I nodded and felt my cheeks warm.
He grinned. “Yeah. Who were you talking about? I wanted it to be me. Just lie and tell me it was me,” he said, putting his hand over his heart.
I smiled through my embarrassment. “It was you. I just didn’t want to say your name. I had no idea where you were or if you were married or not.”
“I’m not married.”
So we’re actually going there. Thank God. “Girlfriend?”
“Not anymore.”
“What happened?” My heart lurched a little as I wondered how long they’d been together, or if she was still a part of his life.
“It was what my friends like to call my ‘Ross moment,’” he said.
“What’s a Ross moment?”
“Like from Friends, the TV show. I was having a heated discussion with my girlfriend at the time, and in the middle of my apologizing to her, I said your name.” He winced a little as he confessed this to me. “It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“You said my name? How?” My expression must have looked like a mixture of confusion and shock, because that was how I felt.
“I basically said, ‘I’m so sorry, Cammie.’”
“What was her name?”
“Jill.” He swallowed before grimacing slightly.
I struggled between feeling bad for Jill and silently loving the hell out of what he’d done. Because it had been my name he’d said, not some other girl’s. And that had to mean something.
“Oh. What did she do?”
“She told me that I needed to figure out exactly who it was that I loved because she didn’t think it was her.”
I shifted on the bed, pulling one of the pillows against me. “When was that?” I asked, my eyes looking everywhere but at him.
“Three years ago.”
I shifted my gaze to his. “Three years ago?” I assumed that he was talking about something that had happened months ago, or at the longest a year. Not three.
He shrugged. “Sorry it took me so long to get here.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. In that moment, I didn’t care that it took him so long. All that mattered was that he was here now. It’s funny the little details you get hung up on when you’re missing someone . . . and then those tiny things all but fly out the window when you’re face-to-face.
“So, when did you move back from New York?”
“Almost a year ago. My partner, Tucker, and I both moved here. The case we’re working on had a change of location, and I volunteered to relocate.”
I remembered that my dad had worked the streets, always driving around in his cop car looking for the bad guys, but he never talked about working a case. “So you’re not a normal cop then?”
He half smiled. “Undercover.”
“You’re an undercover cop?” I wasn’t sure what it was about the word undercover, but it made him seem ten times hotter than just being a regular cop.
“Thanks to you,” he said, and my breath stilled.
“Thanks to me?” I all but choked out.
He shifted again, as if uncomfortable. “Cammie, you made me want to become a cop.”