Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 79831 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79831 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
“Hey, Hartley. Mira,” Grange Sheffler says. He graduated a year before us and wound up taking over his dad’s mechanic shop in town. “I don’t care how many times I see you two together, it makes me laugh. How many years did the two of you waste?”
“Too fucking many,” I say, smiling at him.
He chuckles. “Good seeing you both.”
“You, too, Grange,” Mira says as we move on.
She chooses a bin of strawberries from the strawberry farm outside of town and places it in the cart. She nibbles her lip again, her mind elsewhere. I grab a package of dates and toss them beside the strawberries.
“Yeah,” she says, answering a question that I didn’t ask.
“Yeah, what?”
“Not now. Maybe not even this year.” A grin teases the corner of her lips. “But I think maybe I’d like to have a baby.”
I stop in my tracks, my heart short-circuiting.
She, however, doesn’t miss a step. “Maybe two, because I really loved having a sister. Especially when things weren’t so great, you know?”
My mind’s so frazzled. The only thing working is my dick.
“Three is too many, I think,” she says as if we’re discussing the weather. She adds a bag of almonds to the cart. “And I feel like with three that you have a middle child, and you’d have to play zone defense with them. Like what if one of them wanted to ride horses, and the others did ballet and piano? We can’t be three places at once.”
I reach out and grab her elbow, pulling her to a stop. She turns to me with the most beautiful expression in her eyes. They’re clear, a little hesitant, maybe, but the shield she used to carry when things became personal, or intimate in any way but sexually, is gone.
Thank you, God.
She searches my face. And the longer she looks, the softer her shoulders become. She finally relents and gives me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen from her—one that I’ll file away as a core memory.
This is my girl, my wife, relaxed. Happy.
“I didn’t say that to pressure you into anything,” I say quietly. “I was just being honest about what I was thinking.”
“And that’s all I want from you. Honesty.” She drops her gaze to my bulging cock. “Well, and that.”
I pull her into me and kiss her forehead, wishing we were home so I could pull her onto my lap. I’ve always loved this woman, but the feelings that I have for her now almost feel too big to be encapsulated into one four-letter word.
She’s my world. My life. My future.
And if I’m reading her right, hopefully the mother of my children someday.
And for the first time in our lives, I don’t worry that she’ll take off and leave me behind. We’re truly together, in every way.
She loves me.
Even if she hasn’t said it, I know it. I feel it. I see it in the way she looks at me and the way she cares for me.
It’s going to be okay. I pull her tighter and smile. It’s finally going to be okay.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Mira
“We ate it and didn’t die,” I say, sitting back in my kitchen chair.
Hartley nods appreciatively from across the table. “We ate it, enjoyed it, and didn’t die. You missed a step.”
“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
He chuckles at my lashes fluttering before he takes a drink of his tea.
The remnants of our meal are on the table between us. I wasn’t brave enough to try frying chicken breasts, Hartley’s favorite, so I bought some thin tenders and made them in the air fryer with a little help from Cathy. They might’ve been a little dry, but we didn’t get salmonella. I probably overbuttered the mashed potatoes, if that’s possible, and made green beans from Cathy’s canned green beans last summer.
I only burned myself once.
“You know, it’s surprising that you purport not knowing how to cook, considering it’s Lolly’s favorite pastime and her food is incredible,” Hartley says.
“That’s easy. She threw me out of the kitchen, so I’d stop being a pest.” I wink. “I know that’s hard to believe. And I think she made my mom learn to cook, clean—all those domestic-y type of things—and then she lost her. I have to wonder if a part of her wishes she’d let her play instead of cleaning every Saturday morning.”
Hartley takes a deep breath, his features sobering. “That might be true. Because I know that I spent quite a few days, and still do, sometimes, wishing that I would’ve helped Dad a little more and learned a few tricks of the trade while he was still here rather than goofing off.”
My heart stills as I watch him go down a memory lane that I don’t know exactly, but still understand. The lane I frequent has a lot of parallels to his. Given that he runs a ranch, is an upstanding part of this community, and has many great friends, it’s clear that he navigated his better.