By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(69)

She turned her whole body to face him. “You were trying to impress me?”

Beau didn’t answer, and reached for his plate.

“Beau.”

He looked like he was concentrating hard on spreading Brie on a cracker. Finally, he shrugged. “I guess…it depends…on what you mean by ‘trying.’ Did I know you were sitting by the pool when I walked outside to take a swim? I suppose the answer there is yes. Did I do the butterfly to show off a little? Perhaps also yes.” He grinned at her. “I hadn’t done it in years. I was glad I remembered how.”

Izzy couldn’t believe that he’d come out to the pool on purpose, just to see her. She put her hand on his and let it trail up his wrist, his forearm, to finally rest on his shoulder.

“You also, by the way, seemed wholly unaffected by me,” she said. “I thought you didn’t even like me.”

Beau laughed. “Oh, trust me, I’ve been very affected by you from the first moment,” he said. “And I’ve liked you more and more every single day that you’ve been here. I just wasn’t…am not, probably, all that great at showing it.”

This was one of the most unusual conversations Izzy had ever had with a guy. Usually, with guys she’d dated, they’d fenced with each other for a while with random flirtation and occasional insults. But then, after they hooked up for the first time (or the second time, and usually even the tenth time), everything was vague, up in the air, about when—or whether—they would see each other again, what was going on between the two of them, how they felt about each other.

But she and Beau had already talked about so much in the past few weeks that it felt natural for them to talk about this, too.

Maybe that meant she could ask him the question she kept wondering about.

He nudged her. “What is it?”

He knew her too well at this point for her to hesitate.

“If you’ve been wanting this since the beginning, why didn’t you kiss me before?”

He put his plate down on the table and reached for her hand. “Izzy. You’re living in my house. We’re working together. This whole situation is already weird. I know I can be a real jerk sometimes, but I didn’t want to be that kind of jerk.” He smiled softly at her. “I came so close. That time in the kitchen. And in the line for ice cream. But I didn’t want to do anything you didn’t want to do.”

She leaned forward and kissed him again. She really loved the way he kissed her, how he moved from gentle to passionate in seconds, how he touched her, like every part of her body was special to him.

And they had three more weeks together. What was going to happen after that? No. She wasn’t going to let herself worry about the future right now.

Finally, she sat back. “I don’t want the Brie to get cold.”

He laughed and picked up the remote. “We can’t have that. This is not a house where we waste cheese.”

He put his arm around her as he turned on the TV, and she leaned against him to watch. After one episode of their show, he went back to the kitchen, returning with brownies and ice cream.

“I forgot to ask,” he said. “Did you get good work done today? Oh, and did you get the tea for Michaela?”

In all the excitement about Beau’s visit with his mom, and then everything that happened between the two of them, Izzy had almost forgotten about the hours she’d spent that day reading her manuscript, and what she’d realized.

No, that wasn’t true, she hadn’t forgotten—it had been a quiet, happy hum underneath everything.

“Yeah,” she said. “To both things. I got Michaela her tea. And I got good work done.” She smiled at him. “I read through my book. The one that I wrote, before.”

He sat down right next to her. “I didn’t realize you were going to do that. How did it go?”

He slid his hand into hers. She knew he really cared about her answer.

“I wasn’t sure I had the courage to actually do it. I was scared that I would realize how bad it was, that it would make me feel like I shouldn’t keep going. But I decided that if you could go see your mom today, I could face some words on a computer screen.” She couldn’t hold back her smile. “But I still love it. Obviously, it has its faults, it’s not perfect—”

Before she could finish her sentence, Beau wrapped her in a bear hug. “Oh, Izzy, I’m so glad,” he said. “And of course it’s perfect, it’s yours.”

He sounded so happy for her. So confident in her. She nestled closer to him, hid her face in his chest so he couldn’t see the tears escape and slide down her face. After a little while, she sat up and reached for her dessert.

“Thank you,” she said. “For being so happy for me. I’m really happy about the book, too. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it—if I’m going to try to find an agent with this book, or just move on to writing the next one, or what, but at least I know that I can write. That I can do this. It makes all the difference.”

He brushed her tears off her face with his thumb. Okay, so she hadn’t managed to hide those from him. Somehow, she didn’t mind.

“Of course it makes all the difference,” he said. He pulled her close, and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

Izzy wondered what would happen at the end of the night. As perfect as today had been, as much as she loved being this close to Beau, she wasn’t sure if she wanted their relationship to escalate beyond that, at least, not yet.