After a long moment, she nodded, her green eyes flickering with resignation. “I do…I forgive you, Nate. But… What are we doing here?”
“Making up for lost time.” He dragged his thumb along the seam of her lips. “Which I’m willing to keep doing for as long as you want.”
Something he couldn’t decipher moved across her face. “You want a relationship?”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Another flicker in her eyes, one that might have looked like guilt if he didn’t know better. “My career is important to me,” she said.
“It’s important to me too.” He bent his head to brush his lips over hers. “I would never interfere with your career. If you need to live in New York for part of the time, then that’s fine. We can make this work, baby. I know we can.”
He knew that what he was saying was far too premature. She’d only been back in Paradise for a couple of days, after all. But he couldn’t stop the words from exiting his mouth. Charlotte Hill was the only woman he’d ever truly loved, the only woman he could picture spending his life with. He’d already let her go once—he wasn’t sure he could do it again.
“Nate…”
He was surprised to see a lone tear leak out from the corner of her eye. “Don’t you cry on me,” he said roughly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I…” Her throat bobbed as she gulped. “I was thinking about why I came here…and…”
Her reply was a bit odd, but he couldn’t figure out why she was suddenly so upset. He didn’t like either. He’d never been good with tears. Quickly pulling her into his arms, he rubbed her upper back and murmured, “All that matters is that you’re back. You have me, Charlie. For as long as you’re here, for as long as you want to be, you have me.”
She tilted her head up to look at him, her green eyes swimming with both joy and dismay. “I want you,” she murmured back. “I don’t know about the future, but right now, I want you.”
Grinning, he took her hand and brought it to his zipper. “Then take me.”
With a responding smile, she unzipped his pants and did just that.
Charlotte woke up with the most colossal weight of guilt bearing down on her chest. She couldn’t even believe she’d fallen asleep, though three hours of slumber didn’t really count as a good night of rest.
She’d made a big mistake. Coming here to seduce Nate, planning to break his heart…there was no way she could go through with any of that now that she knew the truth.
Nate had broken up with her so she would be able to live her dreams.
The thought still filled her with shock. All these years she’d hated him for what he’d done, and now she wanted to kick herself for believing the lies so easily. Why hadn’t she stuck around to get the truth from him? Why had she been so willing to believe that he had actually meant everything he’d said to her?
Because you were an insecure idiot.
Yep, that about summed it up. Being ostracized by her peers and whispered about by her elders had succeeded in stripping away her confidence. When Nate dumped her, claiming he didn’t even like her, a part of her had thought, It’s about time. Somehow, she’d never believed someone as wonderful as Nate Bishop could actually fall in love with her.
“Idiot,” she mumbled to herself then experienced a wave of gratitude that Nate wasn’t in the room to hear it.
She’d heard him heading downstairs an hour ago but had been too exhausted to climb out of bed. The faint sound of typing came from below, making her deduce that he was on his laptop. He’d mentioned last night that he was slacking on inputting the pub’s expense reports into the database on his computer.
Although she was wide awake now, she wasn’t quite ready to go downstairs and face Nate. Everything he’d said to her yesterday—the truth about the breakup, his desire to have her in his life despite her hectic career—it all buzzed around in her mind like a nest of restless hornets. A part of her was still annoyed with him—why hadn’t he just told her the damn truth instead of pushing her away? But she couldn’t fault him for making a stupid mistake, not when she’d made a pretty big mistake of her own. She had to tell him the truth about why she’d come back. Sure, she could probably forget about it, never mention it and Nate wouldn’t be the wiser, but Charlotte knew they couldn’t move forward until she lay all the cards on the table first.
A lie had been responsible for their breakup, and she couldn’t, not in good conscience, let a lie begin this new relationship.
And she wanted a relationship with Nate. Badly. She’d been so lonely for so long. She’d been empty. Nobody had ever been able to compare to Nate, and now that she had him back, she didn’t want to let him go. She wanted to hold on to him for as long as she could.
Which was why she decided to take the coward’s way out and tell him the truth tomorrow.