His smile was soft. “You will, baby. You always do. I don’t know anybody with a heart half as good as yours.”
“Aww, there’s plenty of people—“
“No, there’s not.” Rip kissed the side of my mouth, then the opposite side, the short bristles on his cheeks kissing mine. “There really isn’t. You got that little fox on you, but you’re a wolf, baby. A fucking miracle. I don’t know how you came out the way you did, but you teach me something about forgiveness and love every single day. And here I thought for most of my life, until I met you, that I stopped learning things a long time ago.”
Me?
That laugh was soft. “Yeah, you. Only you.”
I swallowed, I gulped, and I raised my eyebrows at him because I didn’t know what to say. Had no idea what to think. He must have known that because he kept on going.
“I don’t know what the fuck to tell you to do about your sisters, but I know you’ll figure it out. I sure as hell don’t know what to tell you about your dad, but if you wanna know what I think, I say let’s go burn down that house you lived in with him. If you just wanna move on with your life though, I’d get behind that.
“What I know is that I’ll tell you right now I’ll never let anybody treat you like fucking shit or make you feel like they don’t want you around. Not me, not even your family. I wasn’t fucking around when I said I love you, and I know there’s a lot of shit I need to tell you, but we’ll figure it out.” His thumb rubbed over my cheek again, and those blue-green eyes that sucked me up and wouldn’t spit me back out were locked on my face as he said, “If you want.”
If I wanted.
Oh, man.
I bit the inside of my cheek. “And if I don’t?” I asked him even though we both knew that wasn’t going to be the case.
“Then I got more work to do to talk you into it,” he replied softly.
The funny thing about life is that there’s a lot you don’t get to choose. You don’t get to choose whom you’re related to. You don’t get to choose your hair color, your height, or what natural talents you are given. You don’t get to choose where you are born, or who or what the world will see when they look at you.
But the best part of life is that in the end, none of that matters. You get to choose who you become. Who you love. You can change your hair color and, to an extent, you can even change your eye color and height. You can learn to be great at something.
There’s a whole lot you don’t get a choice in, but there’s a whole lot more you do.
And I knew right then what I would choose. What I would always choose.
The best decisions of my life had been those I’d jumped into terrified even though some part of me knew they were necessary.
In that moment, and for the rest of my life, I knew that nothing would ever be as necessary as this man in front of me, who would sabotage my dates and make me food because he knew I couldn’t cook and mostly because he saw me for who I wanted to be. For who I tried to be even when I did things that weren’t very nice. This man, Lucas Ripley, who was just as much of a taped together puzzle as I was.
Or as we all freaking were, I guess.
So I told him the only answer I would ever let myself live with.
I looked into those blue-green eyes and told him the truth. “I want to. I really want to.”
Epilogue
It wasthe dream that woke me.
That dream that had me waking up with a gasp.
It wasn’t real, I told myself as I blinked up at the darkened ceiling. It had been at least two or three months since the last time I’d dreamt about my dad and that house and thestupid-assand theidiotthat had my subconscious jerking awake to get out of it. It wasn’t real.It wasn’t real.
I was fine, I was safe, and I was loved.
I wasn’t seventeen years old, and I was fine.
But I didn’t have to roll over to know that it was after midnight now, so technically I was thirty-one now. Thirty-freaking-one. And it wasthatknowledge that had me smiling in my bedroom, that had my heart rate slowing back down, and that had the goose bumps I’d woken up with, retreating.
Of course I’d had a dream about my dad after one of the best nights of my life. That was how this stuff worked. Those dumb memories were spread out more and more as time went on, but they were still there in the those dark, little corners I didn’t go visit that often.
Reaching over to the other side of the bed, I found it empty but still warm, the covers thrown over partially on top of me. I glanced toward the bathroom to find the door closed and the light off, and I knew exactly where Rip was. I knew exactly what he was doing.
