by Amelia Wilde
“The carpet is new as of two days ago…”
I turn on one heel, but Brett has a wide grin on his face. He’s joking, at a time like this. A flush of heat rises in my chest, then to my face.
“Don’t worry about your shoes. Just look.”
I take in a big breath and turn back around, stepping out of my shoes in the process and tucking them under my arm. That’s when it all comes together. The bookshelves, middle shelves filled with a collection of what looks like used titles from the Bookmark, along with some newer releases, the shiny dust jackets wrinkle-free and beautiful.
And the chair…
“Oh, my God,” I whisper, going over to the chair, the memories from that summer flooding my mind. The chair I used to sit in at Anderson’s, dreaming of the day that I’d be woman enough to choose my own furniture and put a chair like this in a room like this. An oversized armchair with a wide base, overstuffed armrests, and a plush back. The kind you can curl up in, your legs tucked underneath, and read for hours.
How long has it been since I had a chance to read? I’m so exhausted when I get home from work these days that books put me right to sleep, and I’ve never gotten around to buying a chair like this one. I’ve never found the perfect chair. This one is teal, unlike the red one I used to sit in at Anderson’s, but it’s the same style, the same shape.
But that’s not all of it.
Perched on one of the armrests is a journal, the cover a deep purple. I stopped writing in a journal that summer. I never started again. Now all I write is the day’s reports. On the journal’s cover is a pen—not too thin, not too thick, and I pick them both up, testing the weight.
There are tears threatening when I turn back to Brett, holding the journal tight in my hands, pulled up against my chest. I don’t have the words.
All of this time, he remembered. And when things really looked bad, this is where he went. This is what he did.
“I wanted you to know,” he says, his voice gravelly and gruff, “that even when it seems like you don’t, you have a place here. With me.” He swallows. “I didn’t go a day without thinking of you, Addi. I wanted to be with you every single day we were apart.”
Every single day.
Chapter Forty-Six
Brett
Addison’s face is lit up from the inside out, and she’s holding onto the journal so tightly that her knuckles are white. My heart beats erratically, skipping time, and I’m trying to decide if the tears in her eyes are because this isn’t enough or because it’s too much.
The silence is heavy, and finally she shakes her head a little to the side, one tear escaping and running down her cheek. “It was a mistake.” She glances down at the journal in her hands. “But it was a mistake before all this. You didn’t have to do any of this. That’s why—”
“You were sitting on my porch for God knows how long?”
“It was only forty-five minutes.” Addison’s voice is choked, like she can’t believe this is happening, and if it’s anything like what I’m feeling, it’s half relief and half overwhelming heat and love.
There’s nothing in the world that can keep me away from her right now, and so I cross the room and gather her into my arms, pulling her in tight. She wraps her arms around my waist like her life depends on it, and after a second, I realize she’s trembling.
“It’s okay,” I whisper into her hair. “It was my fault, anyway. I got in over my head with this house, and I didn’t stop to think about how it would feel for you.”
“No,” she says, her voice muffled in my hoodie. “You have every right—you didn’t have to—”
“I did have to make this up to you. It was a shitty thing that I did. Ten years ago and now. It was all fucking shitty. And I swear, it’s not going to be like that anymore.” I pull back a few inches so I can see her face, see her giant blue eyes as she looks up at me, a few flyaway hairs escaping from her ponytail. “I love you, Addison. And I want to be with you. Today. Tomorrow. For fucking ever. I never want to be away from you again.”
A wide, slow smile lights up her face, and then she closes her eyes. “I want to remember this moment for the rest of my life. The moment that Brett Miller finally stopped being such an idiot.”
We both laugh, and it feels so damn good that it takes me a good five minutes to stop.
When I finally come down, Addison is looking at me with a serious expression. “I’m just as much to blame, though. I should have come looking for you.”
“Why would you? I was an asshole who abandoned you without a word.”
“I could have done something.”
“Nothing you can change now. Except…”
“Except what?”
“Do you want to be with me?”
“Yes,” she shouts, and then laughs again. “Yes, I want to be with you, so badly I can hardly stand it. Brett Miller, please be my boyfriend. Don’t you dare say no.”
“Not a fucking chance,” I say, and then she’s dropping the journal and pen lightly to the carpet and pulling me down for a kiss that’s so deep and so hot and so frantic that it washes over me like a tidal wave.
We lose ourselves in the kiss until Addison pulls back, putting her hand to her lips. “Shit, Brett, I can’t believe this room.”
“Why not?”
“You remembered all this for ten years?”
“Like I said—there wasn’t a day that went by that you didn’t cross my mind.”
“But this stuff—I think we talked about it maybe once.”
“I went over every single memory that I had when I was deployed.”
Now her grin turns wicked. “All of them?”
“All of them.”
Then her mouth is on mine, and I’m going for the zipper on her jacket and tugging it off, dropping it to the floor behind her. I have her shirt halfway up to her ribs when she steps back, laughing. “Wait, wait!”
