Only One You: A Second Chance Romance

by Tia Lewis

  “But you left me hanging for so long. And you still haven’t told me why. If I’m going to build a life here, I need to know you’re not just going to change your mind one day.” She squared her shoulders and lifted her jaw. “I couldn’t go through that again.”

  I leaned against the wall with a sigh. Good thing the cold rarely bothered me. “I was a kid. I was scared. I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground in those days.”

  “None of us did,” she reminded me. “We were all just kids.”

  “You were never a kid,” I chuckled. “You were always grown up. You always knew what you wanted.”

  “What I thought I wanted.”

  “There was nothing wrong with wanting more than what you grew up with. I just didn’t want what I had already seen.”

  “What didn’t you want?” she asked. She stood next to me, then leaned her head on my shoulder.

  “I didn’t want to get left. Love ends, somebody leaves. That’s how it went in my house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I blew out a long, deep breath before continuing. “There were a lot of things I didn’t tell you about my life back then. You were going through enough. I didn’t want to weigh you down with the shit my parents put me through. I can’t blame my mom, of course. She didn’t want to get sick. But Dad? Yeah. I blame him.”

  “I thought his company transferred him to Philadelphia.”

  I shook my head. “Did you really believe that?”

  She stood up straight and stared at me. “That’s what you told me.”

  “He did go to Philadelphia, but it wasn’t for his job. He left us. Mom, really, but I got included in that.”

  “He left? Like…left for good?”

  I nodded. “A real Prince, right? Just when she needed him the most. Not to mention me.”

  Her hand rested on my shoulder. “Sweetheart, there’s nothing wrong with being hurt because your father was a jerk. What kind of cold person do you have to be to leave your sick wife?”

  “The kind of jerk who doesn’t want to be the husband of a sick woman anymore. You remember him. He was good looking, he was still young—they were only eighteen, nineteen years old when I was born. So he was a little younger than I am now when he left Mom. He had the rest of his life ahead of him, and he wanted a healthy woman.”

  “You’ve done some thinking about this.”

  “I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, haven’t I?” I laughed a little. “It’s not easy. Something I had to do a long time ago was put myself in his shoes.”

  “I had to do the same thing with my mom—put myself in her shoes, I mean.”

  I nodded. “But that wasn’t until maybe ten years after he left, you know? When I was seventeen, eighteen years old, it was a lot more raw. No matter how many times I thought it over, how many directions I looked at it from, one thing kept coming back. Love doesn’t last. It always ends. Somebody gets left.”

  I leaned the back of my head against the wall. I had never spoken the words before. It was like opening a trunk that had never been opened and listening to the hinges squeak. “And you always wanted more. You were smart; you had everything going for you. And you had worked damn hard for your scholarship. You were gonna go out into the world and meet new people and see this bigger existence. Know what I mean? There was no chance that you would still want me after that.”

  “You didn’t know that, though.”

  “As an adult, I get that, but I was a kid. I didn’t know any better. I was scared, and I didn’t want to admit that, either.”

  “You should have talked to me.” She wasn’t angry. She was sad. I heard it in her voice, I felt it in the way she rested her head on my chest. “I would’ve told you how wrong you were.”

  “You couldn’t have known before you went to school how you were gonna feel when you were in school.” I wrapped my arms around her. It felt almost too good to have her that close. “I didn’t want to take the chance. It was easier to go through losing you on my terms. That was what I told myself.”

  “It wasn’t easy for me. I didn’t want to lose you. I loved you so much.”

  “I loved you.”

  “I still love you.” Her voice trembled a little when she said it, and I felt her relax in my arms when it was out there.

  I stroked her hair and pressed my lips against the top of her head. “I still love you, too. I’ve always loved you. You’re the only thing in my life that’s ever completely made sense. No matter where I’ve gone or what I’ve done, you’ve always been there. Twenty years can’t erase that kind of love.”

  She sniffled. “Don’t make me cry. My tears will freeze up. It’s too cold out here for this.”

  “I would say we should go inside, but I think I’m frozen to the wall.” We laughed together the way we had been doing since we were little.

  Jake came out for a cigarette and saw us standing there in each other’s arms. “Get a room, you two.”

  “I think we’ll go inside first,” she smirked. “Then, we’ll see the way the night goes.”

  I woke up the next morning at my usual time, only I had a woman in bed with me. The only woman I wanted in my bed, ever.

  She was curled up on her side, the way she always slept. I was behind her with an arm around her waist. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I realized it wasn’t as dark as it normally was at that time of morning. There was more light coming through the windows thanks to the snow reflecting the light from the streetlamps. It was almost torture leaving her. It was so much warmer under the blankets.

  My first look out the window told me there was nearly a foot of snow on the ground, just like the weather people had predicted. It was still coming down, too, and the wind blew what had already fallen. There would be a lot of people out there who didn’t have a choice but to go into work, like the police and the plow drivers. They would need something hot to eat and drink. Then again, I could keep my own people safe by telling them to spend the day at home, or at least the morning. Once the roads were clear, we could talk about opening.

