“Promise me you’ll go back to Newfoundland. You don’t need to forgive him, but you can’t let him keep you from your home. From your mom.”
Her mother was buried there, and I knew she wanted, more than anything, to get the goodbye she never got to say.
“I’ll get Sal to set it all up for you. On my plane.”
“On my plane.” She laughed softly. It wasn’t teasing, it wasstill this incredulity she had sometimes at my ridiculous life. She did it anytime she showed me what she bought on that card, which she didn’t use nearly enough.
“That’s very kind of you, but’s fine, I can go myself.”
But I took her face in my hands. Now that the idea had taken hold, I didn’t want to let it go. The thought of me being able to bring her to her original home felt like everything, even if it was just a cheap balm for my guilt at leaving. “Please. Let me do this, Winona. I feel like I haven’t done more than one good thing for you.”
“One thing!” She laughed, and now she really was crying. “Do you want me to write a list? You’ve swept me off my feet Mitchell. Shown me princes do exist.”
I crushed her to me then, kissing her head and inhaling her scent and wanting to give her all the promises in the world about staying and making her my princess.But then her lips were on mine and I forgot everything except the feel of her fitting so right in my arms.
Before we got in the car she pulled out her phone and took a photo of us, smiling, happy, together. “I’ll need proof to remember it happened,” she said.
“Sell it to the tabloids,” I said. “Let them know I’m taken.”
She huffed. “I just want to show Cher and Sarah.”
I was good with that. They’d been the ones to encourage her to come back to me when I’d been such an ogre. She’d told me Cher was the one she was going to have take over her business, and how Sarah had stood up to her boss because she believed in what Winona was doing.
“I still say her boss is in love with her,” I said. “He’s just fighting it. Pulling her pigtails because he doesn’t know what else to do.”
Winona tucked her phone back in her pocket, looking skeptical.
I reached over and tugged gently on a strand of her hair. “See?”
Her laughter was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
Only a few minutes after I pulled the car back into the street, the car in front of us stopped so suddenly, Winona yelped.
I jammed my foot on the brake, my hand on Winona’s chest in an instinctive and completely useless move, given she was already wearing her seatbelt.
We’d avoided hitting them, but just barely.
“What the fuck?” The car wasn’t moving. I hovered my hand over the horn.
“Wait.” Winona’s brows bunched. “I think—.” She cut herself off as the driver’s side door opened.
A man got out—a big man. He had a beard, and wore a good suit. He was squinting as he walked back toward us.
My stomach lurched.
It was my brother.
I got out of the car. “Blake.”
“Oh good,” he said. “I was worried I was going to be pissing some random dickhead off.”
“Nope,” I said. “Just a known dickhead.”
We stopped a few feet from each other.
“You could have called, you know,” I said.
“Would you have picked up?”
