Page 135 of The Thing About My Prince

“I mean the regular ones too. There’s something missing from you. Like a light’s been turned out. I thought this job would fire you up, live up to all your dreams. But if you want to know what I think—actually, even if you don’t want to know what I think—I think this isn’t what you hoped it would be. And I think that discovering that the job you’ve spent your whole adult life striving for isn’t what you’d hoped it would be must be terrifying. Because what on earth do you do now?”

She looks down and rolls her lips inward. Which gives my heart hope that I’m right.

“So you’re suggesting I make being your girlfriend my new career plan?”

“No. I’m suggesting you make working with me your new career plan.”

“I’m sorry?” She looks up and meets my gaze, her brow furrowed. “Workingwith you? Working with you how?”

“I think we’re both looking for work that makes our lives meaningful. That we both want to do good. And I have an idea for how we could do that. Together. Which would also mean that we could be together-together too.”

“What are you talking about, Oliver?” She looks totally perplexed.

“Before I explain, I need to know whether you’d consider trying to figure things out with me. The life things. The being-with-me things. The you-and-me-together things.”

“I didn’t think those things were figure-outable.”

“Well, I think I’ve figure-outed them.” I reach up to her cheek and brush off crusty dust with my thumb. “Tell me, in a perfect world, where it would be totally possible, where there’s no more bollocks from my parents, or the press, and where there’s definitely no fucking Giles, would you want to give the whole us-being-together thing a shot? Try it out, see if we can make it work?”

“But I don’t think we can, Oliver.” She rests her hand on my arm and looks like she’s begging me to understand sense. “Our lives, they’re polar opposi?—”

I lean in and silence her with my mouth.

It was meant to be for only a second, to stop her spiraling downward into telling me how we could never work. But now my lips are on hers, the familiar sweet scent of her skin combined with the aroma of a long, hot day fills my senses, and I know my life will only ever be complete if she’s in it.

But have I misjudged this?

It sounded like she thinks it’s only circumstances keeping us apart. Which I thought meant she’s not gone off the idea of me completely.

The lack of response from her lips makes my stomach lurch.

Fuck.

That’s it.

It’s over.

I’ve done everything I can, and the answer is no.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

LEXI

Oliver’s kiss catches me by such surprise that I haven’t even had time to react when he peels his lips from mine.

He pulls back and looks at me with the green eyes I’m sure would never fail to make that love-at-first-sight thrill run through me no matter how many times I gaze into them.

I know now that’s what it was—that moment when he opened his apartment door to me—it was love at first sight.

But that doesn’t mean it’s possible to make this work. Not after the shitty way he ended it without actually ending it.

I lean back because the only thing that will stop me from grabbing his face and kissing it right off is being too far away to do it. “You can’t send me a text saying you need time to think, then vanish, then show up here a month later saying you want to be with me again. What kind of emotional boomerang is that? It sure as hell is no way to treat someone you claim you care about. And it’s certainly not a way I want to be treated.”

“You’re right. I’m a shit. I know I’m a shit.” He rises from his crouch and slides onto the seat next to me, reaching formy hands. I let him take them, and a warm, calm sensation spreads through me from his reassuring, firm touch.

But I’m not letting him off the hook. No way is he getting away without a better explanation for that pathetic breakup text.

“You just apologized for not throwing me off the plane to Scotland, for not coming with me when I left Scotland, and for how rude your parents were to me while I was there. But you didn’t say a single word about the only actual bad thing you did, which was how you non-ended things.”