by Rachel Hanna
He had no idea she was coming. No idea that they were about to be together. He’d be so happy, so relieved that she was finally there in front of him. He’d said it so many times before, that he couldn’t wait to meet her, to see her, to touch her.
Yes, she was finally going to have the last laugh with her friends and family. They’d see they were all wrong, and that her romantic notions for this man who lived thousands of miles away were so much more than anyone could’ve imagined.
They’d have this amazing love story, something they could tell their kids and their grandkids. The kind of love that people write books about. It was just on the other side of that door, she thought, as she reached her hand toward the big brass knocker shaped like a seashell.
And it was just like every other amazing love story. Except for one thing - she’d never met him in real life. She had never seen him even on Skype or video chat. And right now, she prayed to God that he wasn’t just some figment of her imagination.
Chapter 1
Molly James had two loves in her life, animals and a guy named Blake. The problem was, she only got to spend time with one of them in real life.
At twenty-two years old, she wasn’t really where she wanted to be in her life. School had always been hard for her, much to her parents’ dismay. Growing up in a family where everyone else seemed to be on the level of genius, Molly had struggled. A lot.
High school had been the hardest, by far, mainly because she barely made it from one grade to the next. But even that would’ve been cool if she hung around with that kind of a crowd, but she also happened to look the part of a nerd during her formative years.
Petite with auburn hair and green eyes, she looked more like one of the boys than one of the girls back then. Before she had learned how to do her makeup properly, the freckles on her face were what she was most known for, aside from her inability to read the way her peers did.
Of course, she finally learned that she had dyslexia in her sophomore year of high school but it was too little too late. Trying to learn new ways of studying with only a couple of years left of school proved to be almost impossible. And when her SATs came around, the embarrassing number she saw on her scoresheet almost sent her into a total depression.
Her parents were hard on her and not nearly as accepting of her dyslexia as others. They wanted her to be something she wasn’t, just like her extremely smart brother, Liam.
Oh yes, Liam was the apple of their eye. He’d almost gotten a perfect score on his SATs, and was now working in Silicon Valley at a tech firm and dating a girl who could only be described as prettier than Barbie. At two years older than Molly, Liam set the standard for what her parents expected.
But she was not what they expected. She was nothing like the rest of her family, often leading her to wonder if she was adopted except that she looked exactly like her father.
There were days she hoped she was adopted because at least that would explain things to her and possibly get her off the hook for the high expectations her parents had. “Oh, Molly’s adopted so we can’t expect her to be Einstein,” she would imagine her mother saying to her father. But to no avail; their names were firmly printed on her birth certificate.
And though she clawed her way through her junior and senior years in high school and somehow, by the grace of God or some magical dyslexia fairy in the sky, she graduated, she certainly wasn’t on the top of any Ivy League college list of students to recruit.
As college after college turned her down, she could see the look of resignation on her parents’ faces. It was embarrassing, distressing and frustrating to not be able to get her parents’ approval. Everything she did seemed to be a disappointment to them, including the fact that she hadn’t yet found what they considered to be “a real boyfriend”.
Molly had never been with any boy in high school, except for the time Dylan Roney, star player on her high school’s football team, took a dare to kiss her behind the bleachers after a football game. It definitely wasn’t a love connection but more of a joke, and as usual Molly had been the brunt of it.
And if she’d been more outspoken, she would’ve told the whole school that Dylan kissed like a drunk lizard and had the worst breath she’d ever had the misfortune of coming into contact with, but she kept her mouth shut and stopped going to football games.
With no fond memories of high school itself, she left and took a year off, again much to her parents’ dismay. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, so she worked at the local library for a year just to take a break. It always seemed very ironic to her that she worked at the library when she had such problems reading.
Still, she wasn’t the type to be jaded by what had happened to her during high school. She managed to forge a couple of strong friendships with people who were much like her – outsiders. And, amazingly, she started to blossom into a beautiful young woman. The only problem was that it happened after high school when she couldn’t get the male attention she wanted from crushes that she had at the time.
One thing that Molly adored was animals, so it made sense after taking her year off to go to vet tech school. She wanted to work with dogs and cats in a veterinary setting, so she buckled down and made it through the schooling required. The crazy thing was, she didn’t have nearly as much trouble in vet tech school as she did in high school, but maybe that was because she didn’t feel so pressured by her parents or the other kids around her.
Being from a small town, it wasn’t nearly as easy to find a job at a veterinarian’s office as she thought it would be, but her parents must’ve taken pity on her when they pulled some strings with one of her dad’s financial planning clients. He owned a veterinary clinic just outside of Seattle, and she agreed to go work for him.
Of course, this meant that she had to get her own apartment closer to work, which she was pretty excited about. Being out of her parents’ reach was something that she had dreamed of for a couple of years. So when it came true, she was more than thrilled to be on her own, even if it meant struggling financially for a while.
