Page 66 of Unromance

A cautious smile spread across his face, and her heart threw itself against her rib cage with blinding force.

“I don’t want to not know you either,” he said tenderly. “And I hope you know your crazy schedule doesn’t bother me. When filming resumes,I’mgoing to be the one who’s working insane hours anddisappearing for long periods of time. And then—” He stared off to the side, a look of bewilderment on his face. “And then I’m starting a business, which probably won’t be time-consuming at all.”

She grinned, shrugging one shoulder. “Probably not.”

He grinned softly, opening his arms.

She pushed off the door, using him to hold her up instead, suddenly very weak in the knees overthat smile. They stood like that for a while, swaying gently on the spot, her hands on his chest and his arms encircling her, his face pressed into her hair.

This was the moment. If she wanted to come clean, now was the time. She wanted so desperately to be able to give him everything, to tell him that she wanted more, too, but even saying what little she had left her feeling wrung out. Though she was no longer sure if the effort of keeping it repressed was more exhausting than opening up. She wished she could be the grand-gesture type, to get up on a platform and make a soul-baring speech, but she wasn’t, and what was the point, anyway? He was moving. They’d crossed a lot of lines, but if they crossedthatline, there would be no going back. So she would take what she could, give what she could, be his friend, and spare them both the inevitable heartache. She’d rather have him halfway than not at all. If she tried to have him all the way, how long until she couldn’t give him the storybook romance he craved, and she lost him all over again? Where would that leave her—crushed, alone, stuck? It was better this way.

Inhaling the scent of his spicy cologne, she tried to make peace with her choice, Mason’s presence soothing the ache in her chest that had been there since they last spoke.

Mason eased out of their embrace, his attention on the stuffed garment bag taking up the majority of her hall closet. “There’s not a body in there, is there?” he whispered conspiratorially.

“Open it and find out,” she challenged.

He grinned, giving the bag an assessing squeeze. Apparently satisfied that it was tulle and not limbs, he eased the bag off the rack before dropping down to one knee. “Sawyer Greene,” he began, his face screwing up in concentration. “What is your middle name?” he whispered as an aside.

She groaned. “Jo.”

His whole face lit up. “Of course it is. Sawyer Jo Greene, will you go to the ball with me?”

She pressed her lips together to hold back a snort, settling on a single nod instead.

“Go ahead and say whatever filthy thing you’re trying not to say,” he said with a twist of his mouth.

She pressed her lips together and shook her head, not wanting to ruin the moment with a balls joke that she should have stopped finding funny a decade ago.

Mason hid his face behind the garment bag as he laughed, despite her not telling her joke.

Pushing the bag aside so she could see him, she grinned, feeling a sense of victory that she was the one who got to make him laugh like this, to make him light up, to see behind Mason West’s PR Face.

Wrapping his arm around her knees, he pulled her closer until she stood between his legs, her knees to his chest. “I think you might be my favorite person.”

“Of course I am, I’m fantastic,” she said instead of what she really meant, which wasI think you might be my favorite, too. It was better this way.

So why didn’t she feel better?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE MAIN EVENT– Everything’s been leading up to this, and it will go either very right… or very wrong.

Mason was on cloud nine. He watched Sawyer finish getting ready in a near reverent silence, the simple act of watching her putz around her bathroom as intimate as anything they’d already done. She kicked him out before she put on her dress, murmuring something about not knowing how sausage was made.

Sawyer was quieter than usual, but he supposed so was he. He liked this quieter version of them equally as much. He wanted to spend all his lazy mornings with her in companionable silence. To come home from a long shoot and do nothing with her. He kept those thoughts to himself, however. Sawyer hadn’t exactly said they were just friends. For maybe the first time ever, she hadn’t pushed that point, and it didn’t go unnoticed by him. Whatever she felt comfortable giving was enough. He wasn’t going to rush this time.

He hadn’t told her about calling Kara. She’d always claimed to want no part of that secret list item. Telling Sawyer all the ways he’d screwed up in the past and how he was trying not to repeat those mistakes with her felt like the opposite of not rushing her.

“Get ready, Álvarez,” Sawyer called through the door.

He grinned. He liked that she called him that, as if a reminder of who he was, that he could be himself with her.

“So ready,” he called back. He was ready, but was she? Would she let herself be ready? He was fairly certain he wasn’t the only one not saying everything they’d been thinking the past two days, but he had to take Luis and Kara’s advice and wait, to not rush.

That resolution was a hard one to keep when she came out of the bathroom.

“Zip me up?” she asked, spinning around and watching him over her shoulder.

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