Kiss Me If You Can (24 page)

She blinked back tears “Why? What changed in the last twenty-four hours?” she asked, obviously not yet convinced.

“You have to ask?” He cupped her cheek in his hand. “I almost lost you. In the minutes that guy had a knife against your throat, I got a glimpse of my life without you. And I realized what an idiot I was for letting you walk away.”

A tear trickled down her cheek.

“Hey. I didn't mean to make you cry.” He pulled her glasses off before they could fog up, and brushed the moisture from her cheek with his thumb.

“It's just amazing to me that you care so much about me,” she whispered.

It was so wrong that she still didn't think he could love her for who and what she was. “I don't just care, Lex. I love you. I said it last night but I failed to follow up. I love you and I will spend the rest of our lives making sure you know I mean it.”

She smiled, the genuine, open grin he'd fallen hard for the first time they met. “What if I still want a house?” she asked. “I wouldn't give up travel com
pletely, mind you, but I'd have a home base. What do you think?”

If she needed to stand on her own before she could commit to him, he'd hate it but he'd accept it. Anything she wanted or needed to be whole. “I suppose I could be persuaded to drive out to the suburbs to visit.”

“No.” She scrunched up her nose. “What if I wanted
us
to have a house? Together. I noticed that you talk the talk about having your own place, but you don't even have matching sheets or dishes. We could start together and build. From scratch.”

“A place of
our
own.” He needed to repeat the words to believe them.

She nodded. “So when we did travel,
we'd
have a home to come back to.”

“And when we weren't traveling?”

She shrugged. “We'd work…”

“And have a family?” As soon as the words were out, Coop held his breath.

Eyes wide, she absorbed the question. And then she nodded.

“You're sure?” he asked.

“Yes.” She grinned. “Yes. Absolutely.” Then and there, Coop had the answer to all the dreams he'd never known he'd had.

Lexie couldn't stop smiling. She had never let herself think about real love, family or perma
nence. Never believed she wanted it or could have it for herself.

Everything had changed with this one man. “Want to know why?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do.”

She couldn't stop touching him and she caressed his cheek.

His eyes deepened with every touch. “If I'd known how much you liked the beard, I'd have grown it sooner.”

She laughed.

“Now tell me why you're sure about a home and a family with me.”

Lexie's mood sobered. “Because you give me the security I never had. You give me a reason to want to be home.”

He brushed his lips over hers. “That's funny because you give me the freedom I was always afraid to take or trust in. And you believe in me, which helps me believe in myself.”

He leaned in for a deeper, emotion-sealing kiss, but she broke it off quickly, remembering a question she'd had from last night.

“What did you mean last night when I made that joke about your looking to take over your brother's job as a cop? You said, ‘Been there, tried that.'”

He groaned. “I had to quit the police academy because of an old sports injury. It felt like I'd failed
and let my father down. Then with the divorce, I failed at marriage. The only thing I didn't fail at was being a reporter.”

She finally understood so much more about him. “So when I asked you to go away with me, expecting you to leave everything behind, you felt like I was taking away the one thing you did well.”

A horrified look crossed his face. “Hey, I hope I do more than that one thing well.”

Grinning, she patted his thigh, her hand dangerously close. “Trust me, there are many things you do
very
well,” she reassured him, nuzzling her face against his.

“What a pair we make,” Coop said.

“I like it.”

“You do realize the irony, right? My dad's a cop and your grandmother's a thief.”

“Ex-thief.”

“Semantics,” Coop said and pulled her into a long, deep kiss that held the promise of today, tomorrow and the future, which had never looked so bright.