Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
She breathed out a laugh, glancing away and then back. Shy. “Hi, Zach.” She pushed off the car. “How are you?”
“Good. I’m good. How are you?”
“I’m good too.” Zach’s gaze moved over her features. She looked good, damn good. A…peace in her eyes that surprised the hell out of him. Once again, Josie’s strength knocked him on his ass. “Thanks for, you know, giving me a little time. Things have just been”—she shrugged, letting out another breathy laugh, though a flash of pain came and went in her eyes—“intense. You know?”
Intense.
Yeah, that was a good word.
“What you did, Josie,” he said, shaking his head at the memory of those few minutes in the lawyer’s office, the sacrifice she’d made for her boy, “for Reed. It was so incredibly brave.”
Grief passed over her face, but she managed a smile anyway.
“If you want to talk about it sometime…” He felt awkward suddenly, as if by bringing the painful topic up, he might have pushed her away when he was so damn happy—relieved—she was standing in front of him.
But she looked in his eyes and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I would like that. Maybe we could do dinner.”
His heart soared. He couldn’t contain the smile. “Dinner. Yeah. I’d love that.”
Their smiles dwindled, vulnerability filling her expression. “Do you think about her sometimes?” she asked softly. “Your birth mother?”
He studied her, saw her heart right in her eyes. Oh, Josie. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I think about how grateful I am to her. How deeply grateful.”
She nodded, her expression still so raw. Was it enough, he wondered? Would it feel like enough to Josie?
For a minute, an awkward silence ensued before Josie spoke. “Archie came by a few days ago,” she said, and Zach’s muscles bunched. He started to say something, to verify that the police were still sitting vigil outside her house, but before he could, Josie went on. “He wanted to make me one more offer. Wondered if after everything I’d been through recently, I might have changed my mind. He figured I probably wanted to hide away somewhere.” Something glittered in her gaze. Amusement? “I told him to go fuck himself…nicely, of course.”
Zach laughed, and it felt so damn good, he laughed again. “Not too nicely, I hope.”
“He got the message. My shotgun helped make the point.”
“You got a shotgun?”
“Yup. Learned how to use it too.”
He stared at her, marveling. It was a wonder Josie Stratton was still standing. Yet here she was, having picked herself up yet again. And he had no doubt that whatever she had to do to stay on her feet, that’s what she would do.
God, he’d missed her. He’d missed her so much. And yet he didn’t know where to pick up.
“We started out kind of backward, didn’t we?” he blurted. He didn’t want to skirt around the issue anymore. He wanted her, wanted them, didn’t want just one dinner, but a million dinners, a million breakfasts and lunches and everything between, and life was too damn short—too damn unpredictable—to waffle around.
“Yeah, I guess we did.” She glanced to the side. “What I told you about being broken when it comes to love, I…I don’t think that’s true.”
“I don’t either,” he said. He stepped closer. He could smell her. The delicate scent of her shampoo, her skin. Her.
“But I’m still practicing how not to be.”
“Then we’ll practice together.”
She let out a breath, her gaze so filled with hope.
“I want to date you, Josie. Court you. Bring you flowers and take you to meet my parents and all that sappy shit. Let’s do this right.”
She laughed, a happy sound as tears filled her eyes.
“I love you,” he told her.
Joy flashed in her expression. “That’s still sort of backward, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said, stepping right up to her, tossing her hat in the car, so he could take her face in his hands. “But I can’t help that. I love you,” he repeated. “Every imperfect, flawed part of you. Every heroic, selfless part of you. The part that’s fallen, and the part that’s gotten back up, over and over and over. You.”
A tear spilled from her eye and tracked down her cheek. “I love you too,” she whispered.
He brought his lips to hers and kissed her as the stars began blinking to life, one by one in a darkening sky.
Epilogue
It was Josie’s favorite time, that dreamy golden hour right before the day drifted toward dusk. She attached a clothespin to the line, the sheet she’d just hung picking up in the slight summer breeze and dropping back down again as the scent of fresh laundry and sunshine met her nose.
The life within her stretched, rolled, and Josie paused, putting her hand to her belly and living right then, in the moment. She did that a lot these days. Maybe it was the combination of hormones and happiness that made her feel so overwhelmed with gratitude that she literally had to stop and—sometimes tearfully—linger in the feeling as long as possible. Maybe it was just pure, unadulterated happiness.