Page 152 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

“Your dad is a preacher.”

“Yes, he is. All he ever wanted to do was serve the community. He grew up in a poor town off the freeway in Northern California. He served in a few different communities there, was at a few different churches. He landed here back in the eighties.”

“Ah, the eighties. I was born in those.”

“Ancient,” she said, her lips twitching.

“Nineties kid.”

“Yes. Though not really. I didn’t really do pop culture. And it wasn’t that my dad was overprotective, he just wasn’t into it. I really liked my childhood. It was different, but it didn’t need to be like anyone else’s to feel happy. It’s only that now...well, the last few months, since my birthday, I’ve been feeling like my life is stagnant. I haven’t always felt that way. I’ve been happy working at the church and doing community service. I’ve been happy living here. But I realized there was nothing marking the time. And my whole life was going to slip away. My dad... He was like that, I think. I think he meant to get married and have children. But he never did. He just settled into his life and before he knew it he was fifty and he’d forgotten to do some of the things he’d always intended to do.”

“That’s a different kind of life,” he said, his voice low. “Must be kind of nice. I felt like I’d lived ten lives by the time I was eighteen. By the time my arrest hit. You know, I figured I’d be dead by the time I was your age. Instead I was two years out of jail and figuring out what that looked like. There was at least some structure in there.”

“Was it...horrible?”

He shrugged. “My life was a war zone before I went in there. It was rough and there were rules to learn. But I’m good at avoiding the wrath of abusers. I did it all my life. I know how to bait a fight when I’m in the mood to do that, but I can also stay clear of it if I want. I read a lot, in prison. Got my GED.”

She felt a small surge of...pride. “That’s really great.”

“I didn’t take the chance for granted. I actually didn’t want to be my dad, not ever. But I was also tangled up in his world, and in his morals. Which weren’t good, not at all. It jarred me, the arrest, because I realized if I didn’t change, it would be the first of many. I didn’t think I was like my dad. I judged my dad.” He let out a rough-sounding breath. “I still do, if I’m honest. But I’ve seen how it can be when you slide from the life you were raised in right into a life of crime. I can see how that works, I can see how you feel like you know the whole world and how it works by the time you’re eighteen because you’ve been living rough, living to survive. I wouldn’t say it gave me sympathy for the devil. But it did make me realize at some point I had to make a choice that was my own. It wasn’t enough to be superior and just think... I’m better than that guy. I had to decide.”

She nodded slowly. “I think that’s amazing.”

“Well, don’t go thinking I’m too amazing. I’m just a white-trash idiot from the mountains who decided to be less of an idiot, because I got put in a cell long enough to take a break from my life and make better choices.”

She rested her chin on her hands. “But that’s true of everyone. I made the easy choices until a different one was in front of me. Until I fully realized I had to decide. And the only reason I was coasting along in an easy, ‘good’ life was because it was the one I was born into. We all make choices. You were starting from a much different place than I was.”

“That is the truth,” he said.

It was getting late and she knew she should go, but she didn’t want to.

So when he cleared the dishes away and then took her hand and led her to the bedroom...she let him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE SUN CAME up and shone through the window, gold and pretty, and tangled through her red hair. She was like the sunrise, right in his bed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent the night with a woman. Maybe he had, in those blurry years after prison when he’d been fueled by desperation. But it hadn’t been this.

What a jarring, weird-ass thing to have it be in this house.

This house that, until now, had been the site of nothing more than pain and bad memories.

But now there was Shayna, and he truly didn’t know what to do with that. With this person who came here to be with him, and simply for no other reason. Unless this was an upgraded version of charity for her.

Dinner and sex.

He hoped not. Because when he’d shared with her it had been real. The furthest thing from charity. It was the most he’d ever given another person and he wanted to think it was the same for her.

It was strange. She was very sweet, and she was innocent. He believed that. But she was also hungry. Maybe those two things weren’t incompatible.

They couldn’t be, because she contained them both.

And she did it well.

She stirred and stretched, the blankets falling below her breasts, and his body stirred and stretched in response.

She opened her eyes, and there in the sunlight he saw that her eyes weren’t simply gray. They were flecked with blue and silver. The sky and the sea. All right there.

“Good morning,” she said.

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