Still, the one thing that had been missing from her life was falling in love. All of the girls that she knew from high school – friends or not – were posting about their boyfriends and upcoming weddings on Facebook, and she still hadn’t gone out on a real date yet.
So she decided to take matters into her own hands. She figured in this age of technology, the best thing to do was get out of her immediate circle of influence and look for the love of her life online. And that’s exactly what she found.
She met a man named Blake. He was four years older than her and a lot more worldly but had the most fantastic heart of any person she’d ever known.
The crazy thing was, she didn’t intend to meet him at all. She’d gone on dating sites, but no one there seemed to suit her. She felt just as much like a fish out of water on dating sites as she did in the real world.
But one night she was on Facebook, surfing around being jealous of the girls from her high school, when an instant message popped up from Blake. He told her that they had some mutual friends and that he thought she was beautiful.
At first, she worried that it was a hoax, but she decided to play it out. As the days and weeks passed, she found herself talking to him on text multiple times per day. Every time she’d get a message from him, her heart would flutter and her stomach would tighten up into knots.
She’d read a lot of romance novels in her time, so she knew what those feelings meant. And then one day it happened – he professed his love for her. They’d been talking for about two months at that time, and she had told him things that she had never told anyone else.
And he didn’t judge her. He thought she was special and pretty and perfect the way she was.
Every little part of her day was something that she shared with him, and he gave her advice and let her vent when she’d had a bad day. The first time she’d been in the room when a dog had to be put to sleep, it was Blake who pulled
her through.
Still, there were drawbacks to dating someone who lived all the way across the country in Georgia. Number one, she couldn’t see him or touch him or go on a real date with him. But the most unsettling part of the whole thing was that he didn’t want to talk to her on video chat.
“Sis, are you crazy? This guy’s probably not even real,” Liam had said to her when he came home for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of saying it way too loud so that her parents could hear, and then they really had something to say about it.
“My goodness, Molly, I thought you were smarter than this!” her mother said, putting her hand over her eyes. “You’re going to be one of those people who gets murdered by some stalker because you’re talking to a stranger you don’t even know. How do you know he’s even real…” she said, going on and on to the point where Molly just stopped listening. She mentioned some story on Dateline and then rambled on about something that Molly was almost certainly an urban legend.
She believed in Blake. When she had asked him why he wouldn’t chat on video, he explained that he had been suffering from anxiety and PTSD after serving in Afghanistan. Blake was a Marine, and he had shown her many pictures of himself in uniform and even a few from the front lines.
He wrote her poetry all the time, and was constantly telling her how beautiful she was. And he never asked her for money or anything like that, so she couldn’t see how it could be a scam. No, it was the love story of a lifetime, the kind of love story people only dream about. And she had it. Finally.
“Molly?” her coworker, Olivia, said waving her hand in front of Molly’s face. They had been working together for almost a year now, and Olivia was her closest friend.
“What? Oh, sorry…”
“Lost in thought again?” Olivia said laughing as she hoisted a small terrier up onto the table.
“No. I just didn’t get much sleep last night.” Molly petted the dog and kissed its muzzle. She loved any kind of animal, but dogs were definitely her favorite. She couldn’t wait to have a farm one day where she could have lots of dogs.
“Let me guess, you were up late talking to Blake again?” she said. Sometimes Molly would text with Blake, but occasionally they talked on the phone. She enjoyed those times, getting to hear his voice, but they were few and far between because he was so busy with work as a security guard.
“Maybe,” Molly said with a smile.
“So when are you going to actually meet this mystery man? Hasn’t it been a year now?”
“Yes, but we’ll eventually get to see each other. We’re both just paying our dues right now.”
“You know they do have these amazing things called airplanes, right?” Olivia said as she began to clip the dog’s front claws.
“Neither one of us can afford that right now,” Molly said with a sigh. “Trust me, I want nothing more than to see him, but my parents certainly aren’t going to fund the trip for me.”
Truth be told, she enjoyed her job as a vet tech. It filled her up with happiness to play with animals every day, but she still felt like she was kind of stuck in her life. She couldn’t be a vet tech forever and support herself, but she had no future plans in mind. Her only plan right now was to save up enough money to go see the love of her life.
“So, I have a secret,” Molly finally said since she’d been busting a gut to tell somebody.
“Do tell,” Olivia said as she moved to the dog’s back claws.
“Blake proposed to me last night,” Molly said, grinning from ear to ear and jumping up and down which then caused the dog to start barking. She quickly stopped and petted the dog as she made shushing noises. Her boss was nice most of the time, but he was pretty strict and didn’t like a lot of drama in the office to get the dogs excited.
Olivia stopped what she was doing and turned to look at her friend, her mouth hanging open. Molly was still grinning and trying not to giggle too loudly.
