AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Twenty-Seven
REESE’S WHOLE FACE lit up when Trent walked into her gallery. She seemed more beautiful every time he saw her, and yet again he wondered how he could have ever wanted to climb a corporate ladder instead of coming home to her. He’d been young, driven, and blind. So damn blind.
“Hi,” Reese said as she stepped around the counter and lifted her mouth to his. Their kiss went from zero to sixty in the span of a heartbeat and would have definitely turned into even more if Jocelyn hadn’t walked by and cleared her throat.
Trent and Reese were both laughing as they drew back. “I thought we were alone,” Trent said.
“You were. I was in the ladies’ room.” Jocelyn was laughing, too, as she said, “Go ahead; get out of here to kiss or whatever you want to do. Just don’t tell me about it. Well...not too many details, anyway.”
Reese and Trent headed out of the gallery, and as they began to walk down Old Mill Row, Trent couldn’t wait to fill Reese in on the shocking developments with his grandfather. “Chandler just deeded over the resort to me and my siblings.”
She stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “No way.”
“He said we’ve proved ourselves to him and that we deserve to own it. But there’s more.”
“More? My world is already spinning. I’m not sure I can handle more,” she said with a laugh.
“He also started talking about his regrets over how he treated Grandma Caroline. And then he warned me not to make the same mistakes with you.”
“Oh, Trent...” She squeezed his hand. “That’s so sweet of Chandler.”
“I never thought I’d hear the words ‘sweet’ and ‘Chandler’ in the same sentence.”
“I knew he was a softie at heart.”
“Only you saw that, Reese. Only you.”
“There have been so many changes recently,” she mused. “First with Quinn. And then with us.”
“All good changes,” he said as he pulled her into his arms to kiss her again in front of the whole world. “Great changes.”
“I know one thing that’s still the same, though,” Reese said. “How great the fried calamari at Charley’s Pub is. Have you been there since you’ve been back?”
“Not yet.” Because it had reminded him too much of Reese. When they were first dating they’d gone to Charley’s Pub every week, sometimes alone and sometimes with Trent’s siblings or their friends. They’d often stayed for hours, talking and laughing. “We should go there for dinner.”
Charley’s was located on the corner of West and Main, beside Island View Pharmacy. Trent pulled open the heavy wooden door. “Mm,” they said in unison as the scent of seafood wafted toward them. They claimed the table in the corner that they used to call their own. Trent slid in beside Reese and draped an arm over her shoulder. She snuggled against him as the waitress took their orders.
Two televisions were mounted behind the bar, one set to ESPN, the other to CNN. A handful of guys sat at the bar drinking, but the pub wasn’t very busy otherwise. There were a few couples sitting in the tables around them, but sitting in the booth with Reese like they used to felt to Trent like they were all alone in their own little world.
“Does it feel like no time has passed?” Reese asked. “Or like we haven’t been here in forever?”
“So much of what we do feels familiar,” he told her. “But at the same time, it’s all brand-new. What about for you?”
“Being here throws me back to when we were first dating, but just like you said, it doesn’t feel the same as it did then. At nineteen, I had no idea I was so young. That we were both so young. I thought we had it all figured out, that nothing could stop us.” She looked pensive as she said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about things. About the past...and the future, too. The truth is that ten years ago neither of us really knew what we wanted out of life. The problem wasn’t just that we weren’t good communicators—it was that even if we had been, we didn’t know ourselves well enough yet back then to be able to honestly tell each other what we needed to be happy. But if we had met a few years later, once we were older and wiser...”
“No matter when we met, I would have fallen in love with you.” He kissed her before adding, “But what you’re saying makes a lot of sense. I loved you when you were nineteen, I love you now at twenty-nine, and I’ll still be loving you just as much at eighty-nine.”
She picked up her wineglass. “To new and old coming together.”
“And to building a love that will last.”
* * *
BY THE TIME Charley’s had their last call, they were both a little tipsy, and Reese was sure she looked like she was swooning over Trent as much as he looked like he was desperately in love with her.
