by Jill Shalvis
Hand to her heart, she stared at it. “I thought you just said—”
“I wanted to give you an optional ending.”
“Okay,” Gray whispered to Penny. “That’s a good one. I’ll give him that.”
Bailey stared at the box and surprised Hud when her eyes filled. “But seriously, what if?” she whispered softly, her hand over the port scar on her chest.
He tipped her chin up to look into his eyes. “Listen to me carefully, Bay. You’re so incredibly strong, and I love that about you. I love you.”
Her eyes filled. “I love you too.”
“So you get that the best part about being one-of-two is that if something happens and your strength fails you, I’ll be strong for you. I’ll never let you down again.”
She stared at him for a long time and he waited, trusting her to come to the same conclusion, that together they could face anything. “I signed up for the duration,” he said. “For the good, the bad, the ugly, everything. I’m in this, all the way in, Bailey. The question is, are you?”
She shifted, a barely there movement, but it brought her even closer to him and she smiled, letting him see what he meant to her. Holding his gaze, she finally took the box and opened it—and gasped again at the diamond ring.
“Options,” he murmured. “That’s all it is.”
She nodded and then shook her head. “I don’t need options,” she whispered. She slid the ring onto her finger and then tilted her head up to his. “I just need you.”
Epilogue
Three months later…
Bailey stood on the bow of the boat, toes over the edge, arms out, head back, eyes wide open on the huge, unbroken sky, having her Titanic moment.
She’d passed another round of tests with flying colors. The words cancer and free were starting to really take root, the reality being that the future she’d spent so many years never daring to hope for was really hers for the taking.
Her heart felt so full it might burst at any second.
She and Hud hadn’t set a date. They’d made no wedding plans at all, or further discussed it. She was very, very happy with that, happy and content to just be for a while—with the man she loved.
He’d taken her to the glaciers in Canada last month. They’d climbed them and she’d stood on the top of the world and had grinned from ear to ear. They’d gone dogsledding—the thrill of a lifetime.
And then they’d made love in the hot springs beneath gently falling snow.
They were working their way down her list. This month was the Greek Islands.
“Good?” rumbled a sexy low voice in her ear.
“So good.” She sighed, utterly content. Hard not to be with Hud standing just behind her, bracing her body safely in the haven of his, his arms wrapped firmly around her. He wouldn’t let her fall.
Not ever.
Of course it also helped that there was no wind and… the boat was moored. They’d been in the islands for a week, since the day after the resort’s ski season had ended.
Before they’d left, Carrie was good, Jacob reportedly was still on tour and safe for the time being, and all was as good as could be.
Penny had been making noises about adding a baby to their insanity, and Gray had brought her home a puppy to practice on.
Aidan and Lily were looking at dates for a wedding.
Kenna hadn’t gone off the rails.
And best yet, Bailey had never felt better.
Knock on wood. Everything was okay in their world. Hence the long, lazy days at the beach spent snorkeling with colorful fish that poked her face mask and made her gasp and laugh and nearly drown herself. Luckily, she had her own personal rescue squad in the form of one tall, dark, and relaxed Hudson Kincaid.
He nuzzled his face at the back of her neck and made her squirm in the very best of ways. When she snuggled her butt into his crotch, she felt him smile against her—he hadn’t shaved all week and the delicious scruff he had going, along with a dark, perfect tan, damn him, made him her very own pirate, and he had pillaged and taken and conquered her, heart and soul.
“Again?” he murmured, his hands sliding up from her hips to her breasts, barely contained in the itty-bitty bikini she wore.
“Yes.” Knowing that their captain and staff had discreetly vanished to give them a private picnic dinner at sunset, she only gasped when his fingers slid beneath the triangles covering her breasts. Gasped and then moaned. “Here?” she whispered hopefully, turning in the circle of his arms, moaning again because the sight of him in nothing but low-slung board shorts stopped her heart.
“The Greek Islands,” he murmured, cupping her ass, lifting her up so that she could wrap herself around him. “That’s on your list, and never let it be said that I’m not a thorough man.” He turned them and laid her out on their towel.
“I do love a thorough man,” she managed breathlessly, and reached up for him.
Towering over her, he smiled. Lowering himself to her, he stroked back the wispy and completely uncontrollable hair that had grown in. She was a little self-conscious about it but Hud seemed to love it, always sifting his fingers through the wayward strands. “We’re going to do this,” he said. “And it’s going to be good.”
She smiled and welcomed him into her arms. “It’s going to be wonderful.”
Please turn the page for a preview of the next book in Jill Shalvis’s Cedar Ridge series,
Nobody But You!
