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I stare downat my daughter in my arms: Amethyst Noel Slade. She’s so tiny. I count her fingers again, her lips pursing.
“She has your button nose.” I can’t keep the smile off my face.
“She has your eyes.” Dolly smiles, her eyes heavy with sleep. She was a champ. She was in labor for 11 hours, pushed for 20 minutes, and just like that, our baby girl was here.
“You look just like your mama,” I tell her.
My heart feels so full. I never understood what people meant when they said you feel such an intense love the moment you see and hold your child for the first time, but now I do.
“I think she’s hungry.” She purses her lips again, her nose wrinkling as she begins to cry. I hand her back to Dolly, who holds her to her breast so she can eat. “You’re a pro already.”
I settle into the bed next to her, wrapping my arms around my wife and daughter.
“What time is your family coming?”
“I told them to give us some time so you can rest. They’ll be here around 3.”
“Hard to believe we made her, isn’t it?” We smile as we look down at her. “She’s going to be surrounded by so much love.”
“Yes, she is,” I agree. “And she’s going to grow up to be an amazing woman just like her mother.”
“What’s one thing you want her to know that you wish you knew when you were younger?”
I pause for a few moments, thinking through a million things I wish I had known as a kid that I know now. Who doesn’t wish they could go back and tell their younger self things? Sometimes it wouldn’t make a difference, because there are some life lessons we just have to learn on our own.
“I’d tell her to follow her heart—to not be too scared to say the words that express how she feels. To embrace love and share it with the people in her life, because we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. And most importantly, I want her to know that even if life doesn’t go the way she’d planned—the way she thought it would—it doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. We never know what twists and turns it might take, and we never know when we’ll be offered a second chance at forever.”
Want more? Read Brooklyn and Tyler’s story inThat Feeling.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW HER, I KNEW SHE WAS TROUBLE—THE KNOCK-YOU-ON-YOUR-ASS KIND OF TROUBLE YOU SPEND ALL NIGHT PRAYING NEVER ENDS AND A DECADE TRYING TO FORGET.
I told myself not to give in, but she’s a defiant little thing that needs to learn a lesson about teasing a man like me.
Those full hips wrapped in skin tight denim taunted me as she rode that mechanical bull.
Her cherry red lips begging me to taste them.
She’s one ofthosegirls—Mysterious, driven, all kinds of sexy.
So tell me why, come Monday morning, she’s sitting across from me at our quarterly board meeting as the new director of social media for Slade Brewing, my family company.
Brooklyn Dyer isn’t just a transplant from Chicago looking for the next step in her career, she’s kind of technically…my new boss.
I wish that was the worst of it, but next thing I know, she’s got me shirtless on a horse posing as the model for her national social media campaign and my heart wrapped around her finger.
Just about the time I think I can let my guard down and embrace these new feelings, life takes a turn when a pining ex shows up, there’s a baby on the way and some seriously dangerous drama unfolds that could change our lives forever.
She’s one ofthosegirls alright.
The kind that makes you wish you hadn't walked away when you did.
The type that makes you feel sorry for her exes when you realize what they lost.
The type that makes you want to finally stop fighting that feeling.
CHAPTER 1-TYLER
“Tyler, you’ll be manning the mechanical bull this year.”
