She doesn’t tell me she knows I’m right. She doesn’t say anything at all.
“I thought somehow I could prevent this,” I say, taking her hand in mine. “Maybe it was wishful thinking.”
“I don’t know how I believed it wouldn’t come to this.”
“But hey,” I say, looking at her until she looks at me. “It’s to this now. And we have to choose whether what we have is worth fighting for or not.”
She smiles and gathers the courage to speak again. “What do we have, Barrett?”
I kiss her lightly. “I’m just figuring it out. I don’t know what it is because I’ve never felt it before. But I can tell you this for sure—it’s not something I want to let go because we’re afraid.”
“Are you afraid of this?”
“My staff tells me I should be. They tell me getting involved with a woman can flip back around and kick me in the ass. They say it can ruin my reputation and lend more credence to Hobbs’ claims that I’m a flighty decision maker.”
Her face falls. “I don’t want to hurt your career.”
“You make me better. Don’t you see that? You make me feel like I can conquer the world, Alison. You make me smile, give me little glimpses of something I’d never considered before.”
She picks up on what I’m getting at and seems shocked at the idea. I want to tell her that yeah, I’m thinking of what a future could hold between us long-term, but I don’t go there. I need to fight one battle at a time.
“You give me and my career way more than you’d ever take from it. But it’s not just about me. It’s about you. And Hux.”
“I feel like I need to protect my boy,” she says. “I know what being in the public eye can do. I don’t know what hearing things said about his mother, about you if he grows close to you like I think he will—what will that do to him?” She frowns. “If I don’t protect him, who will?”
“I’m fighting for you right now, to give me the chance to prove to you I’ll protect you both. That I’m worth bringing into your lives.”
Her face lights up. “Really? That’s how you feel?”
“Definitely. I want to see where this goes, Alison, and I can’t do that if I can’t say you’re mine. Look,” I say, moving closer to her, “I can’t protect you if I won’t acknowledge we’re together. If we’re sneaking around, it’s only going to make the media more curious as to who you are. But if I can come out and tell them I’m seeing you and ask them to respect your privacy, most of them will. Even though they’re complete fucking dickheads to me, there’s a general rule about keeping kids out of it. So you don’t need to worry about Hux.”
I can see her coming around, the idea not sounding so crazy. So I keep talking, praying that I say something that throws her to my side.
“I want you to be my girl in every sense of the word. We can still go slow, but just do it openly. I don’t see the harm in that.”
She sighs, a burden on her chest that she’s clearly wrestling. It would be so much easier if this wasn’t an election season and I wasn’t in this big fight with Monroe and Hobbs. I wish, for a split second, I wasn’t Barrett Landry, Mayor of Savannah.
“If you want to think about it, that’s fine,” I say sadly. “I’ll understand.”
She closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. Her hand trembles as she places it over mine. I can feel her pulse pounding, her skin heated. After a few failed attempts at speaking, her eyes fly open and the words pour out of her mouth.
“This is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in the history of my life, especially since I feel this eerie sense of déjà vu, but,” she says, taking a deep, lingering breath, “let’s do it. Let’s get it over with because the fear of not having you is worse than the fear of the press.”
“Really?” I say, afraid I misheard.
She shrugs, a little grin smearing on her face. “If I think about not seeing you tomorrow, it kills me. And if I think about telling Hux he won’t see Uncle Lincoln anymore, I want to die.”
“Uncle Lincoln?” I ask, raising my brow.
“Apparently your brother told him to call him that.”
Laughing, I pull her into my shoulder. I don’t tell her how much I love the insinuations that makes. I don’t let on that I’m going to call Linc when I get home and give him hell and a couple of thank-you’s. I don’t happen to say that it seems completely right to have my brother already intertwined in her life. But I do kiss the top of her head.
“Linc hated hearing that Hux didn’t have a man in his life. We grew up with all these role models—our grandfather, our father, our uncle, and each other. And, you know, Linc’s the youngest boy in the family, so he had to spend more time than any of us with Camilla and Sienna. I think he just seriously felt bad for your son.”
“Huxley hasn’t been this happy in his entire life,” she sighs. “But I still want to go slow.”
“Absolutely. Whatever makes you feel good about this.”