Page 161 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

HE DIDN’T SLEEP. But he watched her. Curled up there on the bed, until the sun came through the window again.

He did that. Every night. He dozed for a little while, and then he watched her sleep.

He didn’t know why he had that horrendous sense of time being short.

Perhaps because he had all of his life. Because that was what happened when you felt old by the time you were eighteen. The idea that time was short was prevailing.

It was constant, and relentless.

And she made him want to fight against it, rather than live a life in weary acceptance.

He’d come to this place to fix it up, so that he could leave it. He didn’t even know why he had decided to fix it up instead of raze it to the ground. Maybe it was because he wanted the money, but it was more than that. He had money.

Yeah, he wanted to make the place a ranch, a place for himself. Someday.

But he didn’t need the money from this place to do that. Not every last penny that he was planning on getting out of it, so what was the point really?

Why was he really here?

As he looked at Shayna, her red hair spilled across the pillow that she was sleeping on, he thought he might know the answer to that, but his stomach went tight in rebellion at the thought.

She was too beautiful. To perfect, too soft. It was what he had been trying to tell her when he explained about his life.

He was not the kind of man for her.

Except... How could they be so right, then? How could they fit like this?

How could he have found a woman who called to the darker things in him, and asked them to come out and play? Who seemed to delight in them, in spite of the fact that she had been an innocent before they’d been together.

It was like she’d been waiting for him. And suddenly, his heart jumped in his chest, and he had the strangest sensation that he had also been waiting for her.

Just for her.

He got out of bed, without thinking. He pulled on his jeans, and took a last look at her as he headed out the front door.

He walked slowly down the path that took him to the house he was building.

And he looked out over the view.

The view. The view his father hadn’t been able to enjoy. The view they hadn’t had, because they had been carrying on misdeeds in the darkness. He’d had all these thoughts. He’d confronted this already. What was the lesson? Because there was a lesson.

He knew that there was.

And most of all, there was Shayna. And she was glorious and beautiful and everything that he’d ever wanted.

But there was this place. This place. Where his father had terrorized them all, where they had been built on a foundation of moonshine and violence.

When he had gotten to the point that he had decided to agree to rob a store with his father because he couldn’t see a way off of the path until he had been pushed from it. Until he had been arrested. Until he’d been sent to prison. Then. And only then.

It didn’t make sense. None of this did.

How he had gone from there, to here. To her.

And how he could...

She said she loved him. Love. That word had captivated him from the first moment she’d said it. And that first time she hadn’t even said she loved him. But he’d felt it all the same. Like a balm for his soul.

And he had toyed around with saying it near her, about other things, because it made him feel something light.

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