The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(73)

Lights twinkle below.

Not many but enough. And the light of the moon shows off everything from the square to the school to the community center with Gigi’s new office to the old neighborhoods and the lake.

I relax into his arms, all my sugar-fueled energy dipping behind a hum coming from my lower belly. “What would it take to rebuild the Ferris wheel?”

He tenses. “Why?”

“It’s pretty, but it could be so much more.” I frown. “Sort of like me. And it’s fine that Gigi’s fixing the school and the community center, but no one will come to Tickled Pink to see an old high school building. They’d come to ride the Ferris wheel and watch snowshoe baseball and toss coins into the Fountain of Everlasting Eternity and to get taffy from the candy shop and ride cloud boats on the lake.”

“We don’t have a candy shop.” His voice is rough, his body getting more rigid with every word I utter.

“Tourists aren’t the devil, Teague. They won’t descend on the town and try to tear Bridget apart. She’s awesome and she knows it, and I think you know all that too. And everyone else around here with secrets—so what? You’re the kind of people who accept each other, good and bad. So why not let Tickled Pink grow back into what it was supposed to be? With a little—ah!”

I’m no longer facing the town.

Instead, my back is to the railing, and I’m lost in the most intensely serious gaze I’ve ever seen on Teague Miller’s face.

“You want to fix Tickled Pink.”

Not a question. A statement. Yet there are so many layers hiding in the tone of his words, the biggest being why?

He doesn’t stop me, so I let my fingers trail down his thick chest as I speak. “Tickled Pink isn’t broken. It’s crusty on the edges and worn down and tired in places, but it’s not broken. It just needs a little love to bring it back to its full potential. In a way people would actually appreciate. No one wants to use an old school. But a Ferris wheel? All the kids would want to ride the Ferris wheel.”

“You get it.” He’s staring at me that way again. But I don’t think it’s that he finds me incomprehensible.

I think—I think this is awe.

I suck in a surprised breath, taste chocolate again, and then Teague’s kissing me.

Not because we have an appointment on a calendar.

Actually, I don’t have a clue exactly why he’s kissing me, but I won’t argue.

Not when his lips are coaxing mine apart and he’s sliding his large hands over my hips to cradle my ass. Not when he tastes better than a bourbon sour after a long day of work and feels like a shield between me and every insecurity I’ve discovered since landing in this unexpected little town.

And not when that hard ridge of his erection is pressing insistently into my belly.

Teague likes me.

He knows who I am. He knows my faults. He doesn’t put me on a pedestal because I’m a Lightly.

If anything, that’s the part of me that repels him the most.

Yet he’s kissing me like I matter.

Like I’m special.

Like he can’t resist me despite who I am, like my faults are what make me worthy.

Like I have nothing I need to hide.

No matter how bad it is.

I break out of his kiss with a gasp. “I tried to seduce a married man to get a promotion.”

Oh my Oprah.

I just said that out loud.

He squeezes his eyes shut, then drops his forehead to mine. “Okay.”

Shut up, Phoebe. Shut up. Shut up and kiss the man. “And I frequently make the people under me put together presentations so that I can present them to my bosses like they’re my own, but I throw them under the bus anytime something’s wrong.”

“Phoebe—”

I can’t stop. I’ve started, and I can’t stop. “And I blackmailed a former boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend into spilling all the tea she had on him from his time at rehab so that he wouldn’t tell the gossip rags that I got super drunk at a Christmas party and threw up all over the back of his limo.”

“Would you do it again?”

I freeze.

No is the right answer.

But if I were in New York, I don’t know that I’d do anything differently. “It’s so much easier to see right and wrong here.”

He makes a noise I can’t interpret.

High five, dummy. He is so done with you.

Fuck that.

I go up on tiptoe and smash my mouth to his. “Talking over.”

“Phoebe.”

“Kissing only.”

“Phoebe.”

It’s seriously hard to kiss a guy who keeps giving you a mouthful of beard. “I was just kidding.”

He grips me by my ears and gets right up in my face. “You can’t undo a lifetime of habits and values just like that, like you’re flicking a switch. But you’re doing the hard work anyway. That’s fucking hot.”

Speaking of hot, someone appears to have lit a match behind my eyeballs. Why is simple acceptance so hard to take? “You’re fucking hot.”

“Dammit, Phoebe, I’m serious. You’re—”

“Dad? Where’s my spare toothpaste? I just ran out, and I hate this stuff you use. Ew. Oh, gross. Are you guys making out up here? Big yikes. Could you, like, get after it somewhere else?”