Page 67 of Ardently Yours

“You two are cute,” she says, munching on a piece of bacon. “A little piece of advice. Don’t let our anything or anyone discourage you two from being in love.”

“Love?” I ask, choking on my food.

I cough and take a big gulp of my orange juice, slamming my hand on the countertop.

How does she know that we’re in love?

Georgiana is closest to me, so she leans over, about to pat me on the back, but I hold up my hand to let her know I’m okay.

Still, Will asks me, “You good over there, Boss Lady?”

There’s something about the way he asks the question. I peer over at him. I can see that he’s looking at me, but he turns away so quickly, his back to me, that I wonder if he caught what happened before my coughing fit.

I’ve got to give him credit for at least looking over to see if I’m okay. But I know he probably heard what I said.

Love? Of course, I love him. I know I do. But when did that happen? He told me he loved me when we were in the kitchen hours ago. I didn’t say it back. But I feel it. I just don’t know if I should.

Am I moving too fast? It seems a bit soon for that, and when his sister said it, I reacted. And then there’s the fact that he called me Boss Lady. I know he teases me when he calls me that, but I just realized that last night and most of yesterday he called me by my first name, and I called him by his.

We don’t usually do that. Not that often. I feel like nicknames are more our thing. But there was something about the way he said Boss Lady. The way he turned his back to me before I could see his expression.

It’s like he gave me the cold shoulder or was blocking me out somehow. And it makes me want to take back my question. It makes me want to make a joke or say something that makes him laugh and forget all about it.

But then I think, what can he expect from this? We’ve been friends for months, always saying something witty to one another. Then we decide to fake date and everything has changed. And we’re supposed to be in love now?

My mood turns somber, but I play it off by stuffing my mouth with more food. At least Will is a great cook. That’s something I already knew because he likes to brag about what he makes for himself when he’s back at the inn, now that they have a self-serve kitchen setup.

But I guess I’d never actually tasted his cooking before. His baked goods, yes. And whatever he makes me at the cafe. But not like this. Not a full breakfast menu.

I think about love as I eat. I was in love before. When I fell in love with Billie, we were younger, and I was eager.

It’s like I fell head over heels before I even realized that I did. That was the first and only time I’ve ever been in love. And I know now, as I finish off my eggs and gulp down the rest of my orange juice, that love is something that feels foreign to me in the romantic sense.

I love my family, even though they are a lot of drama most of the time. I love my friends because they get me and they keep me grounded. I love my job because I’ve worked so hard to build something from the ground up, and I’m so grateful to God that I don’t have to work for somebody else.

I love the Lord and going to church, and that kind of love is different from all the others. It’s something that fills me and pours into everything that I do.

But falling in love? That’s not something I’ve been able to do for a while.

When I took Wickham up on his offer, I was feeling something. Not love. More in the like territory. We had been flirting on and off forever, and it just made me feel like I was that girl back in high school who had a crush on him.

And I know that’s all it was. A crush.

But here I was, with a failed fake dating experiment with a friend, a failed situationship with a local police officer I’d had a crush on in high school, and an almost husband who left me, then popped back into town expecting me to just love him again.

But what am I supposed to do with all of that? And what am I supposed to do with love now that I’ve been hurt, tricked, and left behind?

I believe in love. I believe that my parents love each other, even though Mama is a handful. I believe that my oldest sister and her husband are in love. She’s also a handful and the most like Mama at times, but they seem to balance each other out.

I believe that Nic and Jay are madly in love, and when I see them it makes me so happy because two of my friends ended up together. One of them is one of my best friends in the whole wide world, and knowing that she’s happy with the one God has for her makes me believe in falling in love again.

But I believe it for her. I even believe it can happen for other people. I don’t think I ever realized that I stopped believing it could happen for me. As the word love echoes over and over in my mind, I blankly stare at my plate, eating the last remnants of my delicious breakfast.

I don’t say much as Will and his sister chat about heading back to the hospital to see their dad. Because I can’t pull myself out of the thought process of how I ended up here, in the childhood home of Will Darcy, wondering whether I could ever fall in love with him. Too scared to acknowledge the truth that I may already be falling before I even realized it.

“Lizzie?” Will calls my name.

I blink him into focus. He’s looking over at me from across the kitchen island, sitting opposite his sister.