Available Spring 2016
Chapter 1
Sophie Marren parked her ex-husband’s boat, tied it up to the deck with knots she copied off a YouTube video on her phone, and flopped to her back on the fancy sundeck that she couldn’t afford, willing the seasickness away.
And yes, she was well aware that “parked” wasn’t the correct boating term, but then again, neither was the word husband, at least not as it had pertained to her marriage.
She’d made vows and kept them, but her ex? Not so much…
Old news, she reminded herself and let out a long breath. That was something she was working on, new choices—such as living without the fist of tension in a vise around her heart, the constant fear and pressure to try and be something, someone, she wasn’t.
Her glass was going to be half-full from now on, dammit, even if it killed her. And it might.
“And yet you now live on a damn boat.” She shook her head at herself. Day one of the new digs and it looked like she wasn’t going to make it to day two.
The early morning was quiet, the only sound being the water rhythmically slapping up against the hull of the boat, and then the dock. Boat… dock… boat… dock—“Dammit!” she cried, quickly sitting up before she got even more seasick. She had to get ready for work. But the air was cold, she was cold, and with the boat rocking as it was, she hadn’t yet risked losing an eye to put on mascara.
From somewhere nearby came the song of the morning birds, all chipper and happy, and it made her wish for a shotgun. She put a hand to her stomach, but it kept on doing somersaults. This was because she could get seasick in a bathtub.
She groaned, hoping death came quickly. Cedar Ridge Lake was one of the larger high-altitude Colorado lakes, and it didn’t help that the winds had kicked up this morning, causing rolling waves across the entire surface.
When yet another gust hit, brushing the strands of hair from her damp face, she risked cracking open an eye. From her vantage point, she could see the impressive Rocky Mountains shooting straight up to the limitless, shocking azure sky. A single white fluffy cloud resembled a pile of marshmallows.
Her stomach, normally in love with marshmallows, turned over again. “Gah,” she managed and quickly squeezed her eyes shut just as from the depths of her pocket, her cell phone buzzed. She pulled it out and hit answer without looking, because looking would mean opening her eyes again and facing that this all wasn’t just a bad dream but her life. “Hello?”
“I just wanted you to know I had your car towed to the scrap yard.�
�
Lucas, ex-husband and the bane of her existence.
“And I had a bonfire with whatever clothes you left in your closet too,” he went on. “So I hope it was worth taking my boat.”
She knew neither of these things were true because he was too cheap and also a little bit lazy. He simply wanted to punish her for taking his boat. The irony was that she’d wanted nothing from the divorce. Nothing but out. Nothing but the chance to find herself again and not just be an extension of Lucas Worthington III, hotshot lawyer on the rise.
Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all, she now knew she should’ve asked for at least some money instead of taking a moral stand and refusing to take a penny of spousal support or any of their assets. But she’d gone into the marriage with nothing and in the end she hadn’t wanted anything from Lucas but out. Not a single thing.
When she’d said so to the judge, he’d called her aside and admonished her for cutting her nose off to spite her face because she didn’t have to walk away penniless.
Hurt at the realization her marriage had been nothing but a sham from the get-go, she’d said fine, she’d take one thing, the one thing she knew Lucas had loved far and above anything he’d ever felt for her—his damn boat.
Petty? Okay, yes. But given that Lucas had managed to have the boat tied up in “renovations” for the entire six months since their divorce—until yesterday in fact—and that he’d also managed to get her fired from her office managerial position at a local inn so she’d had to give up her apartment, the joke was on her.
Karma was such a bitch.
Why couldn’t he have loved his huge house or the Lexus… neither of which would be affected by the morning tide, bobbing up and down and up and down and up and down—
“Oh God.” Clamping a hand over her mouth, she breathed slowly through the nausea.
“I want my Lucas back,” Lucas said and if she could have, she’d have laughed at the ridiculous ego it’d taken for him to name the vessel after himself, including painting The Lucas on the hull of the boat for all to see.
“Are you even listening to me?” he demanded.
Nope. She wasn’t. She didn’t have to because she had a sheet of paper saying that they were consciously uncoupled, thank you very much. And to prove it, she disconnected the call and then let out a long breath, hoping to die before he called back.
“Hey, what are you doing?” a male voice called out from the direction of the dock.
From flat on her back, Sophie froze. Maybe if she didn’t move he’d assume her dead and move on.
“You can’t moor here, ma’am.”
Right, moor, not park. She’d known that. But ma’am? What the heck was that? Her mom was a ma’am. Her grandma was a ma’am. Ma’am was for old people, not for twenty-five-year-old women who were desperately trying to get their lives together. Very carefully, Sophie sat up and then narrowed her eyes at the guy standing on the dock staring at her.
