I walked Victoria to her car, feeling the weight of four sets of Witherspoon eyeballs on my back. When I opened the door, she quietly slid inside the dark interior.

With her head tilted back to look up at me, she searched my expression with calm eyes. “No more secrets, okay?”

I braced my hands on the roof and dropped forward. “No more secrets.”

She leaned forward to glance out the windshield and the curtain at the front of the house twitched closed. “No secrets between us, at least,” she said, dragging her eyes back to mine. “I don’t think I’m ready to deal with our parents yet.”

I understood her reticence. I’d seen the way her mother had glowered at me when she’d thought I was up to no good with Victoria. And then again when she’d found out I’d been married before. To put it mildly, Roni was not my biggest fan.  

And as long as that remained true, I worried how that might color her daughter’s feelings toward me … what she might say to try and turn Victoria against me.

I knew I’d fucked up by not being honest about my past, and I’d do everything in my power to make up for my failings. But I couldn’t handle it if after everything Victoria and I had been through she called things off because her mom didn’t like me.

In a fit of panic, I leaned into the car and pressed my mouth to Victoria’s, tugging on her bottom lip as I came away. I’d meant for the kiss to be a quick reminder of how good it was between us, but my heart tripped when her eyes flared in the faint glow of the dash, and I dove back in for more.

She leaned into me, and my hand found her cheek, turning her face so I could take the kiss deeper. I licked a path over the seam of her lips and they parted, like a parched flower seeking the soft flutter of rain against its petals. Our tongues met and twined in a slow, sensual dance.

I lost myself in the feel of her, in the taste of her, in the way she made me feel.

A door slammed, and I pulled back like a guilty schoolboy who’d just been caught making out with his girlfriend in front of her house after curfew. Which, as Alex glared at me as he made his way to his SUV, I realized I very nearly was.

He did that thing again where his fingers formed a vee and he swung them between his eyes and me.

I bit back a snide comment. Nodding instead. Message received.

Victoria chuckled lightly and dropped her visor down, taming her hair back into place. When she was set to rights, she flipped it back up and snapped her seatbelt into place. “Call me later?”

I felt my annoyance at her brother’s interruption slip away as I nodded and took a step back. “Of course.”

She smiled, turned the ignition, and threw the car into reverse. Backing slowly down the drive, she paused when she reached the road. With the glare of her headlights shining directly at me, I couldn’t make out her face, but I liked to think she was smiling as she drove away.

I was still standing there, watching her car roll slowly down the road, when Theo reached my side. “Do you love her?”

With my eyes glued to the empty street, I nodded. “I do.” I turned to find him staring after her too.

He rocked back on his heels, but stayed quiet for a few long moments. Eventually, his eyes found mine. “It’s not going to be easy.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. Our mom is …” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Suffice it to say, she doesn’t want Victoria to make the same mistakes she has.”

I bristled at the implication. “Is that what you all think this is? A mistake?”

Theo shrugged and laughed humorlessly. “I honestly don’t know. I’m even worse at relationships than Victoria is. I haven’t had a girlfriend since college.”

I studied the oldest Witherspoon sibling out of the corner of my eye. Objectively speaking, all four of the them were attractive. Hell, Victoria was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on, but that went without saying.

But as a unit, they were just … extra. The whole family looked like they could have stepped straight out of a Ralph Lauren advertisement.

Well, maybe not Alex. He was kind of scary.

But Theo Witherspoon had the type of good looks that women bent over backwards for. Then again, being handsome didn’t necessarily mean he was looking for love. For all I knew, he fucked a different woman every night and liked it that way.

“Never found the right one?” I asked, wanting to know his story but trying not to seem like I was prying.

He scrubbed his hand over his jaw. “I found her years ago. I’ve just been too chicken shit to ever tell her. And now I’m her boss.”

I winced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah, ouch.” He clapped a hand to my shoulder. “Anyhow, I’m going to head out.” He took a few steps toward his car but then stopped and turned back toward me. “I’m assuming Alex gave you the whole ‘I’m watching you’ bit already?”

“Yeah,” I answered, wondering what version of that warning he was going to deliver.

He nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Okay, then.”

“You’re not going to lecture me too?”

Theo laughed. “Hell no. Alex is the scary one in our family.”

I fought the grin that threatened to form on my face. Alex was a scary motherfucker. I felt better knowing even his family thought so.

I waved my hand in farewell as Theo climbed into his Mercedes, the solid sound of the door thumping in the dark.

I looked back over my shoulder, debating whether or not to go inside and say goodbye. Since I still had to win Victoria’s mom over, I pulled up my big boy pants and walked back up the path toward the front door. The sooner I got this over with, the sooner I could be back in my condo, laying in bed, dreaming of Victoria.

“What time did you end up leaving?” Victoria asked on the other end of the line. I could hear her moving around her house, preparing for Monday morning.

“About nine,” I answered, recalling that last painful hour.

Reluctantly, I’d walked back inside to say goodbye, only to find my dad with his tongue down Roni’s throat. I’d nearly vomited my dinner up onto the brand new carpet.

Drew, however, was completely oblivious to any of it. Flat on his back on the family room sofa, his chest rose and fell with the type of deep sleep only students could achieve. When you were that busy and your brain was that taxed, you took the zzz’s anywhere you could get them—even if that meant you were less than twenty feet away from where your elderly mother was making out with her elderly husband.

“I didn’t stay long.”

