Page 303 of Romeo

I nodded.

He was quiet for a moment, but this silence didn’t feel like the one I feared for months. Jasper wasn’t looking at me differently in the way I had imagined. He looked like he was trying to understand why I had been terrified to tell him at all.

“Why were you afraid to tell me?”

The question broke something loose inside me. “Because I didn’t know what you would see.”

His expression tightened.

“I know why I did it,” I continued. “I know I made the right choice for Charlie. I don’t regret choosing Claudia. But you weren’t there. You only have my version, and people hear fifteen-year-old mother and abandoned baby and decide they know what kind of person that makes me.” My eyes burned despite my determination not to cry again. “And you talk about someday having children like it’s this beautiful thing waiting in the future, while I’ve already been pregnant. I’ve already had a baby. I was afraid you’d wonder why I never told you, or think I lied to you, or that you’d look at me and see some stupid girl who⁠—”

“Stop.”

His hands came up and closed around my face.

I stared at him through the blur in my eyes.

“Do not ever call that girl stupid in front of me again.” Jasper’s voice had gone rough, and for the first time since I started talking, I understood some of what I was seeing in his face. “You were fifteen fuckin’ years old, sleepin’ on streets, pregnant and alone. And somehow you still had enough sense to watch a woman for days until you knew she was good enough for your baby.”

My tears spilled over.

Jasper wiped them away with his thumbs.

“You didn’t toss that boy away. You fuckin’ picked his mama.” His forehead settled against mine, his voice dropping as his hands held me gently between them. “Then you stood there and made sure she took him someplace safe before you walked away.”

I closed my eyes.

“Nothin’ you just told me changes a goddamn thing about how I feel about you.”

My breath caught.

“If anythin’, Ma Belle, you just gave me another fuckin’ reason to love you.”

My eyes opened.

Everything else he had said disappeared beneath those last three words. “You love me?”

Jasper stared at me as if I’d just asked the dumbest question he had ever heard.

Then the corner of his mouth lifted. “Baby, I’ve loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you.”

I could only look at him.

A year of texts, calls, jokes, surprise visits, flowers, threats disguised as teasing, and patience that had driven me half insane suddenly rearranged itself around the words.

Since the moment I laid eyes on you.

Devlyn’s voice came back to me.

The La Croix curse.

I let out a breath that trembled into something almost like a laugh. “Devlyn told me.”

Suspicion immediately narrowed Jasper’s eyes. “Told you what?”

“About the curse.”

His entire expression changed. “Oh.”