by Noelle Adams
He hesitates. Then shakes his head. “It will be fine.” There’s a matching glass on the table already. He fills it halfway with champagne and waits as the foam subsides. I start to reach for it, but he waves my hand away with a disapproving frown. “That one’s for me. This one’s for you.”
I roll my eyes but reach obediently for the empty champagne flute he hands me. Then I extend it so he can fill it with champagne.
It’s only then that I realize the glass is no longer empty.
There’s something at the bottom of it. Something gold. And sparkling.
I gasp and jerk my hand back so I can peer into the glass.
It’s a ring.
A very pretty engagement ring with old-fashioned engraving and a lovely princess-cut diamond.
“Richard!” I gasp.
“What? Did you want some champagne or not?”
I make a choking sound and dump the ring out onto my trembling palm. “Richard!”
He’s smiling now, his eyes very soft. He gently takes the ring out of my hand. “Didn’t you know this was going to happen tonight?”
“Well, I... I thought maybe... but I didn’t want to presume.” I’m shaking helplessly now, pulsing, throbbing, blazing with joy. “So this is really happening?”
“It’s happening.” He clears this throat. Sways slightly before he kneels down on one knee in front of me. “I love you, Gillian Meadowbrook. I didn’t know how to love—or to live—before I met you. I didn’t know... anything worth knowing. Now I have a new life and a real purpose, and I wake up every morning looking forward to the day. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to spend every day I’m alive, proving to you how much I love you, how deeply I see you, how special you are. Please say that you’ll let me. Marry me, Gillian.”
I’m trapped by emotion. Nodding and smiling and shaking and almost crying. I manage to choke out, “Of course I’ll marry you, Richard. I want to spend the rest of my life loving you too.”
I collapse onto the floor in front of him, and he pulls me into a hard, clumsy hug. It’s a few minutes before we compose ourselves enough to get up off the floor.
Then we have our champagne. And we make love with rather sloppy ardor. Then we finish the champagne and spend most of the night talking about the future.
Two years ago I wanted to start over, begin a third life, one I shaped for myself. It isn’t anything I expected it to be. Richard isn’t anything like the men I used to imagine myself with.
But he’s better. Realer. This life is better and realer too. And, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the only way my third life is worth living.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you haven’t yet read it, be sure to read Second Best, which is Ashley and Sean’s story. And you can find on the following pages an excerpt from my next release, The Return, which is the first book in a new series.
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Excerpt from The Return
FOR THE PAST EIGHT years, Ria Phillips had been the object of her hometown’s tragic love story, a tale told over and over again with increasingly dramatic (and inaccurate) detail.
She knew people in Azalea, Virginia still gossiped about it. They mentioned the story as requisite background when referencing either the Phillips family or the Worths. She saw kindly sympathy behind the smiles of her parents’ friends when they asked about her continued single status, as if they assumed her heart hadn’t yet healed, eight whole years after it had been broken. Acquaintances were always trying to set her up with any available male they encountered in a hundred-mile radius.
And Ria was over it.
Over it.
Jacob Worth had broken her heart eight years ago, packing up and leaving town the morning after the first time they’d had sex. She’d been eighteen, and they’d been dating for two years. It had been her first time. She’d thought it was love. She’d believed he’d felt the way she had.
She’d been wrong. She’d been stupid. She’d been utterly crushed, and it had taken a long time before she’d gotten over it.
But she wasn’t so spineless that she’d still be broken so many years later. Jacob hadn’t been back to Azalea since. Not even once. Not even when his grandfather and only living relative had the heart attack six months ago and almost died.
Jacob had left her behind, just like he’d left everything else. He’d given her a flimsy explanation, but it wasn’t good enough. All she’d believed was sweet and gentle inside him had clearly been a cover for selfishness. She didn’t want him anymore. She didn’t want anything to do with him.
And she really wished her town would believe her when she said so.
On a Thursday morning in May, she was stewing over yet another conversation about Jacob. One of the old ladies who hung out at the laundromat—not to actually do their laundry, since most of them had machines at home, but to use it as the best vantage point for the three blocks of downtown Azalea—had called Ria over as she was walking home for lunch from the flower shop yesterday. The lady Ria had known as Mrs. Mildred all her life had asked her how she was doing and then sympathetically told her she’d find someone eventually. To not give up hope.
Ria had been hard-pressed not to growl in response.
She was fine. Better than fine. She was really good. Twenty-six. Healthy. Relatively attractive. She had a tight circle of friends and a thriving business that was starting to earn her good money. She went out with guys as regularly as was possible in a town as small as Azalea.
She didn’t need a man right now.
She didn’t need to recover from a heartbreak she’d already recovered from.
And she didn’t need anyone to still believe she was hung up on Jacob Worth.
“Hey, Ria, can you—what’s the matter?” Madeline had been talking as she walked into the back room of the shop, but she jerked to a stop in obvious concern.
“Nothing.” Ria smiled at Madeline, who’d been one of her best friends since Madeline had moved to town in eighth grade. “I’m good.”
“You don’t look good. You look like you’re beating those flowers into submission.” Madeline was pretty in a quiet, curvy way with ash blond hair and gray eyes. She projected a very serious presence that Ria knew from long experience wasn’t entirely true to her dry, clever character. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing. Just stewing about Mrs. Mildred yesterday. I know it shouldn’t bother me so much, but it does.”