He was tall and broad, and he had the benefit of standing in front of the sun, which meant she could see his outline and little else. But his stance seemed aggressive enough that she felt herself wanting to shrink back a little.
Which, for the record, she hated.
But there was a bigger problem. The motion of the boat bobbing up and down, compared to the guy standing on the end of the dock not moving up and down, made her want to toss her cookies. In defense, she lay back down and closed her eyes again. “Did you really just call me ma’am? Because I’m not even close to a damn ma’am.”
Nope, ask anyone. They’d tell you Sophie Marren was fun and chill, though she didn’t tend to stay the course. She was a starter, not a finisher, as her mom would say, and she was absolutely not grown-up enough to be a ma’am. As proof, she was living on a damn boat, illegally parked while she was at it—oh wait, excuse her, moored.
“Fine,” the guy said. “You can’t moor here… Red.”
At the recognition of her long, wavy, deep auburn—okay, fine, red—hair, she choked out a laugh. He got a point for having a sense of humor. And ah, finally the wind seemed to be settling down. Around her the morning fell silent again. Even the birds shut up. Had the guy left too? Did it matter? Apparently it did, because she sat up—slowly—to look, and then groaned.
He hadn’t left.
He’d shifted though, coming closer, giving her a good look at him. Short, sun-streaked brown hair. Square jaw at least two days past needing a razor. Wide shoulders stretching an Army T-shirt to its limits. Flat belly. Lean hips encased in camo cargoes. As she watched, he pulled off his reflective sunglasses, revealing eyes the color of one of her favorite things when she wasn’t seasick—chocolate.
Damn.
But if he felt any insta-attraction for her, he was really good at hiding it because he looked at his watch like maybe he was in a hurry.
The story of her life, men being in a hurry to get away from her, and she decided right then and there she didn’t like him, hot or not. “This is a public lake,” she said.
“Yes, but you’re tied to a private dock that belongs to that cabin.” He jerked his chin to the side, indicating the home just behind him.
The lake was multi-use. The west and east shores were owned by the state and were national forest land. There were public campgrounds on the northeast side, with houses on the north shore only.
The cabin he pointed to was indeed privately owned, but she knew for a fact it was deserted because it’d been up for sale for months. Although—troublesome—the FOR SALE sign had been taken down. Even more troublesome, the shades were raised and the front door was open.
Huh. Her bad.
“I was just taking a short nap,” she said.
One of his eyebrows took a hike nearly to his hairline. “At seven in the morning?”
Yes, well, that’s what happened when she’d had to keep moving the boat so as to not get cited for illegal overnight mooring. Not that she was about to admit that. “Didn’t sleep last night,” she said. The utter truth. “The winds were crazy and the boat never stopped rocking.”
“Using two tie-downs instead of one would help stabilize the boat quite a bit,’ he said. “At the bow and the stern.”
Something that of course Lucas hadn’t bothered to tell her. “Thanks,” she said, slightly mollified.
“You can moor overnight, but you have to buy a permit for one of the public docks at the campgrounds or tie up at a private dock—with permission of the owner.”
He was lake patrol, she realized. And a stickler for the rules. Not that she was surprised. The entire male race was on her shit list. Sometimes higher on the list than other times, but that was another story. “I’ll move the boat,” she promised, hoping to appease him enough to make him vanish.
He nodded and… continued to stand there.
Perfect. Still not feeling steady, she managed to get to her feet and sit behind the wheel. That she did so without puking was somewhat of a miracle. But before she could fumble the keys into the ignition, there came the click click clicking of heels running down the dock. Sophie turned her head in time to watch with the same muted horror with which she would’ve watched a train wreck.
A tall, leggy blonde was doing her best to run in painted-on leather pants and matching corset, vastly hampered by her store-bought double D’s bouncing up to her chin with each step of those five-inch stilettos.
“Lucas,” the woman called out. “Oh Lucas… I’ve got the day off, we can play pirate and captive maiden again!”
Sophie managed to stand up and make herself seen over the windshield. Yep, it was one of Lucas’s regular sidepieces, which made her see red. On the positive side, though, apparently a brain couldn’t be both furious and sick at the same time because she momentarily didn’t feel like puking up her guts.
“Whoops,” the woman said, skidding to a halt, tugging down the corset a little and very nearly causing a wardrobe malfunction of epic proportions. “I’m looking for Lucas.”
Wha
t was her name? Sophie wondered, trying to remember. Brandy? Candy?