As the song ended, Gabe drew back enough to look down into her eyes. Then he smoothed her curls, his gaze roaming as if memorizing every curve of her face. “How’d we get here, Elle?”
She frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
He tucked her back under his chin, holding her close. “I mean, up until a few weeks ago, you detested me. And now…”
She pushed back and turned her face up to his, wanting him to see the sincerity in her eyes when she said, “Gabe, I never detested you.” Her cheeks grew warm when she added, “In fact, I had a huge crush on you for years.”
“Nice try,” he chuckled. “But you’ve spent the last few years turning your nose up at me, rolling your eyes every time I tried to ask you out. Don’t try to stroke my ego now.”
Unable to resist a little mischief, she slid her hand over the front of his jeans. “If memory serves, it’s not your ego that responds best to my stroking.”
His breath hitched sharply and he grabbed her hand, bringing it up to his lips to kiss to her palm. “Minx,” he rasped, his desire impossible to mask. “You’re changing the subject. Tell me about this crush you supposedly had. Because, I gotta say, sweet cheeks, you sure as hell could’ve fooled me.”
“Ask Aunt Charlotte,” she insisted. “She still teases me about it, so I’m sure she’d be more than happy to fill you in.”
“Give me the CliffsNotes version,” he pressed.
“Fine. If you must know, I fell for you the day you came to help me move in to Charlotte’s,” she told him. “You were the most handsome boy I’d ever seen, the golden boy of Fairfield County—or so I was to discover.”
Gabe groaned. “God, I hated being called that.”
She leveled a gaze at him. “And yet you totally used that perception of you to your advantage. Don’t even try to deny it.”
He gave her a wicked grin. “Hell, wouldn’t you use it if you were an eighteen-year-old kid with a talent for getting his ass in trouble? Between my dad being sheriff and my brother Tom covering for me more times than I can count, I got away with more shit than any other stupid teenager should’ve. Somebody should’ve kicked my ass and taught me a lesson.”
Elle shook her head. “No one dared! You were smart, charming, handsome, awesome at everything you tried…”
He chuckled. “I notice you’re talking in past tense.”
“Oh, trust me, I had it bad for you back then, Gabe Dawson. But you didn’t even know I was alive.”
Gabe grunted. “Oh, I knew.”
He kissed the side of her neck, eliciting a little moan of need before she pushed him away. “But you ignored me!”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “Because you were too young for me. My dad and your aunt would’ve had a shit fit if I’d gone out with you,” he told her. “Especially after what you’d been through. Besides, I could tell you were the kind of girl who’d be able to see through all my bullshit. I was too much of an idiot to see that as a good thing. Now, back to this crush… When did it fade away?”
She stood on her toes to give a quick nip to his dimpled chin. “Who said it has?”
He looked down his nose at her, still skeptical. “Since you came back to town, you’ve acted like you wanted nothing more than to nut-punch me every time we were in the same room together.”
She shrugged. “Defense mechanism.”
His brows lifted slightly at this. “Come again?”
“Love to,” she quipped. When he chuckled, she gave him a saucy wink and draped her arms around his neck, pulling him down to receive her kiss.
“I think you’re avoiding the question,” he murmured against the corner of her mouth before drawing away.
She sighed a little sadly. “You broke my heart when we were teenagers, Gabe.”
“But I had no idea,” he reminded her. “You can’t convict me for crimes I didn’t know I was committing.”
“I know, I know,” she acknowledged. “I can’t explain to you the mysteries of the heart of a teenage girl.”
He groaned. “I wish someone had back then. God knows I didn’t have a fucking clue. But that was then.”
“The thing is,” she said, searching for the words to adequately explain why she’d resisted him for so long, “I’d heard the stories and rumors from while I was away at college and law school, witnessed firsthand the way women were constantly throwing themselves at you when I returned.”
“I’ll admit I went a little off the rails when Audrey broke things off,” he murmured. “But it wasn’t nearly as bad as what I’m sure everyone was saying.”
“I know that now,” she told him, “but at that point, it’s what I was hearing over and over. And I didn’t want my heart to get broken again. So I kept you at a distance, constantly telling myself you were a womanizer, a player. I wasn’t about to fall into bed with you only to be discarded like yesterday’s trash.”