Practice Makes Perfect (When in Rome, #2)

by Sarah Adams

For introverts like me with social anxiety, the process of dating is equivalent to waxing your bikini line. Menstrual cramps on day two of your cycle. An emergency dental procedure you weren’t expecting—and guess what: they’re fresh out of novocaine.

I am the quiet one in my family. The one with her nose always in a book because she prefers worlds where she doesn’t have to interact with other humans. It’s so much easier to read about relationships than to foster them. Less dangerous too. I can’t offend anyone written into a book. I can’t say the wrong thing. And book characters don’t make judgments about me.

I wanted to talk to her all night. Hell, I would have settled for sitting and watching her read her book.

If some jackass doesn’t take the time to peel back her layers of nervousness to find out who she really is, he doesn’t deserve to have her when she’s at her most comfortable.

“If I waited until I felt confident to live my life and do the things I want to do, I’d never live.”

“There’s still time for you to do anything you want to do.”

“Tell you what, Annie. We’ll get you your committed relationship and your white picket fence, and if for some reason it doesn’t feel right and you want that adventure after all—” He looks at me. “Call me and I’ll come hold your hand on the flight.”

And the worst part is, I’m not just physically attracted to her. I can’t get enough of hearing her talk, and I want to read every book she has stashed away, and I want more than anything to take her on an adventure she’ll never forget.

Seeing her bathed in light and surrounded by flowers from out here in the dark makes me feel like a man who slipped out of hell and is glimpsing heaven.

You don’t even need dating lessons, Annie, you were so perfect on our date. Even when you think you’re doing something wrong, you’re so damn adorable I wanted to pull you into my lap and do things with you in the middle of that diner that would have put me in jail for public indecency.

And yet . . . something about being with Annie makes me want to be cautious for once. I have the distinct feeling of holding something precious and not wanting to let it drop. I feel protective.

I put my hand against Annie’s jaw and chuckle, wiping the tear from her cheek. “I would have committed murder for you just now.”

We’re both laughing and she’s crying and I’ve never experienced this kind of emotion with anyone else. It’s so fragile and vulnerable. I feel guilty that I’m the one who gets to experience it with her. And yet I’m greedy for it at the same time.

She’s quickly becoming special to me—like something rare and precious you want to put in a safe place so you never lose it.

He kisses my inner wrist with a tenderness that surges to my soul. “You don’t owe me—or anyone else—anything, Annie. Just kissing you is a gift.

This isn’t even a relationship with Annie, and I’m clawing out of my skin with a need to be more for her. To always be around when she needs me. To be the kind of man I never saw modeled growing up.

Like I never became a man who avoids real relationships at all costs because all I’ve ever known are painful ones.

But more than that, I trust my sisters to know what they need better than I do. And the fact is, whatever is going on with you and Annie, I support it.”

“For what it’s worth,” James says around a bite of eggs, “I do plan on threatening you.” He aims his smile at me, and suddenly it doesn’t look quite so sunny anymore. It has the same glint a sword has. “Hurt her, and I’ll kill you and bury your body as fertilizer for my plants.”

One of the looks that always makes me feel so mad to be excluded from. The one that I can never understand the meaning of, but they seem to comprehend perfectly.

How is it possible to share DNA with someone and still feel so “other” from them—

ANNIE: You’d do that for me? WILL: I’m quickly learning I’d do anything for you.

I want to, but I’m scared of flying. And going to new places. And meeting new people. WILL: My offer stands to hold your hand.

“If you say the word daddy one more time, you’re going to be scraping your teeth off the floor.” James pretends to shiver with delight. “I love it when you go all alpha.”

But the thing about quiet people is, we’re only quiet because our brains are so busy overthinking everything.

“This . . . isn’t something I would normally do, but I just need to take care of you. Please let me.”

My eyes trace the lines of his face, and I feel a protective anger rise up toward anyone who would ever dare treat him like he wasn’t the most wonderful person in the world. Like he wasn’t precious and valuable.

I take in her long blonde hair, her soft blue eyes, and the curve of her mouth, and I throw all of my plans out the window and consider doing the one thing that scares the hell out of me: staying. Forget the open road of freedom. I think I have everything I could ever need in my arms.

So I text the one person who has become my absolute safe place. “I can’t sleep. Come over?” Ten minutes later, even though it’s against his rules, Will is slipping into my bed and wrapping his arms around me. He kisses my neck and my jaw and my temple and then with his arms around me, I fall asleep with my finger tracing the raised lines of his butterfly tattoo—scared of the day when I call and he’s too far away.

Grief—that mean son of a bitch—doesn’t have a timeline or rules. It hits when it wants.

And now I’ve lived so much of my life without sharing who I am with them, that I don’t know how to start. I don’t know how to tell them that this version of me they’ve seen for so long is not necessarily true to me anymore.”

now what’s wrong with you, my angelic little buttercup? Your petals are drooping.”

I remove her fingers from the top of the towel, and a moment of hurt flashes through her eyes before I take those fingers and raise them to my lips to kiss each one instead.

And at some point, when the sun is starting to kiss the horizon just as tenderly as Will is kissing my shoulder, when we’re both exhausted and in desperate need of sleep, Will pulls me back against his chest, wrapping his arm tightly around my body to just hold me, and I don’t think anything could be more perfect.

James is standing behind Noah, his pained gaze fixed heavily on a place just over my shoulder. Maddie. I steal one discreet look back, and find her smiling fondly at Noah and Amelia, none the wiser that a man is staring at her like every second she’s not in his arms is torture.

I watch his hand—my favorite hand in the world, reach over and lie across my thigh. “I would never ever leave without telling you. Never.”

I need you in my life like I need air, Annie. You have wrecked me in the best way I could ever imagine, and I’ll never be the same. Never want to be the same.”

“Because I knew once I did—it would be over for me. Some part of me has always known I would love you.”