Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69794 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69794 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I felt something warm inside my cold, dead heart.
“Thanks,” I admitted.
He grinned at me.
The pang in my heart was usually a wild thing.
But in that moment, I realized that that pang that I’d felt after Eloy had left, the one that never really went away, had slowly started to heal.
I thought the worst day of my life was the day that he’d told me that he didn’t want to raise a child with me that wasn’t his. But then my sister took her life, and I realized that life can always get harder, and never to speak as if it couldn’t. Karma was a greedy bitch, and she knew how to humble you.
“Magnolia?”
And the reason behind that healing was currently smiling at me. Unrepentant for helping feed Iris’s ice cream addiction.
I stared at the ceiling and contemplated my life.
I’d loved Eloy fiercely.
I’d thought that he was the endgame for me.
He’d been my ride or die since the moment I entered the professional soccer world at sixteen.
Barely twenty-one himself, he’d been just as green around the edges as I had been.
At first, we’d started out as friends.
We’d seen each other at several soccer games that he’d reffed and I’d played.
Over time, that love had bloomed into something I thought was unbreakable and fierce.
He’d shared that one day, he would ask me to be his wife, and I thought that I’d won the lottery.
He was a man that my parents would approve of.
Then, when Iris came home with me that first day to the apartment I’d contemplated giving up so that I could move in with Eloy, he’d rocked my world.
He’d told me that he didn’t like kids, never really wanted them, and he certainly didn’t want a kid that would one day grow up and have no obligation to take care of him.
When I’d pointed out that not even blood relations had the obligation to take care of him, he’d snorted.
In his culture, family took care of family, no matter what the situation. Elderly always knew that they’d have someone to take care of them as they aged.
We’d fought for an hour and a half before Iris had woken up with a scream, hungry and wet.
He’d curled his lip and gathered his things, and that was the last time I’d ever seen him as my boyfriend.
The next time I saw him was at a game.
A game where I was extremely uncomfortable the entire time.
That discomfort was a thing of constant companionship for nearly three years.
Until a grumpy biker who treated team ownership like war.
His rigidity was somewhat suffocating. He was not accepting of weakness. And he certainly wouldn’t allow failure.
But under all of that Marine my way or the highway attitude was a kind and caring man that’d pieced a team back together from the breaking point.
The moment that I’d had him at my back my first game seeing Eloy this season? I’d felt like I had the entirety of the United States Marines at my back.
Eloy, always one to treat me like I was the one who’d wronged him in this relationship, had tried playing his games with me like usual.
Tried to take it out on me on the field.
Then Beau’d come in like an avenging angel blazing with pissed-off fury and wiped the floor so thoroughly with Eloy that he hadn’t reffed a single game of ours since.
It was magnificent and freeing.
“Magnolia?”
SIX
I feel like all of my problems would be solved if I had a dragon.
—Magnolia to Beau
BEAU
“Magnolia?” I repeated for the second time.
She focused those beautiful brown eyes on me, and as always, I was hit with a wave of need.
For eight months, I’d been fighting this pull.
For eight months, I’d been wondering just how long I was expected to go until I just snapped.
I knew she felt it, too.
The way our eyes would lock over the space that separated us. The way she would relax when I walked into a room. The way she would smile at me when she saw me with Iris. The way she would stay close, without appearing to do so.
There were a thousand different instances that I could name off the top of my head from these last eight months that said she felt the same way, but none of them mattered.
At least not yet.
Maybe after we were both settled. Maybe after she was retired. Maybe after I was officially done with the Cowgirls. Maybe when life wasn’t so complicated.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“Sorry,” she winced. “Wool gathering.”
I grinned.
Iris turned away from the television and started signing.
“Wool gathering comes from the sixteenth century when rural farmers used to wander fields looking for wool that was caught on the briars. It was a mindless activity that left a lot of room for reflection,” she signed.
I grinned and looked to Magnolia. “We actually just watched that on yesterday’s documentary about sheep.”