Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77120 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77120 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
But still… It was—
“I’m going to go get ready,” Angie says. “You need anything?”
I blink. “No, I’ll be fine.”
“Feel free to do whatever you’d like. You can hang out in your guest room or on the deck. Walk over to see the horses again if you want, though I guess I don’t recommend that because you could get dirty.”
No dirtier than I got last night with Henry…
My God, he’s living rent-free in my mind now.
I shake my head, mostly to shake the thoughts loose. “I’ll probably just relax.”
“We have a great library if you want to read something.”
I widen my eyes. “Actually, that sounds pretty good. It’s been so long since I’ve read anything besides a medical school textbook.”
She grins. “Well, we’ve got all the classics, plus… I mean, a lot of books on ranching and accounting. Boring as crap.”
I laugh lightly. “Classics sound pretty good.”
“Perfect. You know where the library is. A few doors down from your room.”
I nod. “I’ll check it out.”
After Angie leaves, I walk toward my guest room, pass it, and enter the library.
The library’s quiet in that comforting way, as if the world’s been muffled just enough to let me think without drowning in it. The overhead lights hum softly, and the air smells like paper and leather. I look through the collection of classics.
I run my fingers along the spines. Austen. Brontë. Hardy. Dickens. Melville.
And then I see it.
Persuasion.
It’s thinner than I expect. Tucked between Pride and Prejudice and something I’ve never heard of. I slide it off the shelf and flip it open without thinking.
The first few lines don’t mean much. But then I hit a passage—something about silence and time and second chances—and I just stand there, frozen.
Anne Elliot. The woman who let him go. Who tried to move on, to be proper and composed while her heart was quietly breaking.
She loved him. And he disappeared.
And now I’m holding a book that feels too familiar.
Because I was fine with Henry being a fling. At least, I told myself I was. But I wasn’t. Not really. Not when he looked at me like I meant something. Not when his touch said more than his words ever did.
Until we were done and he left me naked in the barn.
Sure, he came back for me, but only because he knew I couldn’t get back to the house without him.
And now?
Nothing.
Just silence.
I hug the book to my chest and close my eyes.
This is ridiculous.
I’m not the first woman to fall for someone who couldn’t be bothered to stay. But somehow, this story—two hundred years old—feels like it’s speaking directly to me.
Maybe I’m Anne. Maybe I’m not.
But I take the book with me anyway.
I sink into a worn leather armchair in the corner of the library, Persuasion open on my lap. Captain Wentworth’s letter sits there in front of me like a punch to the chest.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.
God.
I read it again. And again. And something tightens behind my ribs.
Because it’s beautiful. It’s raw and desperate and full of all the things people are too afraid to say until it’s almost too late.
But this isn’t me.
I don’t have some tragic love story with Henry. I had a fuck in a barn during a rainstorm, the result of lightning and too much tequila.
But he kissed me like he meant it. He touched me like I mattered.
Then he vanished.
Not vanished, exactly. He’s still here. Still on this ranch. Still walking around like nothing happened. Still nodding politely in my direction like I’m some distant acquaintance, not the woman who moaned his name last night.
And now I’m sitting here, clutching a two-hundred-year-old love letter like some pathetic spinster hoping a man will come back and tell me he can’t live without me.
I huff, snap the book closed, and shove it back on the shelf with more force than necessary.
“Get a grip,” I mutter under my breath.
I’m not Anne Elliot. I’m not some tragic heroine nursing a decades-long heartbreak.
I barely know Henry Simpson.
I’m not in love. I’m not.
I just wish he’d looked at me this morning.
Just once.
Fourteen
Henry
The office smells like stale coffee and printer paper, and the hum of the fluorescent lights has started to drill into the base of my skull. I’ve been at it for hours, sorting through grant applications and budget reports like it’s any other Friday, even though it isn’t.
Even though tomorrow my sister is getting married.
And even though yesterday I fucked one of the bridesmaids in one of our horse barns.
Bradley steps into the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, one brow raised. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I finish typing a note in the margin of the youth outreach proposal. “Just tying up a few things before the weekend.”
His laugh is short. “Henry, it’s your sister’s wedding. You should be out on the ranch or helping with last-minute chaos, not buried in paperwork.”