“Molly, are you insane?” Olivia asked. Molly stopped smiling.
“Excuse me?”
“Look, I’m all for love and romance and this has been a really fun little thing you have going on with Blake, but it’s time to be realistic here. You don’t know this guy at all or even if he’s real. I think this is a crazy move. How can you be engaged to someone you’ve never even touched in real life?” Olivia asked. She carefully carried the dog and put it back in one of the cages to wait for its owner to pick it up.
Molly turned around to grab some wet wipes and started cleaning the metal table where they had clipped the small terrier’s nails. “Love is about what’s in here,” she said, putting her free hand over her heart. “I know that Blake exists. And he’s the love of my life and I’m the love of his life, and we’re going to get married one day soon.”
“And how exactly is that going to happen when you live across the country from each other and you’re both broke?” Olivia said with her hands on her hips. Unbelievably, she was actually shorter than Molly with bobbed off platinum blonde hair and an attitude to match.
“I don’t know. But it’s true love, and I know that anything can happen. I thought you’d be happy for me,” Molly said, crossing her arms and pursing her lips.
“I’m happy for you, always. But I’m worried that you’re going to be in for the letdown for lifetime when this all shakes out, and I don’t know if I can be around to watch it,” Olivia said rubbing Molly’s arms before walking to the other side of the room.
Chapter 2
At twenty-six years old, Austin York was in a far better place than he’d ever been in his life. As he stood in front of the bed and breakfast in January Cove, he was a world away from where he’d grown up and was glad to be starting over.
He ran his hands through his dark brown hair and took a deep breath. Even though he was relieved to be getting a second chance, it was still daunting. Learning how to be a man without a father hadn’t been easy, and now he was truly on his own and away from everything he’d ever known.
He had grown up in a rough area of Atlanta, one of three kids born to a mother who abused drugs and disappeared when he was fifteen years old. He had been split up from his siblings and spent time in foster care until he was seventeen before he ran away from yet another abusive situation.
But there was one saving grace of his life – his best friend’s dad. Austin’s best friend was Eddie Ballard, and they had met playing on a rec baseball team when he was fifteen years old just after his mother took off. One of his teachers had taken pity on him and convinced his foster parents to let him sign up for the rec league.
There was a time where Eddie’s father tried to take him in, but the stupid foster care system failed him yet again and wouldn’t allow it. Instead, he bounced from house to house, each one worse than the last.
He tried not to think about it now because it made him mad at all the years that were wasted. He hadn’t seen any of his siblings in eleven years now, but he thought about them a lot. He hoped they had experienced better situations than he had, and he hoped that one day he might see some of them again. As the oldest, he often thought about trying to find them, but right now he just needed to get his own life on track. He didn’t feel like he had anything to offer his brother and sister until he was more stable.
After high school, which he barely finished, he had bounced from job to job until Eddie’s father, Mac, offered to teach him the trade of building. He worked every day, riding with Mac in his beat up old truck. But it was one of the best times of his life so far, getting to spend time with a real man who cared about him.
Ballard Development was one of the largest real estate development companies in the southeast now, and he knew this opportunity in January Cove would probably be one of the biggest of his life. Mac had given him the gift of a lifetime and he wasn’t going to squander it.
As the project manager of the fanciest new restaurant in January Cove, he would be responsible for making sure the property got built and was done right. And as soon
as it was complete, he’d move on to the next thing and hopefully back to a bigger city.
He’d been pretty surprised when Mac had told him about the job in January Cove because it wasn’t exactly the kind of place that Mac normally built in. He was more of a big city kind of guy, even though he drove that beat up old truck.
But for some reason, he really wanted Austin to take some time away from Atlanta and get his feet wet handling an entire project on his own. Austin could only assume that he sent him way out here to the boondocks to get him away from some of the bad influences that he’d been around his entire life.
But Austin also had a problem – an attitude problem. He knew it was a problem, but he never would’ve admitted it in front of anyone else. He was deemed too cocky by most women and way too arrogant by most men.
And while he would’ve liked the world to believe that he didn’t care what anyone thought of him, the truth was that he did. He desperately wanted to build the family that he never had, but he also wasn’t about to let any woman come close enough to make him feel the least bit vulnerable.
The court ordered counselor that the judge forced him to see the last time he got in trouble for punching a guy in a bar said that maybe he was protecting himself from women because the only important woman in his life had abandoned him.
He had rolled his eyes, convinced that counselors were quacks, but deep down he knew this man was right. And he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Molly pulled up in the parking lot of the vet clinic and shut off her car. She sat there for a moment, because she was 10 minutes early – like always – and stared out her windshield. It was misting rain, as usual, and the gray overcast Seattle skies were making her tired and a little blue. She had grown up in the Seattle area, and there were parts that she loved about it, but sometimes it was downright depressing.