“Wait for what?”
“This is—this is a little library, just like I always wanted, right?”
“That’s exactly what it is.”
“Then let’s save this for the bedroom.”
I lift her up into my arms at the same moment she wraps her legs around my waist, and her laughter is sweet and pure and low and sexy while I hustle us into my bedroom.
She doesn’t take her eyes off me as we tumble toward the bed, and I stand up and strip off her clothes, then mine. Addison stretches out on the comforter beneath me and holds out her arms. I don’t hesitate to dive in.
The second our skin connects, it’s an electric fire that’s almost hot enough to scorch me, but it feels so fucking good, I’ll never let go for the rest of my life.
I press my mouth against hers, tasting that sweetness, testing with my tongue, and at the same time that I thrust into her, she raises her hips to meet mine, already wet and ready and mine, fucking all mine.
She pulls back and buries her teeth into my shoulder and it makes my cock pulse inside her, creating a chain reaction with her muscles clenching around me, and then she’s pushing, shoving up on my shoulders and I let her take over, rolling over onto my back so she’s arched above me, hands braced against my chest, coming down harder and harder with every movement of her hips against mine. I lock my hands around her delicate hipbones and pull down with her rhythm, and it feels so fucking perfect I can’t believe I ever let her tell me it was over. It’s never going to be over. Not until the day I draw my last breath. Maybe not even then.
We’re made for forever.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Addison
I ride Brett with total abandon, letting my body succumb to the fire and burst into sweet release over and over again. I come so many times I can hardly catch my breath, and every time I think I might want to collapse down against him, a new wave of energy washes over me and I want nothing more than to keep going, keep going, keep going.
We’re so in sync that it’s almost surreal, and just when I think I can’t lift myself up and d
own one more time, Brett is taking over, flipping me over onto my hands and knees on the bed and driving back into me, filling me with the perfect degree of stretch, his hands on my waist, pulling me backward for one more round, until he tenses behind me and rides his own wave of sheer pleasure over the crest and right down to the bottom, pulling me sideways with him so he’s curled behind me on the comforter, both of us breathing hard.
There’s nothing but that sound for several minutes until Brett sighs, tightening his arm around my waist, and my muscles melt all over again.
“Damn,” he whispers into my neck, and I twist to face him, threading my arm around his waist. He’s smiling, and I bet if he opened his, they’d be shining and content.
“Not bad,” I say, and his low laughter sends another bolt of warmth down my spine. Without thinking, I start to move against him again, and now he does open his eyes. They’re sparkling, calm, like I haven’t seen them since I first saw him when he returned to Lockton. Something’s changed.
“What’s different about you?”
He raises his eyebrows. “You.”
“Other than me.”
He takes in a breath and lets it out again, his face growing serious. “I saw my dad.”
“Your dad?”
My mind spins back over all our conversations. Did he tell me he hasn’t seen his father in ten years, or did I just get that impression?
“I asked him what the hell he was thinking when he told me I was taking you down with me. Turns out he didn’t mean what I thought.”
“What did he mean?” My chest tightens, a hot spike of anger flashing through my gut and dissipating as quickly as it arrives. There’s only so long you can blame your parents for anything in life. Of course, if you’ve been avoiding it for ten years, it probably still rankles you just as much as the day it happened.
“He knew you had feelings for me. And he didn’t want me to break your heart. He wanted me to…commit, I guess.”
I have to laugh at that. “Smart man.”
“Just not smart enough to say it like that ten years ago.”
“We all make our choices.”
“And what’s your choice, Addi?”
I give him a wicked look, and Brett runs his fingertips over my cheekbone. “Seriously. Are you sure you want to be with me?”
“I wouldn’t have been sitting on your porch if I didn’t.”
“I’m not the same as I was…back then.”
“I know. I like you better now.”
“I’m such a prick, though.”
“You’re…” I choose my words carefully. “You’re more intense now. You’ve lived through things. But I get the impression that you really know what you want.”
“You,” he whispers, and my heart almost explodes.
When I can get my breath back again, I can’t stop the words from coming out. “But…where?”
“In bed. All the time.”
“No…I mean, do you want to stay in Lockton?”
“Do you want to leave Lockton? I thought you loved your job.”
“I do love my job.”
“Then there’s no point in leaving.”
“There is, if you’d rather be somewhere else.”
His expression turns thoughtful, and I think of my parents, the fact that he’s only just spoken to his father again after all these years. “Maybe someday. Not yet.”
“I just wanted to know.”
I close my eyes for a moment and bask in the scent of him, in the solidness of his weight next to me on the bed. I can’t begin to tally up all the times I imagined this since he left. Countless times, bordering on infinite.
My heart starts to pound again, and I push myself up on my elbow, beaming down at him.
He gives me a searching look. “What are you so excited about?”
“This is it.”
“What’s it?”
“This is the beginning of everything. Everything, Brett!”
