Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 60933 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60933 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
I left a trail of kisses from her mouth to her ear, then whispered, “If that’s the case, then I have a new bed I want to show you.”
Tallulah’s laughter was the sweetest damn thing in the world.
WEST AND MAGGIE
CHAPTER ONE
WEST
I stood in the parking lot that now covered the grassy wooded area where we had once parked our trucks. The only tree still standing was the one I had asked Nash and Ryker not to take down. I’d even promised a yearly donation to the new football complex just to keep that tree. My plan for tonight had been to bring Maggie here, to that tree where I had first kissed her, and ask her to marry me.
My chest tightened thinking of how everything had changed. The ache of loss that had slowly eased over the years since my father’s death was now throbbing painfully. So many times since losing Dad, my mother’s actions had hurt me far deeper than I’d thought imaginable. She’d made decisions that would have destroyed me had Maggie not been there beside me.
Once I had thought Maggie must have been an angel God had sent to me when I was facing the darkest days of my life. Now I knew she was. She was the reason I woke up every morning. Since the first time she opened her mouth and spoke to me, I had been hers. I hadn’t known it back then, but I had been. She’d owned me before I even realized it.
Tonight had been something I’d been planning for months. The diamond I’d worked and saved to buy had been burning a hole in my pocket. Every time she smiled at me, I had fought the urge to drop to my knee and ask her to marry me. I had been going to get that moment tonight. I had made sure it would be perfect. That she would remember it and tell our grandchildren about it one day.
My eyes dropped to the phone in my hand, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen now. The phone call I had received three hours ago from my mother had changed everything. Somehow she had managed to hit me with yet another blow, reminding me she was no longer the mother from my youth. She wasn’t the woman my dad had adored.
Her last name was no longer Ashby. I flinched as the pain sliced through me. The memories of a childhood that felt as if it were another lifetime now all flooded me. The way my mother had loved my father so fiercely and the way he had cherished her. My parents’ love had been the reason I believed in it.
Facing the fact that the mother I knew had also died that day when my father took his last breath wasn’t easy, but with Maggie in my arms I had been able to accept it. Or at least I had thought I had accepted it. It had been over a year since I had seen my mother, but only because she canceled plans, not me. Thanksgiving she’d been on a cruise with friends. Christmas she had gone skiing in Colorado.
Now I knew the truth. It hadn’t been friends she had been with. It hadn’t been plural at all. She’d been with a man. A man I had never met. A man she had married last week in Hawaii. I knew nothing more because I had simply ended the call while she was still talking. I couldn’t listen to her happy voice talking about this man she kept praising and how much I would like him. How could she do this? Who was she? How did someone change so completely? She had loved my dad. That was not something anyone could fake. I’d witnessed it and lived in the security of my parents’ love until the day he left this earth.
My phone rang, and Maggie’s name lit up the screen. She was who I went to when I needed strength. Holding her in my arms always fixed all my problems. Nothing mattered if I had her with me. But this…
Not this.
And not now.
I couldn’t tell her how I’d been going to ask her to marry me. I couldn’t tell her about my mother. Because the truth was I no longer believed love was forever. People changed, and I had watched it with my mother now for years. Marriage no longer felt like something full of promise and a future.
It fucking terrified me.
Losing my mom to this person she had become was one thing.
But if Maggie changed. If I lost Maggie like that, how would I keep on living? Maggie was my heart. How did one go on when they lost their heart?
I pressed ignore on the phone and slipped it into my pocket.
Right now I needed space. Even from her.