A cupboard closed, and I pictured Victoria prepping her coffee maker. I drank a few espressos a day, but she downed coffee like it was water.

“Did they say anything?”

“Not really. They were too busy making out.”

“Ew. Gross.” She made a gagging noise into the phone.

I chuckled. “Yeah, not exactly a scene you want to walk in on. Drew was passed out on the sofa though, so at least he was spared.”

“You don’t think …” She paused, as if considering her words. “Do you think he came out to take the heat off me?”

I’d had a similar thought, but with a different take on the situation. “More like to take the heat off me,” I answered. “Again, I’m sorry you had to find out about Stacia that way.”

“It’s okay.”

It wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to belabor the point. If she was willing to forgive me, I wasn’t going to press my luck.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I answered, kicking my feet out in front of me as I settled against the headboard, the shadows from the flames in my fireplace dancing over the walls. “From here on out, I’m an open book.”

She pulled a long, slow breath into her lungs and I waited for the words to spill forth. I had a pretty good inkling what they’d be. “Why’d you get divorced?”

I took a moment to compose my thoughts. My marriage—and subsequent divorce—didn’t paint me in the best light. Hell, it didn’t paint either of us particularly well. It was a relationship that had been doomed from the start, and instead of acknowledging that, we just kept compounding mistake after mistake after mistake … until the only thing left was bitterness and betrayal.

“I think the better question is why we got married in the first place.” I’d promised Victoria there’d be no more secrets between us, so it was time I came clean about the whole sordid affair.

“That sounds … ominous.”

“We were young,” I began, going all the way back to the beginning. “Stacia was the life of the party, and I … well, I wasn’t. I was always studying or working, and she was my escape. Unfortunately, we weren’t always responsible, so when she came to me and said she was pregnant, I did what I thought was right.”

On the other end of the line, Victoria sucked in a shocked gasp. “You have a kid too?”

“No,” I rushed to assure her. “It turns out she wasn’t pregnant. She had a cyst on her ovary that was causing her to have irregular periods.” I shook my head at the stupidity of it all. Stacia had never even taken a pregnancy test. If she had … well, my life would have turned out quite differently.

“One night it burst and she started bleeding pretty bad. I rushed her to the hospital thinking she was losing the baby, only to find out there wasn’t a baby. By that point, we’d been married for six weeks, and I honestly did care for her. Once she got out of surgery and the shock wore off, we decided to stay married. I thought we could make it work.”

“But?”

“But …” I dragged a hand across my jaw, the stubble abrading my skin. “But she had other ideas. I’m honestly not sure she has it in her to be faithful.”

“She was cheating on you?”

“From the beginning, it turns out.” And then I admitted the ugly truth that I’d learned way too late. “Had she actually been pregnant, I’m not even sure the kid would have been mine. It turns out I wasn’t the only guy she was being irresponsible with. I was, however, the only one clueless enough to buy her lies.”

The line fell silent as Victoria processed my confession. Eventually, she let out a long, slow breath. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“No wonder you don’t do relationships.”

“Not until you.”

“Right,” she answered. “Why is that, David?”

Her question caught me off guard. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s just …” She paused, and I pictured her chewing on her lip, a tic that came out when she was mulling something over. I didn’t know if she was even aware that she did it, but I’d noticed it almost immediately. Hard not to, when you were busy staring at a woman’s lips, hoping and praying that you’d get to taste them someday soon.

My answer was on the tip of my tongue, but I took a moment to play the words in my head before speaking them. This was probably the most revealing conversation Victoria and I had ever had, and I didn’t want to fuck things up twice in one night.

“Initially, I thought you’d be someone I could spend a few fun hours passing the time with. Not to be too crass about it, but I wanted to fuck you. Desperately.”

Victoria laughed. “No, that wasn’t crass at all.”

I smiled, remembering how charged our conversation on the ferry had been. At one point I’d had to inwardly recite Chaucer to keep from giving into my baser instincts and dragging her to the bathroom. Christ, how I’d wanted to get my hands on her. But as the discussion wore on, my lust was matched by my need to know her. Not just her body, but her mind as well.

“The more we talked, the more I realized that it wasn’t just physical. I mean, it was, obviously, but you were smart and kind, and I was fascinated by more than your luscious lips.”

“David, that still doesn’t answer my question. We could have fucked—gotten it out of our system—and then gone our separate ways. Why did you tell me you weren’t looking for a one night stand?”

While speaking those words in the moments before our bodies had joined had been terrifying, they were nothing compared to now. Now, I had to give voice to the how and the why of it all. How had I fallen in love with her so quickly? Why had it happened?

I didn’t know if I had the words to explain how she made me feel, all the ways she’d broken through the barriers I’d lived behind. I didn’t know how to explain that I’d never had a choice except to fall in love with her.

“I couldn’t let you walk away,” I answered, swallowing my fear. “By the time the ferry docked, I knew I was more than a little bit infatuated with you. When you looked at me, your eyes sparkling and your face lit with a happy smile, you took my breath away.”

“You made me believe that good guys still existed,” she said, her voice soft.

Her words caused my heart to melt all over again.

I didn’t know all the details of Victoria’s romantic past, but I got the impression she’d been burned before. Badly. Someday soon, I’d ask her to tell me all about it.

But this moment wasn’t about the men who’d come before me. This was my opportunity to prove that I was worthy of her. “All I could think to myself that entire night was that I wanted to be what you need.”

“You are,” she answered. “You will be.”