Total pages in book: 198
Estimated words: 186242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 931(@200wpm)___ 745(@250wpm)___ 621(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 931(@200wpm)___ 745(@250wpm)___ 621(@300wpm)
I loved him so much that not even my grief could mute how I felt about him.
And I knew without a doubt that my mom would have been so happy I’d found someone like him.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
I didn’t have to think about it. “I’m okay.”
Those gray eyes moved over my face. “Just making sure.” He took my hand. “I saw you looking out the window in the kitchen before we left.”
I had been doing that. I’d caught myself doing it less over the last couple of weeks. My body and brain had gotten some time to cope. The surprise visit from my loved ones had really helped too. It had reminded me again of how much I still had, so much more love than some people would ever know. “No, I’m okay, I promise. I was thinking about how funny things work out sometimes. Like maybe if I had waited to book your garage apartment, someone else might have and we would have never met.”
“And here I grounded Am for six months and it was one of the two best things to ever happen to me.”
The other being Amos, I knew. And I smiled. There was a lot worth smiling for. “You scared the shit out of me that day, by the way.”
His mouth twisted. “You scared the shit out of me too. I thought you were breaking into the house.”
“You still scared me more. You were like two steps away from getting pepper sprayed,” I told him.
Rhodes’s mouth pulled into a beautiful smile. “Not as much as you scared me that day you were screaming your lungs out in the middle of the night all because of a sweet little bat.”
“Sweet? Are you high?”
His laugh sent my heart pumping.
I leaned over and kissed him, and that ridiculous, full mouth opened and he kissed me deeply in return. We pulled apart, and I smiled at him as he looked at me with tenderness, but the moment he could, his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Rhodes’s mouth went tight. “I think someone has been following us.”
I turned in the seat to look out the back window but didn’t see anything. “You think? Why?”
“Yes. It’s a black SUV. I noticed it right when we pulled out of the driveway. They were coming toward us and pulled a U-turn almost immediately. It’s been following us since,” he explained. “It might be a coincidence, but it doesn’t seem like it.”
I touched his hand. “I don’t have any stalkers. Do you?”
That got one corner of his mouth to hitch up at the same time his fingers landed on top of mine. “None that I know of. Keep close, will you?”
I agreed, and we got out. The weather had taken a turn for a couple of warmer days, but I still had my down jacket on—the tangerine one he’d given me for Christmas that he’d said made me look like walking sunshine. Rhodes rounded the hood and came over to where I was waiting for him in the middle of the parking lot. He slipped his arm over my shoulder and kept me right there, next to that long frame that made me think of safety and home and love.
But mostly of the future.
For such a quiet, private man, he wasn’t stingy with his affection. Part of me thought that he knew how much I needed it and that’s why he sprinkled it on everything. I’d even caught Am looking a little funny sometimes when he’d randomly put an arm around his shoulder or tell him he was proud of him for the littlest things.
I loved him so much.
And I was totally on to the fact that he’d been slowly moving my things over to his house. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be sneaky or just giving me room to get used to the idea, but it had made me choke up when I’d noticed little things appearing over there that I hadn’t brought myself. He rarely used the L-word but he didn’t need to. I knew how he felt like I knew my own name.
And that was exactly what I was thinking of when I heard the last thing I ever would have expected in my life.
“Roro!”
My brain instantly recognized the voice, but it took my body and nervous system a second to catch up. To accept.
But I didn’t freeze.
My heart didn’t start pounding.
I didn’t instantly start sweating or get nervous.
Instead, it was Rhodes who slowed down first. He who, once we were over the curb and onto the sidewalk that ran around the school, came to a stop and slowly turned us around. How he seemed to know that the “Roro” was for me, I had no idea, but he did.
And I was pretty sure we both spotted the figure jogging across the parking lot with a huge man behind him at the same time.