“Did you know I started to fall for you when you told me why ‘Ode to Joy’ was your ringtone?” he asked, stopping in front of her, and gently closing her book.

She shook her head. “No.”

“I started to fall for you then because it said something about you. About who you are, and what matters to you. And I fell more the day you came to my office in your librarian outfit, and not because of how you looked or what you did. But when you sat on my lap, and you told me about how you once wanted to be a Broadway star. Except you couldn’t sing, dance or act,” he said, and he wanted to take her hand, to kiss her palm, to kiss her face. But he had already won her with touch. He hadn’t earned her love with words yet.

“Why that?”

“Because it showed your sense of humor. Which is part of what I love about you,” he said, and every time he said the word love it was as if another small slice of regret sheared away. “And you asked me about Aubrey and if I missed her, and that’s part of how I fell in love with you too. Because you care. You care about your work, and your clients, and your friends, and your family. And you cared about me long before I could even begin to try to deserve you.”

“Don’t say that,” she said softly, her hands gripping the wood railing behind her.

“It’s true. Because you are so good with words and with talking and sharing, and I’m not. But I want to be. Because I want to deserve you. Like the night at the symphony, when you got mad at me.”

She looked down at her feet, red coloring her cheeks. Gently, he tipped up her chin.

“I fell for you because of that, too. Because you weren’t afraid to tell me the truth. To tell me to stop playing games. To be blatantly honest about something as simple as wanting an orgasm.”

She laughed, and glanced away. “You’re embarrassing me,” she said, but she didn’t seem mad. “You make me sound so horny.”

“You are. And I fucking love it, Michelle. Like I love you. My God, I have to tell you how much I love you. I wasn’t going to sit in that hotel room and wait for you to figure out if you were going to spend the rest of the trip with me. And I had to get my head out of my own ass and out of the past. As soon as I left the hotel, where else did I wind up but the spot where I should have told you in the first place how I felt?”

Her lips curved up, and he was dying to kiss her. But words mattered more.

“I should have told you that night outside the perfume shop. Because I felt it that night. I felt it then, and before, and after, and now. And all the time. And as soon as I realized how monumentally stupid I was for not saying something so simple as I’m in love with you, I had to see you. I had to tell you all the things I should have told you a million times already. The things I let myself believe were too hard to say. The things I was afraid of because of the last time I said them to Aubrey. But you’re not her. You’re you. And I am in love with you, and I couldn’t wait for you to come back to the hotel. I didn’t come to Paris to not be with you,” he said, inching closer to the woman he adored.