Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69534 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69534 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Scottie had invited Calliope to come down to College Station to go to school with her, and Calliope had accepted—though only after she’d gotten her acceptance letter.
Turns out she was doing a hell of a lot better than I expected her to do, and she’d graduated with a 3.8 GPA.
With my lottery winnings being enough to put her through all four years without a scholarship if needed, she’d been granted acceptance and she started there in two weeks.
Koda still had six more years of deployment, but had admitted he had no immediate plans of getting out like he had when he’d first left.
With Mom out of the picture, off living her life somewhere far away from us, and enough money in the bank to cover us for life, he’d become far less guilty about being gone.
“Good god,” Kent sighed. “You’re so lost in your head today. What is your issue?”
I pinched his cheeks before saying, “Just thinking about how different life is.”
I wasn’t lying.
“Tony just got here.” Kent pulled away.
Speaking of Tony, his son, Taryn, had taken a job in Alaska.
He’d left four months ago, with no plans to ever come back.
Tony had been happier, and so had I.
“Oh, and that lady with the baby is here. She’s sitting next to one of the Truth Tellers,” he said.
I’d seen Baker with Copper a lot lately.
But I hadn’t asked questions.
I was just happy she was around.
Fiona had also been hanging around a lot lately, too.
I’d become good friends with both women and was happy that they’d followed me from Decatur to Rockwall.
“Your husband-to-be has gotten impatient,” Kent reported.
“How do you know?” I questioned.
That’s when I heard the stomp of feet.
I looked up in time to see the screen door swing open, and Posy fill the doorway.
“What are you doing?” I asked, a smile on my lips.
“Gettin’ real tired of waitin’, princess,” he said. “Now, come on.”
Before I could say “okay,” he was throwing me over his shoulder.
I laughed my way down the aisle.
Hours later, I finally got to find out why Cakes got his name.
And everyone was right.
Cakes’s namesake fit him perfectly.
But it was only the second-best part of the night.
The first was when Posy leaned me over his arm in the middle of a filled barn and kissed the breath out of me.
4 months later
“No, no, no. This is all wrong,” I said as I took in the yellow paint. “This was supposed to be a more pastel yellow. This looks like the sunshine fell into a paint bucket and blew up all over our room.”
“This is seriously the same color you chose at Home Depot,” Posy pointed out.
I scrunched my nose up at him. “It can’t be.”
He pulled out the color swatch from his pocket and held it up to show me.
“Well.” I hesitated. “I think I want a different color.”
He grinned. “It’ll cost.”
“Fuck it, I’m rich,” I teased.
He snorted. “You won’t stay rich if you continue to blow it.”
If by ‘blowing it’ he meant ‘spending it on building a house, putting Calliope through college, paying for Kent to do travel baseball, and Anders to be put into a fancy-ass nerd school,’ then I was definitely blowing it.
“Gotta spend it on something,” I bantered.
We still drove the same cars—both him and me.
It looked hilarious driving out of our big ass gate, down our fancy-ass concrete driveway, and up to a triple-wide mobile home that looked fancy enough to house the king.
We weren’t spending our money all willy-nilly.
We both still worked—me on my own still, designing book covers. Him at the fire station in town.
Every morning that he worked he dropped Kent and Anders off at different schools ten minutes apart.
I still picked them up, laughing my way through the pickup line when both schools gave my car a disgusted wave.
We still ate at fast-food restaurants and cooked meals at home.
Honestly, those family meals were my favorite times of the day.
I was sad that I didn’t get Scottie and Calliope at home as much as I wanted.
Soon, Kent would be following in their wake.
He only had a year and a half left of school, and there were already multiple colleges looking into him.
It didn’t hurt that Kent had Gunner Penn guiding his way.
Kent had fan-girled over Gunner once he finally made the connection.
And now Gunner was at our place nearly every night that Kent was home playing with him.
Both of them had the time of their lives.
Hell, even Anders had requested to go do a study abroad.
Something I hadn’t even realized was a thing until her new school had brought it up to us as a possibility for alternate study.
I was still on the fence about that one, but Anders and Posy were slowly whittling me down.
I had a feeling that I’d give her what she wanted.
Though, I’d already told Posy that he better be ready to go visit Germany whenever I felt like it.