He looked at his phone one more time, his eyes lighting up briefly before he tamped it down, and then he nodded. “Fine. Let me just eat both of these,” he said, scraping the contents of Nat’s plate onto his own. “And then we will.”
Fifteen minutes later—she’d never seen a grown man eat so fucking slowly in all her life—he grabbed her bags and held the screen door open for her. She shuffled her way down the porch steps and to the gravel driveway where Nash’s old truck was parked. It felt like she was walking through quicksand, each step a little harder than the previous. But she intended to keep that to herself. Nash didn’t need to know how much she didn’t want to go.
No, that wasn’t quite true. While she’d grown to like Havenbrook much more than she’d ever thought possible, it wasn’t the town she was desperate to stay in. She was certain she’d be feeling the same way if they’d lived in San Francisco or Miami or Atlanta.
Nash carried her bags to the truck, then placed them on the gravel instead of tossing them in the back. He pulled out his phone once more.
“Seriously, Nash, I’m tired of this.Whathas you stallin’?”
He glanced up at her, and then his gaze fell on something just over her right shoulder, a smile sweeping across his face. “That,” he said, tipping his head toward whatever was behind her.
Nat turned around, lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and looked in the direction Nash had gestured. She’d filled her life with the kind of adrenaline-seeking that meant she’d experienced nearly every kind of high there was—some illegal varieties included—but none of them compared to how she felt in that moment when her eyes connected with Asher’s.
He stepped out of the car and walked toward her, carrying something in his hand. His eyes darted over her face, his brow pinching at whatever he saw. He swept his gaze over the rest of her and to the bags at her feet that Nash still hadn’t put in the truck.
“Delayed flight?” he asked.
Well, she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that her big plan was to sit at the airport for half a day until she qualified to fly standby on her original flight just to get out of there earlier. So instead, she just nodded.
“What’re you doin’ here?” She glanced down at the book he carried—it was fairly large, maybe twelve-by-twelve, an album of some sort.
“If you’re gonna go, I wanted to make sure you saw this before you did.”
She took the album with shaky hands and opened it, her eyes welling up at the first photo inside—her and Asher on their wedding day, the two of them laughing, their heads close together, their eyes sparkling as they regarded each other. As if they already knew the crazy journey they were about to embark on—the laughter and the tears, the late nights and early mornings. Cleaning up vomit and reading approximately twelve hundred bedtime stories and making memories through just living.
She stared at the image until she could no longer see it through her tears. She’d managed not to cry more than a handful of times in her adult years, and yet she couldn’t seem to stop now. Maybe that was because she’d never had something like Asher on the line. She’d spent her life fleeing from place to place, escaping everything before it got too hard. Before she got too attached. Before she fell in love. All the while, pretending like that was some great life.
But she was already attached to Asher. Had already been halfway in love with him before she’d ever stepped foot back in Havenbrook. She’d just needed a little push.
Maybe she’d had this all wrong. Who said she had to fly all over the world to experience what life had to offer? What rule said she couldn’t do that right there in her hometown? Or Memphis? Nashville, New York, Portland, or any of another dozen other cities? As long as he and the kids were there with her, she’d feel like she was on the adventure of a lifetime.
She gasped as something registered, her head snapping up to frantically search the yard, then the car, which was empty. “Oh my God, did you forget the kids at home?”
He breathed out a laugh as if he’d been holding his breath and shook his head. “First of all, the kids are safe. I dropped them off with Gran on my way here. Second, I’m really fucking glad to hear you call our place home.”
“You are?”
“Yeah.” He stepped up to her, so close she felt the heat of his body seeping into hers, and brushed her hair back from her face. “Because I don’t want you to leave, Nat.”
She sputtered, blinking at him in the blazing sun. “Well—I can’t just—”
He pressed his thumb over her lips to stop her garbled words. “That came out wrong. I do want you to leave, to keep doin’ what you do. But only if you promise to come back to me and the kids and this life we pretended we had. It doesn’t have to be pretend, though. It wasn’t—not for me. And I don’t think for you either.” He cupped her face, his fingers delving into her hair as he swept his thumbs along her jaw. “I let you go because I thought that was what you wanted. You couldn’t wait to escape Havenbrook—it was always too small to keep you, and I didn’t want to hold you back.”
“You don’t. You wouldn’t.”
“I know that now. If you could’ve gotten that through my thick skull yesterday, I could’ve saved us a lot of unnecessary angst,” he said wryly as she breathed out a laugh. “Our jobs are both gonna take us away from here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make this work—that we can’t makeuswork. I want our house to be your home base.Iwant to be your home base.”
Her breath caught, and the tears welling in her eyes finally spilled over as he told her everything she’d wanted to hear, everything she’d been secretly hoping he’d say.
He wanted her to stay.
“How do we make that work?” she asked, heart in her throat and hope clinging on for dear life.
“I don’t know the logistics, but we don’t need to yet. We’ve got a year till June starts school, and there’s a whole stretch of highway I’m pretty sure you’ve been wantin’ to capture.” He smiled and traced the outline of her lower lip with his thumb. “I can write songs anywhere. All I know is we can figure it out…we can make anything work if you’re mine.”
She was basically a fountain now, her tears free-flowing as Asher handed her everything she never knew she wanted. But she wanted him. And she wanted those kids. And she wanted this life they’d had together. They could figure everything else out along the way.
“And you’d be mine?”
