. “I have no experience, and I lied about it. To you. You trusted me. I let you believe I was a different person.”

Buck reaches out and cups my face. “Aw, come on. Don’t be so dramatic.”

Wade tries to interject. “I think drama is called for, actually—”

“Can it, bro.” Buck orders without tearing his gaze from me. “Is your name Grace?”

I swallow as he tenderly wipes a tear from my cheek with his thumb. “Yes.”

“Did you grow up here, graduate from Fate High School with honors, class of 2018?”

I nod slowly, touched that he remembered the year. He doesn’t miss a detail about me, which is a heady feeling to know how closely he pays attention.

“And did you go to state university and earn a bachelor’s in art history, going against your parents’ wishes that you major in law and relocate with the family to Arizona?”

“Yep. That stuff’s all true.”

“And do you love me?”

Wade makes a choking noise and marches away somewhere; I don’t know where because my gaze is trained on Buck. My man. My amazing man.

“I never said I loved you, though.”

Buck towers over me, and I’m trapped between him and the wall. I feel his heat from my face down to my toes.

“Probably because I didn’t say it first. I love you, Grace, and I don’t care that you think you lied to me.”

“I did lie,” I say, my heart in my throat, refusing to absorb those three words.

He shakes his head. “You didn’t. You had photographic proof.”

“Of my best friend’s apartment,” I choke out, half crying, half laughing.

“Yep. That counts as the truth in my book.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Crazy about you.”

“And cheesy as hell.”

He lifts one shoulder. “Then I’m crazy, cheesy, over the top, dramatically in love with you. I’m good with that.”

After a long pause, staring into Buck’s eyes, asking myself if I trust him, I decide.

I take his advice: relax, let it go, surrender, go with it.

The truth is out, and he doesn’t care. He just wants me, all of me.

“I love you too, Buck,” I rasp.

A wide, shit-eating grin splits his handsome face.

“But you can’t just go moving my stuff, it’s crazy—”

He cuts me off with a kiss. A deep, long, claiming kiss that wrecks any remaining resolve.

I love this man all the way down to the marrow in my bones.

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