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She gave his fingers a quick tight squeeze. “I think that’s a perfect plan for you, Sparky.” She opened the door and hopped out of her seat. “By the way, you’re buying and I’m totally getting three scoops.”
***
Jillian
Nine Years Earlier
Before Dean even had a chance to fully open the front door, she launched herself in his arms. As soon as she read the letter there was no one else she wanted to tell. She’d raced out of her house, through the backyard, beside Fredrock, making sure to run her hand across the surface for good luck, and up the cement stairs at the front of his house. No matter how many times his mother had told her to just walk right in, she always knocked.
“I got in!” She shrieked the handful of words as she squeezed his neck and the paper tighter. “I got in, I got in, I got in!”
He held her firmly against him and spun around in circles in the middle of the entryway. “Hot damn, I knew you would. Congrats, Jillybean.”
His parents emerged from one of the rooms near the back of the house, frowns firmly in place until the scene before them registered and their faces immediately morphed into amusement. In the half a second before Dean lowered her to the ground, she noted the older couple’s hands linked together and a mixture of jealousy and longing swept through her.
The affection his parents openly displayed toward one another and their children was like nothing she’d seen in her own.
A small smile tugged at her lips. Her grandparents, on the other hand, acted like newlyweds until her grandmother passed a few years earlier.
It was the exact kind of marriage she wanted for herself and for her children to see. Someday.
She banished the romantic ideations and held up the now wrinkled paper for display. “I got into Georgia State University. It’s one of the top schools for nonprofit management and they took me!”
His parents each offered congratulatory hugs and kisses. Mike Carlisle flicked his wrist and offered the same suspiciously mischievous grin his son sported way too often. “Looks like you came just in time for dinner. Where do you want to go to celebrate?”
“A field.” Dean piped up from behind her. “Something with lots of grass and dandelions so she can graze for hours.”
Jillian spun on one heel, propped her fists on her hips and glared at him. “Are you making fun of me because I’m vegetarian? Because I don’t want to eat living, breathing, adorable animals? Because I think that they are treated inhumanely and that we as smart, ingenuitive beings could do better?”
He blinked several times in rapid succession, his face completely void of all emotion. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
She looked back at his parents over her shoulder. “Do we really have to take him to dinner with us? It would be so much more enjoyable without,” she waved a hand up and down to encompass his six foot plus self, “that.”
The two adults laughed. Dean’s father grabbed his keys from the hook by the door and pulled his and his wife’s lightweight jackets from the adjacent closet.
Dean slung an arm over Jillian’s shoulders and steered her toward the exit that led to the garage. “You’d miss me.”
Three simple words he meant as a joke hit her in a funny way. She would absolutely miss him like crazy. Her grandfather, Henry, Frieda, and Dean. A small, but loyal group of people she knew loved her beyond a shadow of a doubt, even if she was the odd child who dressed like a hippie and took up unwinnable causes.
For the first time since she opened the letter and was overcome with total elation, her heart plummeted to her toes. Before climbing inside the back of the SUV as Dean held the door for her, she turned and wrapped her arms tight around his neck, forcing him to bend at the waist to avoid being choked.
“I will,” she whispered in his ear. “I will miss you so much.”
He pulled back and offered a cocky smirk. “Not a chance in hell you will. I’ll be driving down far too often for you to even have a chance to miss me.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dean
Present Day
He lay in the bed staring at the darkness created by his closed eyes, afraid to open them and be confronted with the possibility that last night was all an exceptionally realistic dream. When he finally peeped through barely parted lids, the mass of ginger waves splayed across his chest eased the band of tension that barely allowed him to breathe.
She moved slightly and he held every cell in his body at rigid attention until she stilled. When the soft puffs of air from her nose blew against his abdomen in a gentle, steady rhythm, he allowed himself to relax and commit every miniscule detail to memory.
This was a dream come true and an epic nightmare all rolled into one.
Damn it all to hell, he wished he could just grow a set and tell her that this wasn’t a fake marriage to him and he’d do anything if she’d give him a chance to prove he really loved her. Everything he should have said before falling into bed with her.
