Page 17 of Adore Her

“I’m not. It’s as simple as that.”

Jude rubs his jaw as he stares out across the lake. I drag my gaze out across the water, too. There’s no one out there right now. But the surface is slowly undulating, unable to come to a complete standstill.

“I’ve been looking out for her—protecting her—for her whole life,” he says.

“I get that, Jude,” I say. “I know you’re just trying to protect her from getting her heart broken. But has it occurred to you that if you force her and me apart, that’s going to break her heart, too? You’re letting your good intentions do more harm than good.”

Jude doesn’t say anything.

“Trust me, man,” I say. “I want what’s best for her too. If that meant giving her up, I’d suck it up and let her go. It would kill me, but I’d do it.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious. I would never try to force her to be with me. I’d never try to make her do something she didn’t want to do.”

A heavy minute of silence passes. Then, finally, Jude blows out a long breath. “It’s gonna take me time to get used to seeing the two of you together, dude.”

“Totally fair.”

“But I’ll get there. Eventually.” Jude looks over at me. “Hey, remind me to never get in a fight with you again, okay? It felt like you broke my fucking nose.”

I laugh. “Sorry, man.” I reach over and give his shoulder a squeeze. “So are we okay?”

“Yeah. We’re good.”

When we embrace in a hearty hug, I know he means it.

As we break from our hug, I catch sight of Cora. She’s up on the lawn, and even from here I can see how relieved she looks to see Jude and I make peace.

God, she’s so fucking beautiful.

Jude looks over at her too, then back at me, then laughs. “Jesus. You should see your face right now. You reallyarein love.”

“I told you I was.”

“Just promise me you two aren’t going to run off to Vegas tonight and get married while the rest of us are sleeping.”

“What is that, a five-hour drive from here? Six?”

Jude stares at me.

“I’m kidding, man.” I slap him on the back. “Don’t worry. When I marry your sister, I’m going to give her the wedding of her dreams.”

9EPILOGUE –CORA

ONE YEAR LATER

“Do you, Cora, take Maddox to be your lawfully wedded husband, to cherish in friendship and love for the rest of your days?”

Before answering, I take a second to soak in everything about this moment, because I want to remember it vividly for the rest of my life. I want to remember exactly how magical it felt to stand up in front of our family and friends and say our vows to each other—and I want to be able to recall the way Maddox is looking at me right now, his gorgeous dark eyes so full of unending love and adoration.

Six months ago, when Maddox got down on one knee and proposed, I started crying with joy, blubbering ayes, of course I’ll marry youthrough my tears. After my tears dried, I looked down and gasped at the sparkling engagement ring Maddox had slipped on my finger. My first reaction was that it wastoonice, and I tried to talk Maddox into letting me downgrade it for something more modest, especially because he had already been so generous with funding the yoga studio.

But Maddox refused to let me settle for a less expensive ring. And in the months that followed, he made sure that everything stayed on track for us to have a dream wedding. The fact that he was so involved with planning our wedding made me fall in love even harder with him—and also reinforced my hypothesis that he would someday be an incredible father to our future children.

When I told him that, the biggest grin spread across his lips and he said, “How soon can we start trying?”

We talked about it a lot that night and decided that we would start trying to get pregnant as soon as we got married. Neither of us wanted to wait any longer than that.

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