  “What will you do?” Amanda’s voice was thick with sleep. I turned from my place by the window to look back at her. She pushed herself up on one elbow and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered.

  “I know. But you did. So what will you do?”

  “I think I’ll call my people and tell them to stay home for a while.”

  “You? The slave driver?”

  I smirked at her as I picked up my phone. “Yeah. Me. The slave driver.” I got Debbie on the phone and asked her to call up the others. My woman was waiting for me in bed when I slid back between the sheets.

  “Have you turned over a new leaf?” she asked as I rolled her onto her back. She opened her thighs to invite me. Like I would turn down an invitation like that. I settled over her and slid my arms under her shoulders.

  “Maybe. Or maybe there’s somebody I’d rather boss around and force to fulfill my every deviant whim.” My mouth skimmed her throat and chest. I felt the vibrations of her soft groans.

  “Wow. That sounds pretty specific.” She wrapped her legs around my hips and held me close to her warm, soft body. It fit so perfectly with mine. The heat between her legs called to me. I couldn’t think of anything but being inside her. That was the funny thing about all the blood leaving my brain and going south.

  She lifted her hips to tease me a little more while I ran my tongue over her chest and down to her tits. Her pink nipples tightened in my mouth—first one, then the other. I moved back and forth, looking up at her to see the way she closed her eyes and gasped through her open mouth. Her hips started rolling in circles under me, which only made my cock harder. Her legs slid up and down my ass and thighs, closing tighter and tighter. She was dripping by the time I reached her pussy. I lapped at her swollen lips and listened to her moans and whimpers and knew I would pleasure her all day if I could. I could spend the rest of my lif
e tasting her spicy sweetness and watching as she got closer and closer to exploding. A flush spread over her chest and face and her body tensed. I sucked her clit a little harder and flicked my tongue across the tip, which was all it took to make her thighs tighten like a vice around my head while she screamed my name. There was nothing like hearing her scream my name like that.

  “How was that?” I muttered as I unrolled a condom and spread her legs again. Her eyes were closed, and her hair was a crazy mess. Her chest was rising and falling hard and fast as I positioned myself at her entrance—she was still quivering down there.

  “How do you think?” she whispered, then moaned as I slid home. We made slow, sweet love as the snow swirled around outside the windows.

  23

  Amanda

  “Off the record, I think you have a case,” I told my would-be client as we sat in my office, which was really nothing more than the dining room of Craig’s house. No. My house. One day, I would start thinking of it as my house. Sometimes I did, in a distracted sort of way, like if I wasn’t thinking about it. I would think of the house as mine and then give a surprised little start. Just one of the many things I had to get used to since his death. It would be a year in a few weeks.

  “Off the record?” My next-door neighbor, Mrs. Harris, stirred her coffee and looked hopefully at me from across the table.

  “Well, I don’t have my license to practice in Virginia yet, but this is my advice to you: next time, get a contract in writing when you sell a piece of property. I’d be more than happy to help you with that in the future. For now, threaten this jerk with legal action if he doesn’t pay you the rest of the money for the car. You have a verbal agreement, yes, but it’s one that was witnessed by your son and daughter-in-law. He agreed to give you a total of two thousand for the car and that number was irrespective of any work that needed to be done on the car. He should’ve done his homework before he agreed to buy.” I shrugged. “Also, next time, get all the money upfront.”

  She chuckled. “You know how it is. A friend of my son’s, he needed the car, I wanted to be helpful.”

  “Understandable. But when it comes to money, people get crazy.”

  “That’s the truth.” She looked around at the books and notepads spread across the table. “So you say you don’t have your license to practice in the state yet?”

  I shook my head. “I’m getting there. I should have it soon—the Virginia state bar exam is next month. It’s been a strange journey, putting it mildly.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I came back—well, you know that.” We’d had more than a few over-the-fence talks, coffee in hand. That was how people communicated with their neighbors in towns like that. We didn’t chat via social media or text. We got together and chatted face-to-face. How novel.

  I leaned back in my chair and sipped my decaf. “So I took my time.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Mrs. Harris insisted. “You’re young. You have plenty of time to decide what it is you want.”

  I laughed. “I’m not as young as I used to be, by a long shot. And I do want to practice law, but it won’t be the way I did it before. That’s a big mental hurdle to get over—no big-name firm, no big office at the top of a glass tower.”

  She smiled. “It sounds very fancy.”

  “Very fancy, and very not right for me. I only thought it was. But the law doesn’t have to be that way.” Just like medicine didn’t have to be the way it would’ve been for Craig had he not come home. He would’ve been at constant odds with other physicians, striving to bill and bill for the sake of pleasing the insurance companies. He’d wanted to do things his way. Just the way I wanted to do them from that point on.

  “So you’ll be the next Mr. Steadman?” Mrs. Harris’s eyes twinkled.

  “He could use the retirement,” I mused with a wink. “I wonder how he would feel about me replacing him, so to speak.”

  “There’s no replacing him, just like there’s no replacing Dr. Miller. It doesn’t matter how many doctors we have around here; there was only one of him. And there’s only one of you.” She reached across the patted my hand before standing. “You’ve already given me far too much of your time today.”

