She really didn’t want to know because it made her sad to know something was making him sad. “What?”
“The way you sell yourself so short.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Yes, you do. You think you have nothing to give me or anyone, so you act as if this sort of thing could never happen for you.”
His insight made her angry. How dare he have her so figured out? No one got to see that much of her, so why did this man, five years her junior, have to be so fucking astute? How was that even fair? She needed to be very, very careful. In the kindest way possible, she said, “It’s not that I think it can’t happen for me, it’s that I don’t want it to. Can you see the difference?”
“Yes, I can see the difference, but how do you know you don’t want it when you’ve never had it?”
“I’m almost thirty years old, Coop. I’ve seen a lot of things in my life. I know what I want and what I don’t, and it wouldn’t be fair to a nice guy like you to let you get involved with someone like me—”
“Someone like you. What does that mean?”
“I’m damaged, Cooper! I don’t have the same emotions other people have. You deserve someone who can truly care for you the way you deserve to be cared for, and that person is not me.” Her chin quivered and her eyes filled, infuriating her. She was always in control of herself and her emotions, except, it seemed, when Cooper James was around.
He moved to sit next to her on the sofa and put his arm around her, drawing her in close to him. As he kissed the top of her head, he said, “You’re not damaged. You’ve had some stuff happen, some painful stuff that’ll always be part of who you are, but you’re beautiful and sweet and funny and so worthy of love.”
Gigi was going to lose it if he kept that up. She tried to pull free of him, but he only held her closer.
“You have no reason to be afraid of me.”
“I have every reason to be afraid of you.”
“Nah.”
“Yah.”
He tipped her chin up to receive the sweetest, softest, least demanding kiss of her life that somehow managed to say everything without a single word being spoken.
“We shouldn’t,” she said.
“We should. We really, really should.”
He kissed her again, and somehow, she ended up underneath him, with her arms and legs wrapped around his body and the heat of his hard cock pressed tight against her core. “I want you to listen to me, okay?” His lips were soft against her neck as he kissed his way to her ear. “I will never do anything to hurt you. I promise. I want only to make you happy, to make you smile, to make you laugh.” Rocking against her, he added, “To make you come. You’re safe with me, Gigi. I swear on the lives of everyone I love that you can count on me to be there for you no matter what happens, if only you’ll let me be.”
The words I can’t were on the tip of her tongue, but unfortunately, her tongue was very busy fending off his, so she never got a chance to say them out loud even as they echoed loudly in her mind. With her fingers buried in his hair and her hand inside the back of his shorts, she wasn’t exactly sending the “game off” signal that she’d intended. Rather, this was feeling extremely “game on.”
“Cooper,” she said, gasping as she broke the kiss. “Wait. I’m not sure I should…”
“You should, Gigi. You really should, because everyone deserves to have someone who loves them more than anyone else does.”
“And that’s what you want? To love me more than anyone else?”
“Yeah, I think that’s what I want.”
“Forever?”
“I sure as hell hope it lasts forever.”
“How can you know you want that when you’re not even twenty-five yet?”
“I’ll be twenty-five in September. Will that make me qualified to possibly care about you forever?”
“This is all just preposterous!”
“What is? The fact that I’m offering you something real and potentially life-changing for both of us, or you being so afraid of getting hurt that you refuse to take a chance?”
She shoved at his chest. “Get off of me.”
He pulled back and let her sit up.
She pressed her back into the corner of Jordan’s sofa—or was it Mason’s sofa?—and wrapped her arms around her knees.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why not? It’s true. I mean, what other reason could there possibly be for any woman with a heartbeat not to want what you’re offering? You’ve probably had to beat women away with a stick your entire life.”
“There was never an actual stick involved.”
“Quit being cute. You’re pissing me off.”
His smile lit up his gorgeous eyes and filled her with a feeling of breathless, giddy joy that was entirely new to her. Of course, her first thought was to push back, to not let it flourish. But the feeling was too big to be denied.
“You’re beautiful, even when you’re pissed off.”
“How do you see this working? Not that I’m saying yes to any of your craziness. I’m asking hypothetically.”
“I’m glad you asked, because I’ve given that a lot of thought. I’d like to move forward with my party boat business here on Gansett, but that’s a summertime gig. What if we lived here in the summer and in LA the rest of the year? That way, you’d get built-in time with Jordan, Nikki and Evelyn every summer.”
Her heart hammered in her chest. He made it sound so easy, so possible. “And what would you do the rest of the year?”
“I’d manage my portfolio—and yours, if you’d like.”
“Wow, you’ve got it all figured out.”
“Not all of it, but it’s a start.”
Gigi looked at him for a long moment, gathering her thoughts and her defenses. “This is happening too fast for me.”
“Okay.”
“What does that mean? ‘Okay.’”
“It means just what you think. If it’s too fast for you, we’ll slow it down and take our time. We’ve got some time before you’re heading back to LA. We can see where we are when it’s time for you to leave.”
“What about what I said earlier, how I don’t want this for myself?”
“I heard you, but here’s my thought on that. You’ve never had this, so how do you know you don’t want it?”
“Are you sure you went to business school and not law school?”
“Very sure,” he said, chuckling.
“You have an answer for everything. It’s annoying.”
“I aim to annoy you with my answers for a very long time to come, but only if that’s what you want, too. I have no desire to force myself on you, Gigi. And I mean that. If you tell me right now to go away, I will. I’ll hate that, but I’ll go.” He tilted his head. “You want me to go?”
Yes, go away so I don’t have to deal with any of this. The words burned at the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t make herself say something that would hurt him. “No, I don’t want you to go.”