Page 84 of The Heartbreaker

My heart told me he would. Especially by the way it was slamming in a constant rhythm inside my chest.

By the look on his face, he seemed as content as I was.

As happy.

He was falling in love with Malibu.

The shore and ocean.

Because of me.

But there was something so evident in my thoughts, so pressing, and I wondered if he realized it too.

It was that it didn’t matter where I was. It could be the beach, the club, or Ridge’s house. What mattered was that I was with him.

He was the link.

The bond.

Not the water or the shore or the sand or the salty smell.

Ridge … was everything.

He slowly turned his head and looked at me. His eyelids narrowed the longer the silence pulsed between us, his lips pulling wide.

That smile.My God. How could something trigger so many thoughts and emotions and tingles at once?

He nodded as though he could hear everything in my mind and then said, “I know, baby. I know …” He allowed a few seconds to pass—while my world rocked because he really did seem to understand what I was thinking—before he broke the quietness again. “Do you see it?”

I shook my head. I was far too focused on him, on the explosion within my brain to see anything else.

He unclasped our hands and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his side. “Look.” He used his free hand to point in the distance.

I followed his finger and immediately knew what he was referring to. While I’d been staring at him, the sky that was just above the water had begun to lighten from the sun, turning a deep copper and gold and bright yellow—colors that were almost ombré as they lifted toward the center sky, which was now baby blue. And in the middle, the rays were starting to shoot across the blue. Those rays moved gradually as the sun lifted from the horizon, the brightness casting sparkles across the indigo water and deepening each of the hues as it rose higher.

“It’s so beautiful,” I whispered.

“Our first sunrise.”

It hadn’t hit me until then.

That we’d watched the sunset many hours ago, and now, it was rising.

That we’d been here all this time.

That pretty soon, we’d have to go to work.

“I can’t believe we’ve been here all night.” My voice was still soft, as if I didn’t want to disrupt the sky. “And we need to leave so we won’t be late to work. It’s going to be a long day without any sleep.”

“But worth it.”

When I glanced at him again, his eyes were on me, his fingers diving into my hair, his thumb stroking my cheek.

“Twelve hours,” he said. “That’s how long we’ve been here.”

“It feels like we just arrived.”

He smiled. “All of those hours of you getting more of me. You must almost be an expert at this point.” He winked.