Page 105 of Stuck with my Mechanic Daddies

Maybe we could do this. Maybe Lawson wasn’t as untouchable as he thought.

I just had to make sure we gave them a reason to believe we could win.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Aurora

I was runningout of time.

The old grandfather clock in the corner of Page Turners might as well have been ticking just for me.

Two more days. That was all I had.

Fuck.

If I sold the bookstore, I could walk away. I could go back to the life I built for myself before all of this. Before Medford. Before the Grady brothers.

My career would be intact. No messy legal fights. No threats looming over me.

But if I stayed…

I exhaled sharply, pressing my palm against the cool glass.

If I stayed, I risked everything. The bookstore. My future. My safety.

And not just mine.

My fingers hovered over my stomach, barely touching, like I was afraid to acknowledge what I already knew. It wasn’t obvious yet, not to anyone else.

But I felt it. The smallest changes, the way my body wasn’t just mine anymore.

I had a baby to think about.

The thought sent a wave of something fierce through me. Protectiveness, maybe. Fear. Both.

I closed my eyes, trying to drown out the noise in my head.

The logical choice was to sell. Cut my losses. Take the out while I still had one.

But when I looked around the bookstore, saw the shelves my uncle had spent years curating, the notes in his messy handwriting still scribbled in the margins of his ledgers, I felt something twist in my chest.

This place had been his dream. And in some strange, impossible way, it had become mine, too.

It was almost as ifThe Adventures of Rosie and the Bookshop Dragonwas playing for real in my head.

I’d heard about the town meeting. About Mason, standing in that town hall, fire in his eyes as he told Lawson he didn’t own this town.

About Owen, steady and certain, telling people they had to fight.

About Ethan, carrying the weight of it all, refusing to let Medford go down without a battle.

They had my back.

They believed in this town.

And, God help me, I kind of did, too.

I turned away from the window, exhaling slowly. I wasn’t ready to make a decision yet, but one thing was clear—Medford wasn’t just some stop on my way to somewhere else.

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