Page 93 of Falling for a Grumpy Hero

He chuckled. “I’m glad it did. Thank you for waiting for me, baby. I know it can’t have been easy for you.”

“No, but it was worth it.” I squeezed him tight and closed my eyes, both of us exchanging I love yous late into the night until finally we drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms.

EPILOGUE

FORD

One Year Later

Icame home from a weekend trip to Florida to music so loud, it was rattling the windows. Rook bounded over when I opened the door, greeting me with what I could only describe as a healthy dose of disappointment to be seeing his other, not as important, human.

Considering the music, I knew the more important human was around here somewhere, though. I smiled as I walked into the house, leaving my carry-on next to the front door. My visit to Luke’s parents had gone well, but I was happy to be home.

Over the course of the last twelve months, I’d visited them a handful of times, and every time I went, I felt like another part of my hurt scabbed over. Being with them was soothing in a way I wouldn’t have expected, but seeing how they were carrying on while also carrying him with them every day had taught me how to do it myself.

He’d been my friend, but he’d also been their son, and sure, I had additional trauma stemming from the accident itself and my own recovery, but it still couldn’t hold a candle to theirs. All things considered, I’d learned that there was such a thing as healthy coping mechanisms and I’d started employing them.

“Lila?” I called as I walked deeper into the house, my footsteps muted not only by the deafening music but also the rugs she’d put down.

In fact, the whole house looked very different from what it used to be. Not only had Lila brought all her stuff here after I’d asked her to move in with me, but she was constantly working on the place. We now had art on the walls and framed photographs of us and our lives together mounted between the paintings.

There were overflowing bookshelves in the living room, populated by her after I’d let it slip that I had a secret love of reading. Especially fantasy and adventure books. It wasn’t a hobby I’d indulged in much after I’d gotten back from Afghanistan, but I’d rediscovered it after Lila had started buying the books.

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t seem to hear me calling her name. The music kept playing and she didn’t respond, but Rook trotted out ahead of me, heading to the den that, until now, I’d been using for storage.

That was where I found Lila—and the room definitely wasn’t a spot for storage anymore. She’d moved all the old, dusty boxes out and had cleaned up the odds and ends. Plastic sheeting covered the floor and she was rolling butter-yellow paint all over the walls and ceiling.

Dressed in overalls splattered with all different colors of paint, her hair was thrown into a messy ponytail right on top of her head and her feet were bare. She was singing along to the Taylor Swift song that was blaring from the speakers and she hadn’t noticed me yet.

Leaning against the door frame, I smiled as I watched her shake her ass, using the roller as a microphone every so often. As she bent over to swipe it through some more paint, she must’ve spotted me in her periphery because her spine suddenly snapped straight and she screamed.

“Ford!” Her hand flew to her chest, her eyes wide as she spun to face me. Reaching for the remote, she hit pause on the song and then laughed, racing over to me with joy lighting up her beautiful face. “You’re home!”

My heart tripped over itself. It’d been a whole year and I still couldn’t believe that I’d gotten so lucky. I caught her before she could smear her paint-covered body all over my clean clothes, then laid a searing kiss on her that burned through my entire body.

“I missed you,” I murmured against her hair, closing my eyes and breathing her in. “What are you doing, exactly?”

She laughed again and planted one more hard kiss on my mouth before she stepped back. “Just brightening the place up a little. It’s such a beautiful room and I couldn’t bear to have it just standing here, literally gathering dust.”

I chuckled, taking a quick look around and finding that she wasn’t wrong. It was a pretty nice room and it’d been a massive waste of space, just using it for boxes. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”

“Do you?” She wrung her hands in front of her, her gaze darting this way and that and her cheeks blushing a beautiful, rosy pink. “I know you don’t like yellow because it reminds you of sunshine and all that, but the room is south facing. It just needed color and I tried a few before I settled on this, but I figured you’d prefer yellow to red, which was the other option in the end.”

“I actually love the color yellow.” I smiled and reached for her hands, squeezing them and tugging her into me. Fuck the paint.

She laughed as she crashed into my chest, her eyes flying up to mine and her paint-streaked arms wrapping around my neck. “Hi.”

I planted a kiss on her forehead before I rested mine against it. “Hi.”

“Do you really like yellow?” she asked, her fingers toying with the hair at my nape. “I thought you hated it. When you first asked if I’d take on your house as a project⁠—”

“Our house,” I corrected, then I grinned. “And I know what I said back then, but I wasn’t in a place where I could appreciate the color at the time.”

“What about now?” she asked quietly. “What’s changed?”

“It reminds me of you,” I replied, and it wasn’t even just a line. It was the complete and total truth. “Dan told me once that he and his wife painted their entire first house yellow because it reminded him of the sun. You do that for me. The color just reminds me of your warmth and your light.”

She melted into me, properly smearing paint all over my chest as she lifted up on her toes and wrapped her arms around my waist. “I love you.”