Page 66 of Share with Me

“Only what Grandpa Brooks told me. Then, of course, I found out from Yun yesterday that some of what Grandpa said to me didn’t match up with her Bible.”

“That’s Grandma for you. You should see what she tells Pastor Gonzalez from time to time.It doesn’t match up!”

“Pastor Gonzalez? Seaside Chapel?”

Ivan nodded.

Brinley thought it was interesting that he didn’t invite her to his church.

“Speaking of which, what time is it?” Ivan asked.

She checked her watch. “Only two thirty.”

“Only? You don’t enjoy being with me?” Ivan folded his arms.

“I’m saying we’ll have enough time to get lunch—if Barbara Jean’s is not too crowded—and then get back to church.”

“It could take us fifteen or twenty minutes to get down, unless we tumble down, in which case we could be dead.”

Brinley punched his arm playfully. “This high elevation doing a number on your head?”

“The proximity with a beautiful lady is.”

“I’m not—”

“Yes, you are.” He lifted her chin. “Don’t shortchange yourself. God made you beautiful and that’s the way it is.”

“He made me plain.”

“You’re not plain. The word that has been in my mind ispleasant. You’re pleasantly beautiful.”

Brinley looked up into his eyes in interesting colors of light brown and dark green hues with specks of gold. Hazel eyes. She could easily stare at them for hours, but he didn’t let her as he closed his eyes and stopped her further thoughts with a lingering kiss so sweet and light and full of promises of more to come.

She thought about all that on the way down the steps, noisy now with thumping sounds and chattering voices coming up toward them. They passed the same tourists they had met at the pier earlier. When they reached the ground floor, they decided to skip the museum and go eat.

Pleasantly beautiful.

And lovingly kissed.

Twice.

What did it mean? Ivan had called her beautiful. Everyone knew she was plain Jane with the brown straight hair. If not for her bank account, she’d be a spinster like Aunt Ella.

But Ivan?

He was poor. Had to be.

He probably didn’t know, but coming down the stairs, she had spotted the lost threads at the seams on the back of his barn jacket that looked old, like maybe he got it from his grandfather. He should patch that rip up, but if it were up to her, she’d chuck it and buy a new one.

Maybe I could get him a new—

No.

She had revealed too much of herself to Ivan as it was. Getting someone to show up in twenty minutes to fix his family home commode had cost more than the usual call to a plumber. Driving Dad’s million-dollar Bugatti Veyron about town like it were some putt-putt car made the Brooks family look like they threw money around. Surely his brother, Quincy, by way of her sister, Zoe, had told Ivan a lot more than he needed to know about the Brooks family, their holdings, estates, global empire—whatnots, really, compared to the meaning of life, whatever that was.

Ivan McMillan could be like Phinn, Crispin, or Xander. Or worse.

At least her ex-boyfriends had their own fortunes and inheritance. Ivan had nothing.

If you were dirt poor, wouldn’t you want money?

It was time for Brinley to run back into the castle where no one could touch her. It was safe inside the fortress. Out here in the wild, among the peasants, she could get robbed blind.

But the kisses…

His kisses.

They were real.

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