“Mmm. I could get used to this.”
The words should have scared me. Should have triggered all my usual defenses about getting too comfortable, about people leaving, about nothing good lasting forever.
Instead, they just made me hold her tighter.
“Me too.”
She made a soft, sleepy sound and within minutes her breathing had evened out into sleep.
I lay there, watching her, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing against my side. Afternoon sunlight caught in her hair, shining like copper strands. Her face was peaceful, relaxed, all the worry and stress of the past weeks smoothed away.
She trusted me enough to fall asleep in my arms. To be vulnerable with me. To tell me her fears and let me see the parts of herself she usually kept hidden.
And I felt something shift in my chest. Something that had been locked up tight for years cracking open.
Something that felt dangerously close to those three words I’d promised myself I wouldn’t think about. That I’d told myself it was too soon for, that this was supposed to be temporary and casual and not serious enough for feelings like that.
But lying here with Leigh in my arms, her trust given so freely, her presence in my life becoming as necessary as breathing, I knew I was in trouble.
Deep, serious, no-way-out trouble.
This was supposed to be temporary. Simple. Fun.
But it wasn’t any of those things.
It was becoming everything.
And I had no idea what I was going to do about it when August came and she left to go back to her life in Blue Point Bay.
No idea how I was supposed to just let her go.
No idea how I’d survived this long without her.
She stirred, made a soft sound, burrowed closer to me in her sleep.
I pressed a kiss to her hair and closed my eyes.
August. We’d figure out August when it came.
For now, I had this. I had her. I had today.
And maybe, just maybe, today would be enough.
Even though I was starting to suspect that nothing would ever be enough when it came to Leigh Pierce.
Not a summer. Not a lifetime.
Nothing would ever be enough.
Chapter 15
LEIGH
Emma’s Flower Shop was tucked between the hardware store and the café on Main Street, its windows bursting with color even from the outside. Buckets of sunflowers, roses, and wildflowers crowded the sidewalk display, and through the glass I could see more blooms in every shade imaginable.
It was exactly the kind of place you’d expect in a small town. Charming, established, the kind of business that had probably been here for decades.
I pulled into a parking spot across the street and sat for a moment, hands on the steering wheel, trying to calm my racing heart.
