Page 108 of When Love Takes Root

“You breathed smugly.”

He grinned. “My breathing got tone now?”

“Everything about you has tone.”

His eyes moved over my face, and the playful air between us warmed into something slower. “You noticed everything about me?”

I sipped my tea because I needed my hands busy. “I notice enough.”

“What you notice?”

“No.”

He leaned forward, forearms on the table. “No?”

“You’re not about to have me sitting in The Red Garden confessing under mood lighting.”

His smile deepened. “You scared?”

“I’m cautious.”

“About me?”

“About myself around you.”

The play in his face softened. He nodded once and let my answer breathe.

“That’s fair.”

The fountain trickled behind us.

“You looking at me hard, Mr. Brooks.”

His thumb brushed over my knuckles once. “I’m trying to read what you won’t say.”

“And what am I not saying?”

He leaned closer, not enough to crowd me, just enough for the warmth of him to enter the space between us. “That you’re happy, but you don’t fully trust it yet. That you like being here with me, but part of you keeps checking over your shoulder for guilt. That you want me closer, but you’re scared closeness is going to ask more from you than you’re ready to give.”

My throat tightened.

He lifted my hand and pressed his mouth to my knuckles, his eyes still on mine when he lowered it. “I’m not here to take what you haven’t offered, Celeste. I’m here to show you that a man can want you and still honor your pace.”

The conservatory kept humming around us.

“You always talk like this?”

“No.” His gaze stayed intense. “Only when a woman makes me want to be careful and bold at the same time.”

I swallowed.

He saw it.

Of course he did.

I traced the handle of my teacup. “I was married young, you know. Not child young, but young enough to think love was supposed to feel like certainty all the time. Jamal and I grew together. We got on each other’s nerves. We had babies. Bills. Arguments about thermostat settings and whether he needed to stop buying the children loud toys. But even when we were mad, I never doubted he was for me.”

Josiah listened without interrupting.