“Have you ever been in love?” she asked. “Had your heart broken?”
“Maybe at the moment,” he said after thinking for a second.
“The in-love part?”
“Yeah. Michelle Dillson.”
“Wow.” Paige was shocked by how much she hated Michelle Dillson.
“It was pretty serious.”
“Huh.” Paige decided she didn’t want to talk about Michelle.
“We had lunch together every day. For like two weeks.”
Paige narrowed her eyes. “Two weeks?”
“Yeah. Well, maybe eight days.”
“Which is just one day over one week.”
“Well, five days a week in a school week, so…”
Paige realized what he was saying. “When did you date her?”
“Fourth grade.”
She shook her head. “Got it. So no, you haven’t really been in love.”
He took a couple of seconds to answer. He was watching her intently. It made her heart turn over in her chest.
Please don’t say anything like “until now” or something.
“I guess not,” he finally answered.
The stab of disappointment she felt was stupid, and she was irritated at herself. She made herself nod. “Me either.”
“But you were engaged.” He didn’t say it as if he was surprised that she was confessing to not being in love with her one-time fiancé.
“Right. Because we’d dated for over a year at that point, and our families really wanted us to be together forever. Our moms were best friends. Even before we were dating, we had holidays and took vacations together once in a while. Once we were together, our moms talked about how amazing it was going to be to share grandkids and things like that.”
Paige studied the bottom of the boat. It seemed like all of that had been a lifetime ago, yet she could still remember how she’d felt sitting at the dinner table listening to their families talk as if she and Garrett were already married.
“They caught us in his bedroom one night when we thought they were all out. They didn’t even care.” She gave a soft laugh, but she wasn’t amused. She hadn’t been that night either. “I think that was when I realized that I was in way over my head. They’d caught their seventeen-year-old son having sex with his girlfriend, and they were almost happy.”
Paige looked up at Mitch. “I think that was when I realized that Garrett would eventually propose, and I’d say yes, and we’d get married, and… my whole life was already mapped out. It was just expected.”
Mitch’s jaw was tight, and he looked like he was trying not to say something he shouldn’t.
“How did he propose?”
She thought about it. That night in his bedroom, and then the day she’d stared at herself in the fitting room mirror in a wedding dress at age eighteen and thought, what the hell am I doing? were more etched in her memory than the proposal.
“It was at my graduation party,” she said. “He asked me to go over by the garage with him. And…” She shrugged. “He asked me to marry him.”
“By the garage?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he have a ring?”
“No. He said we should pick it out together.”
“Did he say something sweet about you being the love of his life, and he couldn’t imagine the future without you or anything?”
“No.”
Mitch clenched his jaw again but didn’t say anything more about it. “How did the next guy propose?”
“Which one?” She gave him a little teasing smile. It wasn’t mature or probably even nice, really, but she liked poking him about her plethora of proposals because she liked his jealousy.
He gave a growl and said, “The next one. The one who thought he should ask twice.”
“Oh, Adam.” She grinned. “He asked me in his car in front of my apartment after a date the first time. The second time he showed up at my door with roses and a fruit tray.” She smiled. “That was sweet. At least he knew enough to not bring me candy that I wouldn’t eat.”
Mitch gave a resigned sigh. “Yeah, he gets points for that.”
She laughed. “Number three, Stephen, proposed at a candlelight dinner. With a ring in the middle of a lava cake. The whole thing. Everyone in the place was in on it.”
Mitch narrowed his eyes. “Which you hated, right?”
“So much.”
He studied her, and she felt like squirming. Mitch had seemed to figure her out easily from the very beginning, and it was weird. No one knew things about her that she didn’t let them know.
“But you’re not opposed to public displays,” he finally said. “It’s not that. That isn’t why you hated it.”
She studied him back. Then she nodded. “Right. I hated that he really thought that’s where we were. That he didn’t know that was way too much, too soon. Or ever. You don’t propose, and certainly not publicly, unless you’re sure of the other person.”
Mitch nodded. “Right. It’s more of an announcement to the world then. The public display isn’t so much about the question itself because you know the answer, but it’s about making it memorable and letting everyone around you in on it.”
Paige realized she was leaning in. Their noses were only a few inches apart. “And you’d never do it in a restaurant full of strangers. You’d do it at a family gathering or in the middle of Ellie’s or something.”
He nodded. “Yep.”
She swallowed. That was how it should be done.
She knew that public proposals weren’t everyone’s jam. Hell, proposals weren’t her jam in general. But at that moment, sitting and looking at Mitch Landry, she knew that the only way he’d ask a woman to share his life would be with his whole family gathered around in some meaningful way.
And the jolt of jealousy and ache she felt thinking about him doing that with someone else wasn’t just a little prick of pain near her heart. It was like a knife slicing through her gut.
Dammit.
Leaving him was going to hurt so much.
“And then Carter proposed standing by my car in the freezing cold after we’d danced a few times at Josie’s wedding reception.”
Mitch’s eyes widened. “Just blurted it out?”
“Yep. Out of the blue. Just ‘hey, I was thinking.’”
“Jesus.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure he’d heard that the roses and lava cakes hadn’t worked. He figured why go to all the trouble.”
“You go to the trouble because it fucking matters. But you go to the right trouble. You don’t do it because some cheesy movie did it or because you want to make a big public spectacle of how great you are. You make it meaningful for you as a couple and for...” He pulled in a breath and sat back suddenly. “Never mind.”
Yeah, they should both never mind all this talk. For sure.
“Should we head back?” he asked. “I can show you one of the pontoon boats.”
She nodded. “That’d be great.” She actually wanted to stay out here with him for a few more hours. Or days. Or forever.
So, yeah, they should definitely get back.