Total pages in book: 23
Estimated words: 22165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 111(@200wpm)___ 89(@250wpm)___ 74(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 111(@200wpm)___ 89(@250wpm)___ 74(@300wpm)
I did that.
She asked me to. And now she doesn’t have to wish anymore.
I move up her body and slide inside, both of us groaning as we link. I watch her face twist in ecstasy as I start pumping. She wraps her legs around me, which she knows I love, and pulls me deeper. Her eyes never leave mine.
“God, I love you,” she says again, like she can’t stop saying it. Like she’s making up for twenty-one years of never saying it to anyone.
“I love you too, baby,” I tell her, rolling my hips, hitting that special spot inside that I know she loves. “Every stubborn, beautiful inch of you.”
We move together slowly, passionately, building to something that has been growing ever since the moment she ran from me at that party. And when she comes again, crying out my name—not “daddy”—I follow her over the edge, spilling into her while the world narrows into just us.
Just this bed. Just her eyes, locked on mine, filled with trust and love and absolute certainty that she’s exactly where she is supposed to be.
After we come down, I roll to the side, and she curls into my chest. I stroke her hair as her breath slows and look up at the ceiling, the same way she described looking up at the ceiling of her apartment, wondering if she’d be alone forever.
You’ll never be alone. Not ever.
“Dawson?” she murmurs, half asleep already.
“Yeah, baby?”
“This is my home.”
I kiss the top of her head and pull her closer, breathing her in, feeling more anchored to my life than I’ve ever felt. “Yes it is.”
Outside, buried in the backyard, Charles rests in peace, his services no longer required.
Evie found something real. She found me.
And I found her.
EPILOGUE
EVIE
Five years later…
It’s Friday night, and I’m in the kitchen plating up some garlic chicken.
Not just any garlic chicken, either. Dawson’s mom’s famous recipe. The one he made for me on our first real date, back when my hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold a fork.
I’ve gone on and tweaked it just enough so the seasoning is just mine, which Dawson of course says is better than the original. I’m sure he tells his mother the opposite, of course. He’s a smart man.
Through the window over the sink, I watch his truck pull into the driveway, and just like that, my body responds. A warm flush creeps up my neck, my pulse ignites, and I press my legs together out of pure instinct.
Five years. Five whole years, and my body still reacts to this man like it’s the first time he showed up at my door in that Henley.
The engine cuts, and I hear his boots hit the gravel. I wipe my hands on my apron—an apron that says Kiss the Designer, a birthday gift from Reese—and wait for the sound that still makes my stomach flip.
The front door opening. His heavy footsteps crossing the hardwood. And then his voice. Deep and warm, filling every corner of the house he built for us.
“Something smells incredible.”
“That would be me,” I reply without turning. “The chicken smells pretty good too.”
His laugh rumbles through me as his arms wrap around me from behind. I cave into his strength. He smells like sawdust, and even after all this time, his scent still makes my legs go weak.
“How was your day?” he asks, his thumb tracing a circle on my hip. The same slow circle he drew on my knee back at Vincenzo’s on our first date. I don’t even think he realizes he’s doing it anymore—it’s just muscle memory.
“Good. I finished that rebrand for that restaurant chain, and they said they loved it.” I lean back into his broad chest. “How was yours?”
“Long. We broke ground on the Graham project.” He kisses the top of my head. “Would have been a lot shorter if I wasn’t thinking about you the entire time.”
I giggle and scoff. “You say that every day.”
“And I mean it.”
Finally, I turn and look up at him. Dawson is thirty-eight now, with tiny hints of gray showing at his temples. Salt and pepper, they call it. He has tiny lines beneath his eyes when he smiles, yet somehow, he’s managed to get more handsome over time.
His construction company has tripled in size since we first met, and he runs it the same way he runs everything in his life: with quiet authority and no tolerance for bullshit.
And me? I’ve changed too. I’m a wife, a cook, a partner, but most of all, I’m not the girl who used to lock herself in her bedroom and reach for a drawer anymore.
My freelance design business turned into an actual company two years ago. Dawson added a home studio wing onto the house that holds a drafting table and three monitors. My client list now would have made twenty-one-year-old me pass out just looking at it.