The Stopover (The Miles High Club, #1)(130)

Instantly I’m overwhelmed with emotion. I stay silent as I battle the lump in my throat. I hate that he makes me feel so weak and vulnerable. I pull my hands out of his grip. I need to create some distance between us.

“Em.” He frowns. “I . . .” It’s clear that he has no idea what to say. “When I saw that image of you kissing Jake—”

“Jameson,” I stammer.

He holds his hand up to signify silence, and I close my mouth. “Something snapped inside of me. I was so thrown that it upset me so deeply that I . . .” He frowns as he remembers it. “I was furious—firstly with you, but then with myself.”

Our eyes are locked.

“I was going through so much shit at work, and the very last person on earth that I thought would lie to me . . . was you.”

I drop my head in shame.

“And then when I calmed down after a few days and realized that you had been set up, the future mapped itself out to me.”

I frown.

“There is always going to be someone like Ferrara who is prepared to step on you to hurt me.”

My heart drops.

“And I don’t want that for you.”

“Jay,” I whisper sadly.

“I don’t want you to be married to a workaholic who has to travel all the time and is stressed out of his head. I don’t want you to have to remind your husband not to drink too much or stop being rude to people because he’s too busy to care. I don’t want you to have to remind your husband that he’s neglecting you.”

“Your bottle of wine.” The waiter appears out of nowhere. He opens it and pours us both a glass.

“Thank you,” I reply. My eyes go back to meet Jameson’s.

The waiter leaves us alone.

“I don’t want you to come second to Miles Media. I don’t want you to ever come second to anything.”

“But—”

“Let me finish, please,” he demands.

I sit back in my chair, annoyed that he wants to speak first.

“The thing is, if you’re with me—married to me—your life is going to be all those things.”

The lump in my throat gets big.

“I love you too much to let you live that life, Em.”

He’s ending it again. My eyes fill with tears.

He takes my hand over the table and lifts it to his mouth and gently kisses it. “Don’t cry. I hate that you’ve cried over me.”

I blink to try and get rid of these stupid tears.

“I made a decision to protect you from that life. To push you away. Because I knew that one day, you would eventually be unhappy . . . and I just can’t live with that.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make,” I whisper angrily.

He frowns. “My job is to look after you and make the hard calls, ones that you can’t make for yourself.”

“Jameson.” I stare at him through tears.

“But something happened while I was away from you.” He leans in and cups my face in his hand. “I realized that I didn’t want any of those things either.”

My eyes search his.

“I can’t live without you, Em. I’ve been so fucking miserable that it’s been unbearable.”

He leans in and kisses me softly; his eyes search mine as he dusts his thumb over my bottom lip. “If you don’t want me as I am now, I’ll resign from Miles Media immediately, and we can move to bumfuck nowhere and, I don’t know, live in a fucking tent somewhere.”

I smirk. “You idiot,” I whisper.

He smiles as he holds my face in his hand.

“I love you how you are. I don’t want you to change anything.”

“You do?”

“But I don’t . . .” I pause as I try to articulate my feelings. “How can I move on from how you’ve treated me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t just pretend that this hasn’t happened, Jameson. You’ve hurt me too deeply.”

“I know; I don’t want you to,” he stammers. “But can’t we just . . .” He shrugs. “Start dating again? Take it slow.”

I stare at him as confusion fills me.

“I know it’s going to take time to get back to where we were, but we have the rest of our lives. We can date and get to know each other properly this time.”

I sit back as I consider his proposal, and I sip my wine. “You know, I always imagined that I would find my dream guy and fall in love, and then it would come to this big cheesy climax.”

He scrunches up his nose. “Cheesy climax? That just sounds wrong.”

I giggle as I imagine what he must be thinking about. “No, I meant proposal.”

“You want a cheesy proposal?” He frowns. “Wouldn’t you want a romantic proposal?”

“Not really. My point is, this isn’t how I imagined things would go.”

“Me neither.” He takes my hands in his. “Far from it. I’m officially an idiot. Give me another chance, Em. I won’t fuck it up, I promise.”

I stare at him.

“I love you; you love me.” He shrugs. “We can work through this, and then hopefully in time, you can forget it ever happened, and you can live happily ever after with an outdoorsy Kung Fu Panda.” He smiles hopefully.