Page 133 of Townshipped
Em pulls back and giggles. “You need to put me down.”
“Never,” I tease her, giving her a boost and resettling her in my arms.
Every reclusive instinct that led me to buy a farm on the outskirts of a small town has flown off somewhere far from here. I need her. I’m starved for Em after these last few weeks of waiting and wondering. I don’t care who’s watching or what they think of us right now.
She wiggles and her face turns pink. Her smile fills her face. “Aiden, seriously. Put me down now.”
Her voice is full of playfulness and tinged with the smallest amount of embarrassment.
“What if I don’t want to,” I tease her.
She leans her forehead on my shoulder and laughs a carefree laugh. “You have to. We’re in the middle of an airport.”
I reluctantly release her and she slides down me, linking our hands as soon as her feet hit the ground. We walk toward her carry-on which is splayed on the floor about twenty feet away from us.
“I think I’ve loved you since I met you,” I confess as we walk.
She turns to look up at me. “Really? How is that possible?”
“How could it not be possible? You’re it for me. I think I fell for you when you first opened your eyes and asked me if you were a goat farmer.”
She giggles. “I’m totally not a goat farmer.”
“But you could be. One day.”
She smiles up at me, her eyes a light-green crystal ball. And I read our future in them with a knowing clairvoyance.
We reach her bag and I let her hand drop so she can collect her belongings. As soon as she’s standing with her bag looped over her shoulder, our hands find one another again. It’s like we can’t stop touching each other, assuring ourselves the other one is here. We’re making up for the time we had to go without a touch or even a word from one another.
I think back to the first moment, the morning she woke up on the farm after her crash. She said her name was Em, and everything clicked in place. A jolt of awareness had run down my spine. There she was, this stranger with red hair, after I’d had those persistent dreams.
But I’m a practical man. I didn’t believe in love at first sight, so I ignored the spark at the time, even though something in me whispered,She’s the one.
As Em healed, my feelings for her grew stronger. And I kept fighting them for her sake, waiting for her story to become clearer, always wanting to protect her—especially from me and the intensity of what I began to picture for us.
A part of me just knew, while another part of me dismissed the possibility that the very thing I’d been teased about could actually be happening.
A woman dropped on my doorstep and we fell for one another.
“I think I’d been waiting all those years for you to come crashing into my life,” I tell her.
“And I’d been waiting for my white knight.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have a trusty steed,” I joke.
“We’ll just have to ride off into the sunset on your tractor,” she says.
“Or maybe on two goats,” I suggest.
“No! I know!” Em says. “We’ll ride tandem on Lily’s back.”
“I’m sure she’d love that,” I say laughing. “How about we take an airplane instead.”
EPILOGUE
AROUND SIX MONTHS LATER
Em
