“I’m relieved.” My hands find his back pockets and squeeze his round, hard ass through the fabric. “Thrilled. Beyond happy. My heart was breaking. I wanted both of you, and now I don’t have to choose, because it’s all…you.”
He smiles against our kiss. “Even with my capitalist wiles and the online bookstore?”
I nod and bury my face in his neck, breathing in woodsmoke and wintry forests. “Especially with your capitalist wiles and the online bookstore. You saved Bailey’s.”
“For you.”
“For me.”
I feel his smile deepen as he nuzzles me, then kisses my neck down to my collarbone. “I won’t work there,” he says, “if you don’t want. You can have it all for yourself—”
“What?” It’s a bucket of ice water right over me. Yanking my hands from his pockets, I pick up my head. Our noses brush, but there’s no kiss, only frowning. “I just found you, and now you’re leaving me?”
Jonathan’s smile is sweet and gentle as he tugs me back into his arms and returns my hands to his back pockets. “You always had me, Gabriella. And I’d love to stay, but not if it won’t make you happy.”
I melt inside his arms, as Jonathan’s hands drift in soothing circles down my waist, then palm my butt affectionately. “It would make me endlessly happy,” I tell him. “We’re the perfect team, you and I.” Our eyes search each other’s. I slip a hand from his pocket and brush a dark lock of hair from his face. “When did you know?” I ask.
He leans into my touch, his eyes slipping shut. “Our fight after meeting with the Baileys. When I picked up the romance novel, and you made that dig about Jane Austen. It was nearly verbatim what I’d said, what we’d talked about in our chat. I thought I was losing it for a second, imagining things, but then I asked you to name more of your favorite romances, and the ones you pointed out were every single title MCAT had told me. Then I went home and I tried to talk with you on Telegram about work to see if I could get any more clues. When you said you had one coworker who made you miserable and hated the holidays—I knew it was you. At least, I was as sure as I could be.”
“That’s why you said it,” I whisper. “When we kissed. I shouldn’t do this. Not yet.”
Sighing, he opens his eyes. “I wanted to wait until we both knew, until everything was out in the open. Only you were just so perfect, standing there catching snowflakes on your tongue, a smile lighting you up, and I knew you wanted me, even though you were torn. I’d spent thirty minutes with you in my car, listening to the smoke in your voice, watching you squirm your little ass on the seat, rubbing your thighs, staring at my mouth and—God, Gabby, I couldn’t stop myself. Not when you were right there with me.”
“And when we kissed?” I bite my lip, remembering every hot, wet slick of our tongues and mouths, the way his hands sank into my coat and pinned our hips together.
He’s quiet for a moment as he stares at me, holding me tight, so tight, as if he’s afraid the moment he lets go, I might vanish. “That’s when I prayed, because kissing you was water in a desert, sunlight breaking the horizon, and I was gone for you, no turning back. I’m not a praying man, Gabriella, but I prayed so fucking hard that this wasn’t some horrible joke, that you’d be happy when you realized it was me, that whatever cosmic force gave me the gift of stumbling into your life wasn’t cruel enough to keep me from always belonging to it.”
“Jonathan.” I pull away, clasping his face. “My Mr. Reddit. My own grumpy Scrooge McGrinch. It was you. It had to be.”
“How did you know?” he asks quietly.
I smile so hard my face hurts. “You slipped. The night we closed up, you mentioned Mr. Reddit.”
His eyes widen. “Shit. Did I?”
I nod. “I didn’t process it until last night—well, early this morning. In my dreams.”
His smile is slow and lazy and so arrogantly sensual, I want to kiss it right off his face. “Been dreaming about me, have you, Di Natale?”
I shove him playfully. “I already admitted that the night we closed up.” Our humor dies away as I search his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you suspected it?”
He drifts his knuckle down my cheek, brow furrowed. So serious. “At first, because I was reeling. I needed time to sort it out in my head. And because you hated me, Gabriella. Especially once I realized how badly I wanted it to work, I realized you needed time to see my less terrible qualities…” He blows out a slow stream of air. “And I needed time to finish the online bookstore build-out, then find the guts to tell you about it. It didn’t feel right, the idea of revealing who I was—who we were—before I told you everything, including the store.”