Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73665 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73665 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
I stop because I’m shaking, trembling. If it gets worse, I’m going to stir up dust without even moving a single step. We’re both too quiet for too long.
The barn fairy dust specks dance around Rowleigh in the slants of light, framing him like an angel. A dust angel. Even dirty and grimy, he’s so attractive.
Zaddy? Whatever that means, it’s probably a yes. DILF? For sure, because yes, no matter how many talks I give myself or how many boundaries I set, I want him. I want to break free of all those restraints.
This was about saving him by showing him that life could be great, but I’ve opened my eyes too.
It’s terrifying.
He’s terrifying.
And also good enough to lick. Like a popsicle just dropped in the dirt.
Who thinks stuff like that?
I’ve never wanted anything so strongly. I’ve never had a clear direction that I knew my life should go in. I was never like my mom, who knew she wanted to be a doctor when she was just a kid, or like my dad, who wanted to help people since he was a teenager and took a social justice class in school. I’m not one of those people who can just alter the course of the world. I’m not a helper. I’m not someone who makes a huge difference.
I didn’t think so until right now. I do help people, and I love doing it. I love making people’s dreams about their love and a day they’ll remember forever come true. It might not be saving lives, and it might not be keeping people out of jail or helping them find justice, but it matters.
Also?
This matters. Rowleigh. It’s like there’s an arrow pieced straight through the both of us with a line of rope, and when it’s retracted, we’re drawn together. A gory and gruesome image, but I feel a little speared through the heart.
“Do you ever feel like you’ve lived more than one lifetime?” he asks softly, breaking into my thoughts out of nowhere with his question that he’s pulled out of that same nowhere-ness.
“Like reincarnation?”
“Sorry, no. I meant…more than one life in this life. Like who you were in the past is someone different from who you are now, and you can’t draw a line between that person and your current self.”
“Like you wonder how you got here?”
His shoulders heave, and he looks away toward the open barn door. “I don’t know.”
I squeeze my water bottle hard enough to practically rocket launch the cap into the roof. “Do you miss this?” That question brings his eyes back to me, and they’re soft, dark, and luminous because he’s standing in all those glowy cracks, and my god, does this man ever look good in sunny cedar glowy cracks. “You could still do it. You could do whatever you want. Run hotels, not run hotels. Do antiques, see the world. Be a dad. Nothing’s off limits.”
“You are,” he murmurs.
I gasp. Like a real-life echoing gasp that rattles through the barn. My hand crunches the bottle into oblivion, but the cap doesn’t come all the way off. Water rises up, spilling beneath the seam and running over my fingers.
I need to play this off as a ha, that’s funny, good joke moment. I could fake laugh and go back to sorting through haunted trunks or take my terrifying face-eating bear outside into the daylight to give his dark soul a sunbathing. I could remind Rowleigh that this is about him, not about me or us.
Instead, I drop the water bottle at my feet. My mask joins it, the strings falling from my fingers. “Call off your wedding.” Shit. Oh, wow. Yup, that’s great. Is that husky voice even mine? I sound like a haunted seductress.
There’s a span of time that lasts for only a few seconds, but it’s like a void. I tip over and fall into it, waiting. Waiting for him to break this magic sunbeam and dust spell, to shatter the tension that’s been wrapped around us since I walked into that lounge, and we first set eyes on each other, binding each other with hooks and strings that neither of us can just shake off.
He sighs and takes one step forward. My heart crashes into my stomach, the acids churning all around it, eroding the muscle until it barely feels like it’s beating.
There’s a reason hearts don’t belong in the digestive system.
And a thousand valid reasons I never should have just asked him to call off his fake wedding. Not because he loves life. Not because he wants to.
But for me.
Rowleigh’s eyes darken, and his jaw clenches. He puts up both hands, his mask dangling from one. Not to ward me off, but like he’s surrendering. Still, my heart plummets further, right down into the knees and toes category.
“Even if I did call it off, it still wouldn’t be appropriate.” His tone is all regretful, though he’s arranged his face into something that’s hard to read. “You’re my daughter’s age. Your parents would hate that. In the grand scheme of things, it can’t be more than a spicy fling, which will make me look and feel like a monster. I don’t…I don’t fling. I don’t want to fling with you. I mean, I do, but not…I…I’d get attached. You probably would too. Then where would we be? Trying to do life when there’s two decades between us?”