  “You know it’s no trouble.”

  “Just the same, I’ll leave you to it. I should get back and start dinner. My boy is bringing the baby over tonight.”

  I smiled wistfully as I walked her to the door, leaning against the doorframe with a soft sigh. We’d had the first frost the night before, and the air was crisp and cool. Halloween was coming soon—I’d had a ball decorating for it. That was one thing I never got to do in New York, and something I had always looked forward to seeing when I was a kid. Pumpkins sat at both sides of the steps, along with potted mums in yellow and orange. I’d brought them in when the weather man called for frost, so they were still fresh and vibrant in spite of the chill. There were garlands of silk leaves wound through the railing and around the pillars, and a ghost hung from the underside of the porch roof. It wasn’t bad for my first attempt.

  It was my house. It was my town. It was my life. Things were good—better than I could’ve imagined. Worlds away from what I thought they would be back when I was a kid and had the sort of sureness only a kid can have that I knew what I needed. It took finding what I didn’t need to see what was really important.

  It was going on four o’clock, and the light was getting that pretty, warm glow that only happened at a certain time of day in a certain time of year. I felt more peaceful than I could remember feeling in a long time, even with a bar exam looming in the not-so-distant distance.

  Dawson would be back soon from the diner. We’d decided he should move into my house rather than paying for rent on his own—besides, it was bigger and more comfortable, and I was there. It just made sense. And each day was better than the one before. I would never have imagined it. Life was never like that with Michael—we were roommates who had sex. I could see that after living with Dawson. Sure, our personalities clashed sometimes and he hated how I left clogs in the shower drain, while I kept my pitching arm in shape by chucking dirty socks at his head whenever I found them on the bedroom floor or wherever else he’d decided to drop them. But there was affection and a lot of laughter, too. After the final paperwork went through and he officially owned the diner, he’d taken steps to ease his schedule. He’d even tried spending weekend mornings at home with me, when we drank coffee together and read the paper in bed. Sure, there were mornings when I ended up going over there with him—somebody was out sick, that sort of thing—but for the most part, he did what he could to make sure we got our time together.

  We had a date that night, and I went upstairs to shower and change in preparation. Our dates weren’t typically fancy—we had an hour drive to Richmond if we wanted to get fancy—but it was a sure way to get time together, just the two of us. And after pizza and a movie, we always ended up in bed, which was never a bad thing. The sex was another thing that just got better and better. I glanced over at the bed as I undressed and smiled to myself.

  By the time I finished getting dressed and drying my hair, the front door opened and shut. “I’m home!” As always, my heart skipped a beat.

  “I’ll be right down!” I smoothed the front of my sweater over my chest and stomach, turning to check out my profile before taking a deep breath and heading down. I had big news for him, news which I hoped he would take as well as I had.

  Sometimes life threw a curve ball. It had when I made that drive south almost a year earlier, wearing my pajamas and last night’s makeup. It had when I walked in and saw Dawson standing there, in the same living room where we’d be eating our dinner. And it had when I found out I had a house of my own.

  It had that morning, too.

  He had set two pizza boxes down on the coffee table and was taking off his jacket when I reached the living room. “Two pizzas?” I asked, arching one eyebrow.
“I’m hungry, but I’m not that hungry.”

  “I was in the mood for something a little different.” He took me by the waist and planted a soft, sexy kiss on my upturned mouth.

  “Oh? Mr. Double Cheese and Pepperoni is mixing it up tonight? Wonders never cease.” I rested my head against his chest and breathed deeply. His cologne always stirred a mixture of feelings—comfort, calm, arousal.

  “I’m not that predictable, am I?”

  “The guys down at the pizza shop probably make a pizza for us every Friday night before we even call in the order.” I kissed him lightly and laughed. “But that’s just fine.”

  “The one on top is the special one. Take a look, see what you think.” I went over to the boxes without a second thought and flipped open the first one. It took a moment to understand what I was looking at. A pizza box that was empty except for one thing: a velvet box in the center.

  “What is this?” I whispered, covering my mouth with my hands as my eyes widened.

  “Open it. Find out.” His voice trembled just a little. In the small corner of my brain that was still thinking rationally, I was touched. He was actually nervous, wondering how I would respond. Like he had anything to worry about.

  I reached down and swung the top of the little box up on its hinge. And there it was. A diamond ring. All the hope I’d been carrying around in my heart ever since I came back exploded in a dizzying burst. It felt so right. Like something was sliding into place. At the same time, I was almost giddy with excitement.

  “Marry me?”

  I pried my eyes from the ring and focused on his face. He had all the joy and hope in his eyes that I’d always dreamed of seeing there. He looked like a teenager again, with the entire future ahead of him. But no, he wasn’t a teenager anymore. He was a man, the sort of man I wanted standing by my side for the rest of my life. The sort of man a woman dreamed of and swooned over and wished she could have for her own. He was my own. All I had to say was yes.

  “You know I will,” I whispered, running the tips of my fingers over the side of his face.