Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
When I pull back, he searches my eyes. “You okay?” After I nod, he turns to Calder. “Doctor clear you?”
Calder repeats the checkup report.
Weston looks at the coffee table, to the empty spot where the box had been. “How did it go?” he asks me in a gentle tone.
Emotion rises so quickly I’m glad I already cried most of it out before they got back.
“It’s done. C’mon. I want to show you.” I lead them into the den, and they follow without saying anything. At the shelf, Weston comes to one side of me, Calder to the other, while Buck stops just behind me.
None of them touches me at first, but after a few quiet seconds, Weston reaches for my hand and takes it in his, just as Calder takes my other. Buck settles a hand at the back of my neck, then slides it down in one slow pass over my shoulder.
“It looks right,” Buck says after we stand in silence for a long moment.
Calder’s thumb strokes across my knuckles. “Yeah.”
I lean back just enough that Buck’s hand feels grounding more than comforting. Weston’s fingers remain laced through mine, while Calder steps closer and moves his hand to my waist.
“I didn’t know if it would,” I admit. “I thought maybe putting it all out would make it worse.”
“But it didn’t,” Weston says quietly, and he’s right.
Buck presses a kiss into my hair near my temple, Weston squeezes my hand, and Calder’s fingers flex at my waist.
None of them crowd the moment or try to fill it with the wrong words. They let me breathe.
After a minute or so, Buck says, “I’m glad you didn’t have to do this alone.”
“I did part of it alone,” I say.
“The part you needed to,” Weston says.
Calder’s voice is quiet when it comes. “And now you don’t have to be.”
I have to look down for a second, and my throat tightens, but it’s not painful this time.
I bring Weston’s hand up and kiss him there, then turn my face into Buck’s shoulder before reaching for Calder. Weston shifts closer and brushes his mouth against my temple. Buck strokes his thumb once along the side of my neck. Calder keeps hold of my waist, quiet and sure.
Between them, I feel held from every side without being hemmed in.
For one more long moment, we stay together in the den, with Tyler’s picture on the wall and the shelf beside it made into something that feels less like a shrine to loss and more like a place where memory can live beside everything still to come.
CHAPTER 47
BUCK
I’ve spent three years carrying Tyler, Mason, Reed, and Holt like a live coal in the center of my chest.
Some days, the memory of what happened to them burns hot enough to make breathing feel like work. Other days, it just sits there, heavy and familiar, and I couldn’t imagine myself setting it down.
I told myself it was loyalty, and guilt was the price of surviving when part of my team hadn’t.
Then, Elena moved to Moon Ridge.
When I realized I wanted her, my guilt expanded into something I figured I’d spend the rest of my life trying to make peace with but never fully forgiving.
But now that Kozlov is dead and the threat is finally over, something inside me is loosening.
It’s not disappearing—I don’t want Tyler and the other men gone—but the heaviness is easing.
Elena is tucked against my side on the couch in her living room. One leg is folded beneath her, and she’s absently tracing the seam of my t-shirt near my ribs. Weston’s at the other end of the couch, close enough to brush Elena’s calf now and then. Calder’s in one of the armchairs, elbows braced on his knees, even quieter than usual.
It’s late, and the house is still now that the dishes are done and T.J.’s gone to bed.
Elena tips her head back against my shoulder and looks up at me, then at the other two men. “This is going to sound strange.”
Weston squeezes her leg. “Are we talking regular strange or Moon Ridge strange?”
“Moon Ridge isn’t strange.” She sounds like she’s frowning at him.
“You haven’t been here long enough,” I say. “Just wait.”
“Hmm,” she says, and I can feel the hum of it against me. “Now I’m intrigued.”
I brush my knuckles along her arm. “Tell us what you were going to say.”
The teasing fades from her voice, and her body stiffens slightly. “When I put Tyler’s things on the shelf the other day … when I hung that photo …” She pauses for a second. “I felt peaceful. More than peaceful, really. It was like something settled.”
Weston and Calder both fix her in their gaze.
“I don’t know if I believe in signs,” she says after swallowing. “I don’t know if I believe Tyler was really there, but it didn’t feel like I was leaving him behind. It felt like … maybe he was letting me go. Like he was giving me permission to be happy.”