Page 114 of Ardently Yours

“Please do.”

The humor slowly leaves her expression, and she shakes her head. “I wish you’d told me about the money.”

“After graduation, we had so many important things to deal with that it slipped my mind.”

“How do you forget giving someone that kind of money?”

“I—” I close my eyes.

“What?” She sounds wary.

I tilt my head to the side. “On a scale of one to I-Want-an-Annulment,how”—I stretch the word out in a blatant attempt at procrastination—“would you rate finding out that I gave you a lump sum of $250,000 and called it a life insurance policy?”

Color leaching from her skin, she drops to the bed as though her legs have given out.

“Honey?” I sit beside her and brush her hair from her forehead.

“That money was part of Steve’s employment. He wanted to take care of us.” Her voice sounds small and lost.

“He wanted to,” I agree. “But he wasn’t here.”

“So you did.”

I thought she might be angry. Not once did it occur to me that she’d be hurt if she knew. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought it was him.” She covers her eyes. “The good things that happened in those first couple of years after he passed. I thought—But it was you.” Face crumpling, Charlotte twists her fingers together and looks at her hands. “Why, Arden? You didn’t even know me.”

“Because the world had kicked you in the teeth, and you didn’t deserve it. Because I looked at you holding yourself together at that funeral with nothing but your pride and the determination to take care of your child, and I remembered what that felt like. Because”—I lift one hand helplessly—“one day Steve Hunsic told me about an amazing girl with a contagious smile and showedme her photo, and I needed to know that girl was going to be okay.”

She buries her face in my shoulder. “Arden.”

“Causing you pain was the last thing I wanted.”

She nods her head and leans into me harder. “I know.”

When I lift her onto my lap, wedding gown fluffing around us, she curls into me, her tears soaking my shirt.

I made her cry on our wedding night. “I’m such an ass.”

She cups my jaw and shakes her head. “No, you aren’t, you beautiful man.”

“You’re crying, Charlotte.”

She smooths her fingers across my jaw and shakes her head. “When I saw the papers for RealFreedom, I didn’t assign you positive intent, but you were giving with no expectation of receiving anything in return, not even gratitude. I don’t need to be defensive with you.”

I hold her against me, utterly grateful for this woman. “Never.”

She lifts her head, her pale blue eyes holding mine. “It wasn’t luck or a ghost from my past telling me to keep going. It was never the universe teaching me to believe in happy endings. It was always you.”

Step Into Christmas

Charlotte

December 2001

The sugar cookies aresweet and colorful chaos. Four kids, wearing gingerbread aprons, perch on stools at the kitchen island with pastry bags of icing in hand.

Bronnie globs on another sploosh of green frosting. Her “tree” cookie has five inches of decoration piled on top of it.

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