His smile matches my own, incandescent and wide and the thing I’d want to see every day if I could only see one thing for the rest of my life.
“Holy shit,” he says, and his tone is teasing, but just as buoyant as mine. “What should we do?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I shout, leaping out of the bed and gathering up my clothes from the floor.
“Hardly,” he says, throwing his legs over the side of the bed.
“We have to go out to dinner!”
“It’s three o’clock!”
“We could eat sushi for hours and nobody would care.”
Brett laughs again. “Why sushi?”
“It’s small pieces and they wait forever between each plate.”
He stands up and pulls me in for a kiss while I’m still trying to put on my pants. “We can have a late lunch. But we’re not staying for hours. I already want to be back here with you.”
“Naughty.”
I smile up at him, and then pull my pants the rest of the way on. I’m starving, and I want to hold his hand across the table for everyone in Lockton to see. I’m finally with Brett Miller.
Brett Miller is finally mine.
“Oh, and there’s something else.” He pulls his shirt over his head and cocks one eyebrow at me. “You have to go into home renovation.”
“What?”
“Look at this place, Brett. People will be falling all over themselves for work like this. No joke.”
“I don’t have a builder’s license.”
“Get one!”
“Oh, so it’s that easy?”
I run right back into his arms again.
“Yeah. Compared to everything else? It’s going to be a walk in the park.”
He takes in a big breath and lets it out, his body relaxing against mine. “I believe you.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“Good. Let’s go eat.”
Epilogue
Brett
When the email comes in four months later, Addison’s the one who feels my phone buzz in my pocket. Her hand is wrapped around my waist and we’re walking toward the Dockside for breakfast.
“I felt it,” she shouts, and I roll my eyes.
“Don’t get too excited. It could be anything.”
Well—almost anything. I’ve diligently unsubscribed from just about every fucking email list on the planet, marking them as spam a hundred times over if that’s what it takes so that the only emails coming in to my inbox are the ones from the state licensing board. Last weekend, I drove four hours to the only city offering the written tests to become a licensed builder and contractor in our state, and the results were guaranteed to be delivered in seven days.
This is the seventh day.
“Are you going to check?”
“I can check once we have a table.”
Addison stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, her eyes sparkling in the unexpected February sun. It’s been cloudy for weeks and she hates it, but once we’re at home for the evening, it doesn’t matter at all what the weather is like outside. Still, we’ve been dreaming lately of moving south—at least south of Lockton, so we can get three extra weeks of spring and three extra weeks of summer.
But I have a list of clients waiting for me to work on their houses—everything from single rooms to whole floors—and it all hinges on the licensing board.
“You check that email right now.” Her tone is serious, but her eyes are laughing.
“It’s damn freezing!”
“Check it!”
I shake my head, smiling at her, and pull my phone out of my pocket. My heart flies into my damn throat while I yank off one glove so that I can swipe the screen to unlock it.
The phone lags for three agonizing seconds while I wait for the email app to open. I suck in a deep breath and let it out instead of dropping the thing into the snow and leaving it all behind.
“What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘I’m not good at being a fucking phone and I’m going
to take a thousand years to load the email.’”
“Salty language.”
I lean down and give her a quick kiss, and that’s all it takes to make the phone work. When I look back at the screen, the list of emails finally comes into view.
The first one’s sender gives me momentary vertigo. Official Licensing Board…that’s all I read and I’m stabbing at it with my thumb to get it to open.
Addison comes around to my side and we both peer down at the email together.
“Oh, my God,” she groans, and she’s absolutely right—the first thing I have to do is scroll through a lengthy disclosure about how official documents will be arriving by mail in seven to ten business days, and in the event that I need to retake the test, I can do so on the specified dates and times, and my heart hammers against my ribs, so hard it hurts, and then I get to the bottom of the message. It reads: OFFICIAL TEST RESULTS FOLLOW HERE.
Addison sees it first, and then the words register in my mind: I passed both of the tests I needed to pass. I’m officially licensed.
She jumps into my arms, shrieking with delight, and I pull her into me and then we’re kissing hard on the sidewalk, cold lips and noses pressing into each other full force.
When I finally put Addison back down on the sidewalk, she actually claps her hands a couple of times. “Wow,” she breathes. “This is going to be one hell of a breakfast. You did it!”
I raise one eyebrow at her. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“No,” she says, linking her arm through mine and tugging me toward the Dockside. “I knew you’d do it. I’m just excited for you to finally get started doing what you want to do.”
I feel a pang, remembering the feeling of speeding across a runway in a fighter jet, but it dissolves when Addison’s fingers curl through mine. This is a thousand times better than anything I could have dreamed of in the Air Force—maybe a million—because everything I do will be with her by my side. And nobody can say I never made anything of myself. The list of names and projects on my phone are a testament to that. If Addison has anything to do with it, that list is only going to grow—she already has a website in the works and has been talking up my newly available services to anybody who will listen. How anyone could say no to her, I don’t know.