“Of course it does. No one likes to be pitied—particularly when they have nothing to be pitied about. Unfortunately King Asshole has been irretrievably branded into your identity for a lot of people in town. Even if you fall in love and get married, they’ll still probably talk about how you bravely overcame your heartbreak to make a new life with someone else.”
Ria groaned and slumped onto a nearby stool. “Maybe I should do something wild and crazy just so they’ll have something else to talk about.”
“Wouldn’t work. They’d just blame it on your tragic history. Jacob-Worth-demons still flagging your steps and all that. It sucks. It really does. But you can live with it or you can move somewhere else.”
“I’m not going to move.”
“I know that.” Madeline quirked her lips briefly in a quick flash of ironic amusement. “So try to live with it. At least they think about you as an individual unit and not only as Josh Cantor’s girlfriend.”
Josh Cantor had been the star football player in high school, and people in town still looked at him as some sort of hero. Madeline had been dating him for years.
“That’s true. I guess we all get pigeonholed in one way or another.” Ria sighed and shook off her a
nnoyance as she straightened to her feet. “Did you need something when you came back here?”
“Yeah. I wanted to know if you’d gotten a start on the Nashville order. I’m blocked and need some inspiration.”
“Oh. Yeah. I’ve pretty much got it done. I’ll show you.”
Three years ago, Ria’s parents had died in a car accident and left her the family business, a struggling, small-town florist. She had an older sister, but Belinda had never shown any interest in flowers. It was Ria who’d been hanging out at the shop after school every afternoon since third grade. So Ria got what had then been called Phillips Flowers.
For the first year, she’d tried to keep it going the way her parents had, but small town businesses of all kinds were struggling, and the local weddings and funerals weren’t enough to sustain a profitable business. She’d been afraid she’d have to close up shop, but then she and her two best friends had miraculously turned it around.
One of their high school classmates had come into the store one Saturday afternoon and asked for a custom arrangement as a way to apologize to his wife after getting into a big fight. When Ria had asked for the message on the card, he’d told her to just think of something good.
Ria was good with flowers. She was naturally creative and artistic, and she loved designing unique arrangements. She’d put together something really special for the guy’s wife. As she did, Madeline (who’d been hanging out with her that afternoon) kept making up funny possible messages for the card. She worked at the public library, but she’d been writing all her life, and she’d ended up composing a little poem that was funny and touching both. Skye, their other best friend, had been so thrilled with the arrangement that she’d taken pictures. After getting permission from recipient, she’d started posting the photos on social media.
Skye was currently unemployed and spent a lot of time online. One of her posts on the arrangement got the attention of an influencer with a large platform and went viral.
Suddenly, Ria had orders coming in for custom arrangements from all over the world, asking for personalized poems to go with them. At first, she could only handle the orders within a couple of hours of Azalea—in Hampton Roads or the accessible parts of Northern Virginia. But Ria had gotten busy and connected with florists all over the country so eventually she could serve orders all over. Skye took over the marketing and social media and was genuinely brilliant at it.
Since they specialized in apologies, they rebranded the business as Second Chance Flower Shop, and it had been thriving for the past two years. It was a huge amount of work. They still had to be selective about the orders they accepted since they didn’t have the staff to handle huge numbers. But they were able to raise their prices every six months with no loss of orders, so the money was really coming in now. Pretty soon, they’d be able to buy the building the shop had leased from old Mr. Worth since Ria’s parents opened it thirty years ago.
It was one of those flukes. As much luck and timing as skill and talent—as all success was. Ria was still astounded every time a major platform shared one of their arrangements online and they got a new flurry of orders.
She and Madeline were talking about the design for an order they’d accepted yesterday when Skye Devereaux came bounding into the back room.
Skye was barely five feet tall. A tiny, freckled redhead with big eyes and a big smile. Despite her small size, she always seemed to fill a room. Right now, her eyes were even huger than normal, and she was gasping loudly. “Big... big news. You’ll never... never... guess.”
“What’s going on?” Ria asked, only mildly interested. Skye was dramatic about everything, so there was no reason to assume something genuinely earth-shattering had occurred.
She was wrong.
It was earth-shattering.
It left her (literally) shaking.
Skye was still trying to catch her breath. She must have run all the way over here from wherever she’d gotten this news. “He’s... he’s... coming back... to town.”
“He?” Madeline asked with a frown. “He who?”
Ria had already frozen. She knew—she knew—what was coming.
Skye turned huge blue eyes onto Ria’s face. “Jacob... Worth. He’s finally coming home.”
YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE about The Return here.
About Noelle Adams
NOELLE HANDWROTE HER first romance novel in a spiral-bound notebook when she was twelve, and she hasn’t stopped writing since. She has lived in eight different states and currently resides in Virginia, where she writes full time, reads any book she can get her hands on, and offers tribute to a very spoiled cocker spaniel.
She loves travel, art, history, and ice cream. After spending far too many years of her life in graduate school, she has decided to reorient her priorities and focus on writing contemporary romances. For more information, please check out her website: noelle-adams.com.
