Page 96 of Riptide

“The speech?”

He nods. “And what you just said, which was what again?”

My lips lift at the sides. “That I’m in love with you?”

He stifles his smile, pulling in his lips to hide between his teeth.

“Hey," I say. "I earned that one. Don’t hide that smile from me.”

He tips his head back with a laugh, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anything better than that, his throat exposed, eyes crinkled, the unguarded sound of his happiness.

“You did earn it, but I’m not hiding, just taking it in,” he says, eyes now locked on mine.

I reach up, fingers grazing his scruff-covered jaw, tracing the curve of it, memorizing the bristle against my skin. “Take all the time you need. I’m not taking it back.”

He leans into my hand, just slightly. “Good,” he murmurs. “Because, baby?”

“Hm?”

“I’m in love with you too.”

My whole body warms as I pull him into a short, sweet kiss that imprints onto our lips.

“I don’t know how to do this perfectly,” I whisper.

“I don’t want perfect,” he says, voice rough. “I just wantyou.”

He leans in, and his forehead rests against mine for a long, quiet second. Neither of us moves. “You came into my life like a riptide,” he says. “Fast, and all at once. I didn’t see it happening. I was still trying to convince myself I had everything under control, and then suddenly, there you were. And I couldn’t hold anything in place the way I used to.”

His gaze doesn’t move from mine.

“But you didn’t break anything. You just...changed it. You shifted the whole current, and I didn’t fight it because, for the first time in years, it didn’t feel like something I had to survive or control. It felt like something I wanted to keep. And I think that’s what undid me the most. Not the chaos or the rush. Just how easy it was to let you in, and you wiped me out anyway.”

My throat’s tight, and I don’t try to speak. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.

Because what do you say to someone who just told you they let go of everything safe, everything they try to control, because you made it feel worth the risk?

I press my forehead a little closer to his again, and I close my eyes.

“I love you,” I say, looking up at him again.

He smiles as he threads his hands into the back of my hair. “I love you, too, baby.”

And then he kisses me again. It’s slow at first, like we’ve got all night. As though there’s no rush to prove anything, and there really isn’t after what he’s just said. His lips move against mine with the kind of certainty I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. I know he’s not just kissing me because he wants to, but because he has to, because maybe, like me, something in me healed something in him. And now, he’s not afraid of it.

His hands skim under my hoodie, fingertips dragging along the skin at my sides like he’s memorizing me one inch at atime. And when I lean into him fully, when I feel the warmth of him pressed against every part of me, there’s nothing left but certainty.

We don’t talk. We don’t need to. Every touch feels like an answer to a question I didn’t know I’d been asking.

When we finally make it to his bed, it’s not about the heat building between us. It’s not about distraction. It’s about staying. About being known, and wanted, and letting that be enough.

Chapter forty-one

Foxx

“Soyou’repartiallyunemployednow, huh?” Finn asks.

“I guess… From OCC, at least.”