My breath catches.
He fists the reins in one hand and wraps his other arm around my belly. “I don’t fall, Maisey. I refuse. But with you—I can’t help myself. You’re nothing that I expected you’d be and everything I’ve ever wanted but never thought I’d find. We can go slow. Weshouldgo slow. But I can’t walk away from you. I want to be on this journey with you. Ups and downs. The hard times and the easy times. I want to be the man right beside you as you keep reaching for your own stars, and I want you to be the woman holding my hand while I take a few leaps of my own. I always thought I’d be happy being alone, but that was before I knew what it was like to be with you.”
“Flint,” I whisper.
I can’t find words beyond that.
“I love the way you say my name,” he says, low and husky in my ear.
The sky is turning a soft orange over the butte in the distance. Wind swirls around us. Earl is nowhere to be seen.
And I’m safe and warm andloved, on the back of a horse, in the middle of a place that was my escape when I needed it in my teenage years and is myhomenow.
“Is this real?” I whisper.
“Very, very real.”
“Are you scared?”
“That I’ll fuck up sometimes? Yes. Of loving you? No.”
I twist in the saddle, trying to kiss him, and something lurches wrong.
“Oh God,” I gasp.
But he laughs.
Laughs, and quickly dismounts from Parsnip before we fall, pulling me down into his arms when I flail without him behind me.
Parsnip snorts.
Flint pulls me close, one hand looped around my back, the other holding the horse. “I love you, Maisey Spencer. And I will love you no matter how many horses you get me thrown off of, no matter how many times you tell me Junie comes first, no matter how badly you cook, or how often you demonstrate that you can fix a leaky pipe and paint a wall faster and better than I can.”
Tears are turning into little slushy icicles all down my face, so I bury my head in his chest, listening to that strong, steady thump of his heart while I wrap my arms around his waist. “I didn’t want to love you,” I confess. “I didn’t want to love anyone. But I can’t help myself. Not when you’re so much more than I ever expected you to be.”
“Young and hot?” he murmurs.
And now I’m laughing too. “Yes. Young and hot. And kind and generous and attentive and so,sogood to my daughter. When you told her she was the heart of the team? I couldn’t fight it anymore. I just couldn’t. You’re everything she deserves and nothing she’s ever had.”
“She has you.”
“And she deservesmore.”
“I hope I’m everythingyoudeserve too.”
“I wanted to find me”—I whisper—“and I think I did. In you.”
“So you’ll give me a chance?”
The hope and the fear lingering in his voice hit a sensitive part of my heart that knows exactly how he’s feeling.
Scared. But hopeful. Knowing you deserve love, that you deserve tobeloved, not for who someone wants you to be but for who you are.
I lift my head and take his scruffy cheeks in my hands. “I love you so much,” I tell him. “I thought I wanted—that Ineeded—to find me by myself. But findinguswill be the greatest joy of my life.”
He drops the reins holding Parsnip, lifts me, and twirls me in a circle that ends with more proof that Flint Jackson is the world’s best kisser.
But more?
