“Another man had his hands on you, looking at you like…”I look at you.“You were more than friends. Of course, I was jealous. It was eating me up inside, all the way home, thinking that maybe you’d replaced me—”
“You’re irreplaceable.” She kissed me, no doubt to shut me up. “You’re the other half that makes me whole.”
I let her words sink in, knowing I couldn’t have expressed it better myself. I’d wanted a family ever since mine got torn apart when my mom died. I wanted a woman to love me the way she’d loved my dad. Someone to believe in me. To cheer me on. To kick my ass when I needed it. To call me out when I was being stupid or shooting my mouth off. I wanted someone to promise they would always be there for me, and love me forever. I wanted Gia.
“I feel the same way.” My voice was raspy as I fought hard to keep the emotion from bubbling up. “But here’s the thing… you’re not allowed to leave me.” I swallowed a few times, choking back tears. “I’ve already lost everyone I love. I can’t lose you too.”
“Joel—”
“Just hear me out,” I whispered, kissing her palm before laying her hand on my chest. “Please.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“If we had kids…” I closed my eyes, trying to spit the words out through the emotion clogging my throat. “And you left… you took them away from me… I couldn’t handle that. I can’t have a family, only to lose it again. That would destroy me.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” She curled her hand around my bristled cheek, forcing me to look her in the eye. “Do you really think I could do that to you?”
I didn’t want to believe she could, but I still had scars. And that made it hard for me to believe people would stay, even when they promised they would never leave me. “What if you just… stopped loving me?”
“My heart breaks for you when you say things like that, you know.”
I wasn’t trying to break her heart, or make her feel sorry for me. I was just trying to voice all my fears and concerns, so they wouldn’t continue haunting me for the rest of my life. “I know you can’t give me a written guarantee that you’ll be with me forever—”
“Really? What would you call our marriage license?”
“But you still left.” I knew it wasn’t her fault. If anyone was to blame for driving her away, I was.
“No,youleft me.” She inched back, drilling me with a look that dared me to challenge her. “And if you ever do that again, I swear I’ll hunt you down and drag you back home.”
I grinned, feeling my whole body relax. “Promise?”
“Yeah, I do. And I expect you to do the same if I’m ever stupid enough to try and leave you again. Deal?”
I kissed her. Again and again. “Deal.”
“Now, we have to get up.”
“What? Why? I thought we were spending the night here.”
“No way, we have to go home and rescue our baby.”
I chuckled. “I texted Johnny and he said he’d keep an eye on Duke until we get home.”
She pouted. “But I miss him. Please, can we go home?”
“How can I say no to that, beautiful?”
ChapterNineteen
Gia
The last few days with Joel felt like a dream. We spent all our time together, he barely let me lift a finger, claiming I needed to recover from my fall. And I fell a little more in love with him every day. But something was still missing. We hadn’t had ‘the talk’ about what our future might look like and I was starting to feel restless. As much as I loved the life we were building together, I knew he would eventually need more and so would I.
I was out in the stables, feeding the horses when Johnny walked in. “Hey, Johnny,” I said, feeding a few sugar cubes to my favorite horse, Stardust.
The Wheelers got Stardust the year I turned sixteen and I’d loved riding her ever since. Even after Joel moved away, Mr. Wheeler told me I could come over and ride her whenever I wanted to, and I took him up on the offer whenever I needed to clear my mind.
“You must miss riding her, with your leg in a cast and all.”
