“All great choices if you like chocolate.” A beat. “Which I don’t.”
I sat up on a gasp. “You cannot be serious.”
“Deadly.”
“How did I not know this?” I asked, tapping my chin. “You think you know a man for years, and then he drops a bomb like this on you.” I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dam. I—this might be a deal-breaker.”
He snorted. “You think you’re so funny.”
I grabbed a slice of pizza. “I know I’m funny. I’m the star of a rom-com, remember?”
Another snort. “And well on your way to Ego level.”
My gasp was punctuated first by my giggle and second by me shoving pizza into my mouth. I’d been teasing about Pizza Night and eating till the cows came home, but in reality, I’d been sticking with vegetables, fruit, and low carb meals since I’d wrestled with my dress the previous morning.
Not starving, but throwing in a few healthy meals until I bounced back.
But I wasn’t giving up my Pizza Nights with Damon . . . or my favorite clothes because I’d gotten too big to wear them.
And as a former model, I’d been given a few gems.
I wanted to be able to wear them again.
“Such a hypocrite,” I murmured.
“Come again?” Damon asked, looking confused. Rightfully, too, since I’d been listening to him talk about his travels up to San Francisco. Apparently, he’d met up with a photographer friend, Tanner, and they’d gone out to dinner.
So, 'hypocrite' was way out in left field.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was woolgathering. Not that I wasn’t enjoying your story. I’m glad you caught up with your friend. It’s me who was being a jerk and drifted off.”
His eyes went warm. “What made you drift off?”
I waffled for a few seconds before deciding that I’d been truthful about this and so might as well be truthful about everything else. “Well, I say I’m not willing to sacrifice my happiness to be a certain size, and meanwhile, I don’t want to get so fat that I can’t wear my clothes.”
There.
Right there.
That thing on his face again.
“Damon, what’s going on? You’ve made a weird face twice tonight and—” Horror dawned and I dropped the pizza back into the box, appetite fading. “Is it about what I told you? About my ex? My family. I mean, I know it’s a lot—”
“Eden.”
“I know I’m messed up and—”
“Baby.”
“I—”
“Eden.”
Sharp. Unusual. Enough to snap me out of the spiral.
It should have reminded me of Tim, of my past, made me retreat, but even when Damon was sharp, he was still soft, if that made sense. Of course, like the rest of my mind this evening, it also didn’t.
I . . . guess I just knew that Damon would do anything in his power to not hurt me.
And Tim hadn’t cared.
“Yes?” I said, pulling myself out of my head.
“Nothing that happened to you in your first marriage was your fault,” he said, fiercely. “None. Of. It.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I—” My rebuttal stopped. “I do,” I whispered. “Or . . . part of me does, anyway.”
“Yes, baby,” he said. “It's the rest of you that keeps tugging you under.”
“I hate that I can’t forget.”
“Maybe you need to stop worrying about forgetting and start seeing that your past has made you the strong, incredible, wonderful woman you’ve become today.”
“I—”
I don’t know what I was going to say because those words touched me so closely, so deeply that there wasn’t any armor. Damon meant them—the sincerity was in every syllable.
“You make me think that’s possible.”
“Baby.”
“I really like you,” I whispered.
“Eden.”
“You make me want more.”
He sucked in a breath. “I think that’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I’m going to try really hard not to screw us up.”
A shake of his head. “We’re both going to screw up, you know that, right?”
“If you say so,” I murmured. “Because up to now, you’ve been pretty much perfect.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes danced with amusement. “Only pretty much?”
“Learn how to make French toast, and you’ll be all the way there.”
“Come up to San Francisco when you wrap,” he said. “You can drive up with me to visit my folks. My mom makes the best French toast. But she’s never given me the recipe. I bet if I bring you along, she’ll cave and teach it to both of us.”
“I—”
“No answer required right now.”
“Damon—”
“It’s okay,” he said, sitting up. “I shouldn’t push.”
“Damon!”
He stopped talking.
“I was going to say that I’d love to go with you.”
I was?
My heart began pounding in my chest, my throat went tight, my—
I was.
Moving forward, not forgetting, but not letting it define me. Not any longer. I deserved that. Damon deserved that . . . and I wanted it. I wanted a future with him.
“Baby.”
I sniffed. “I know.”
“I wish I could hold you right now.”
“I wish you could, too.”
We turned the conversation to lighter topics then—Damon dropping back into his story about Tanner and Tanner’s fiancé Kelsey, and then telling me how he’d done some touristy things for the first time ever, including riding a cable car and getting ice cream at Ghirardelli's—vanilla, of course.
We hung up when I yawned three times in quick succession, and that meant that I never got to the bottom of the weird look on Damon’s face.
Turned out, I only needed to use a little of his patience.
I was going to find out just after my plane landed in San Francisco.
And it was going to change absolutely everything.
Thirteen
Damon
She was the picture of Hollywood glamour, walking down the stairs of the private jet she’d hired, her jacket flowing behind her as she moved, red hair a shining sheet of fire down her back.
“Hey,” she murmured, coming close and pressing a kiss to my lips, where I waited at my car, parked just outside the private tarmac.
“Hi, baby.”
Her shoulders relaxed and she smiled up at me. “I’ve never let another man call me baby, you
