Page 147 of Waiting For A Girl Like You
The air he breathed, the heart hammering in his chest, the blood in his veins—every bit of it belonged to her.
Laura Jean was everything.
The other half of his soul, she filled the blank spaces in him. Spaces created by the careful chipping away of his own doing. Dark deeds and dirty deals hollowing him into a shell that wasn’t worth anything.
A machine no one could love.
But she loved him.
She made him whole, the missing piece of his puzzle. Click. Perfection personified with the union.
It would hold him. For an eternity, the love he held for her would seal their destiny together. Tied tight like a string, knotted with one end in him and the other in her.
Forever.
“What are you thinking about?”
With her back to him and little Jamison on her hip, Laura Jean stood a few feet away on a dune’s peak. The wind whipped about, coming off the waves and sending her beautiful blonde hair flying around her in a tornado of silky tresses. Their other children played on theshore. Three small figures looking for shells while he examined the remains of his family’s old beach house lying in ruins on the sand.
No.
This wasn’t right.
Jamison shouldn’t be here. The skeleton of his old beach house was long gone by the time their princess was born. The structure had been peeled from the earth when they renourished the beach to make it strong again. Strong enough to build their home here.
A castle.
He had built Laura Jean a castle among the dunes, rising high in the sky so she could see the entire expanse of white and the spectacular emerald shade of the water that matched her eyes.
“Laura Jean?”
The laughter of their children ceased, dying abruptly on a gust of salty sea air. In a panic, he scanned the beach but saw nothing. No Selah, nor Samuel, nor Evie. No Jamison on Laura Jean’s hip.
Above them, the sky turned over on itself, too fast for his eyes to track. Night entered and erased the multicolored sunset, leaving a sea of stars to carve out a place in the darkness.
Laura Jean raised her arms high, her hands clawed. “Find him.”
She whispered the demand, the night and earth pulsing with her will. The scene should scare him or, at the very least, set him on edge.
But it didn’t.
It never did.
These whispers of what the world deemed unnatural were completely natural with Laura Jean. Loving her had only made it easier to accept.
“Find him.”
Her repeated order shot through his chest, pulling at his heart with enough force that he thought the organ might shoot out the back of his body.
“Who?” He couldn’t breathe; oxygen ripped right from him. “Who do I need to find?”
Laura Jean’s clawed hands slammed down to her sides. She spun in a dizzying whirl and faced him as the wind went silent, leaving nothing but his ragged breathing. Wild emerald eyes overfilling with pain met his, and the woman he loved above all others glared at him with absolute rage.
The sight shockedhim. Seeing her this way shocked him to his very core, and when another slice of her anger seared through him, it nearly knocked him to his knees.
“Talk to me,” he begged. The stars continued to twinkle, battling with the rotation of night. Comets and other celestial objects joined in on the dance, weaving through the sky as they worked to craft a screaming kaleidoscope of space. “Laura Jean?”
“Find him.” She took heavy steps down the dune, a crackle of lightning shooting out along the beach. Strike after strike, bolts of electricity rained down upon the shore, sending sand exploding into the air. “Samuel! Find your father!”
