She went by Lucy Hale now. Imagine my luck. Had for nearly four years, after a small, private ceremony that not even the most vigilant paparazzi had gotten a whiff of ahead of time.
The name change had cost Jimmy Watson his share in her future profits. Which suited my gal just fine. He’d gotten enough from her in the divorce proceedings.
Not that he could enjoy much of it from his jail cell.
They’d let him out eventually. But he knew better than to come anywhere near Red Oak Mountain.
That man wouldn’t be bothering her again.
She still went out on tour occasionally, but she kept it limited.
Lucy was going through her homebody days, and she’d flipped her script, touring two months out of the year and being here with me the other ten.
It seemed to make her happy.
These days Lucy spent a lot of her time in the recording studio I built for her on our land, a proper one with good acoustics and equipment she’d chosen herself.
But nights like this, playing on a small stage in a tiny mountain town dive bar for the sheer pleasure of it, were her favorite kind.
She played a simple chord progression on her guitar and started to sing, and the Bear Den went quiet the way it always did when Lucy performed.
The song was one she’d written recently, about finding love after the coffee’s gone cold.
I chuckled under my breath while she sang it, knowing it was based on the day our coffee maker died shortly after Melody had joined our family.
We’d been running on fumes until Valerie saved the day, popping in with a new machine she’d picked up in Fernwood for us.
I’d heard Lucy working on this song at the kitchen table two weeks ago and had stood in the doorway listening for a long time.
I watched her up on that stage now and felt it all over again.
This was the woman I’d fallen for on day one, and it had never stopped.
My heart was full of her. But it had expanded to hold the kids, too.
When I walked away from the SEALs I’d expected a quiet life out on my land, licking the jagged wounds in my heart from some of the tough shit I’d seen and done.
I hadnotexpected to find Lucy Lee one week into my retirement.
And I had certainly not expected to be sitting in a booth at the Bear Den in Red Oak Mountain five years later, dog-tired and completely content, with a teether in a paper bag beside me.
Valerie was babysitting tonight. She’d relocated with Lucy. She was something more like family than an employee after all these years at Lucy’s side, and their bond was unbreakable.
Peter was four now, and Melody had just turned one.
Fatherhood had done something to me that twenty-two years of special operations had never managed to do. It had made me soft in all the right places.
I gazed up at my woman on the stage, every beat of my heart just for her.
Lucy finished the song as the bar cheered her on. She smiled out at the room with that open, unguarded expression that had undone me from the very first day.
She was stealing hearts in the crowd. She did it everywhere she went. Lucy was so damn easy to love.
She stepped off the small stage and crossed the bar toward our booth, as I slid out to meet her.
I pulled her into my arms, still amazed that I was the one who got to keep her.
Lucy settled in easily, her head tucking against my chest the way it always did, like she’d been designed specifically for that spot.
