Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
But it was over.
Finally fucking over.
Only then did I allow myself to fully relax. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about being a package deal.”
“And then you had to go and ruin it,” Brooke said, stepping away. She took Zoey from Lofton, and called over her shoulder. “We’ll be in the car.”
Lofton laughed softly, once again pressing herself into my chest. “This should probably buy you a few weeks in her good graces.”
“A few weeks? That’s it?”
She laughed again. “She’s protective. What can I say? I have a type.”
“You love me more than her, right?” I teased.
She smiled. “Most of the time.”
I smiled right back. “I’ll take it.”
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Everything we’d been through seemed to settle between us—every close call, every fight, every moment we tried to deny.
And somehow, we were still here.
Still standing.
I lifted my hand to her face, brushing away the last of her tears, my thumb lingering there like I couldn’t quite let go.
“Hey,” I murmured.
Her eyes softened. “Hey.”
And then I kissed her.
Not rushed.
Not desperate.
Just… certain.
Like something we’d fought for and finally earned.
Her hands slid up my chest, curling into my shirt as she leaned into me, and I swore I felt every second of the future we hadn’t lived yet seep into my bones.
“I love you,” she whispered.
My chest tightened, but this time it didn’t hurt.
“I love you too.”
She smiled. “Forever, Devon.”
I huffed a quiet laugh and lowered my hands to settle just over her ass, swaying her gently from side to side. “There you go. Proposing again.”
She laughed into my chest. “You could be so lucky.”
She definitely wasn’t wrong there.
EPILOGUE
Lofton
Six months later…
“Oh, come on,” I groaned at Salty. “Why do you always do crap like this?”
He was standing in the middle of his stall, ankle-deep in water, his automatic waterer hanging off the wall, a steady flow flooding the ground.
I unlatched the door, and he ambled out, completely unapologetic for ruining my day.
Devon sidled up beside me with two mugs of coffee and took one look at the situation before saying, “So I guess this is what we’re doing today.”
I took my coffee from his hand and leaned into his side. “You think Daddy would notice if I hired a team to dig out the stalls?”
“Yes,” he smiled at me with that quiet, unhurried, morning expression of Devon Grant that belonged to me in the early morning hours in the barn.
We both took a sip of our coffee.
When we’d first come to the farm, it had been a crisis location. One where I had come back carrying grief, fear, and a bodyguard who didn’t want to be there any more than I’d wanted him to be.
Now, it was our home together.
When we left LA after everything happened with Jason, we hadn’t sat down and made official plans to merge our lives and move to the farm permanently. I didn’t pack up my things in LA, hire movers, or sell my house. He still owned his house in Chicago and the Facebook HOA page that accompanied it. It was just mornings accumulating, one on top of the other, each one a little more ordinary, until I couldn’t remember why I’d ever wanted to leave in the first place.
About a month in, Devon had looked up from his coffee one morning and stated, completely unprompted, “I need to get my driver’s license changed to Tennessee today.”
I blinked at him.
The guilt hit immediately. I had never once asked if that was what he wanted. He had an entire life that existed outside of the farm, my family, and me.
“Devon, we don’t have to—”
“Not a conversation we need to have, babe.” He’d picked his coffee back up. “You live here. Now, so do I.”
And that was it.
No deliberation. No negotiation. No dramatic moment where the weight of the decision was acknowledged and processed. Just Devon, stated a fact, like the conclusion had been reached long before the words and he was simply catching me up.
The decision about my career had taken considerably longer to arrive at. Devon and I had talked it through more times than I could count—long conversations that stretched into the early hours, his voice steady and unhurried, making it clear that he was behind me completely. When a role came in that my team had been genuinely excited about, he listened to every detail and told me it sounded like something I’d be extraordinary in.
I’d passed on it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy to pass on the obligations that were already on the books. Lavender Midnight still had a premiere circuit to run, press junkets to get through, and a handful of promotional commitments I’d agreed to long before any of this had happened. I honored every one of them. Devon had accompanied me to all of it, jacket on, earpiece in, professionally indifferent to the cameras in a way that had gotten significantly harder to maintain once the internet started paying attention to the way he looked at me when he thought nobody was watching. He’d also brought Leo along for all the moments when he did not give a damn who was watching, and he snuck me into every dark corner he could find. And because it was Devon, I had no doubt that he’d probably mapped those dark corners out ahead of time.