by Tawna Fenske
But she couldn’t help noticing this day was smack-dab in the middle of their Australia trip.
Grady took both her hands in his and smiled into her eyes. “It’s probably not a surprise that I want to marry you.”
Willa’s heart began thudding in her ears. She nodded, surprised to feel butterflies swirling in her stomach. “You’ve mentioned it once or twice.”
Or a dozen times, which was fine by her. She was ready for it. This proposal—if that’s what it was—but also the rest of their lives together.
“So I know I kinda killed the spontaneity there,” he continued. “But I do still have one surprise up my sleeve.”
He leaned over and slid open the drawer on the nightstand. When he drew his hand back, Willa gasped. A red ring box was nestled in the center of his palm, leaving no doubt what was about to happen.
As her eyes met his, her throat pinched with emotion. “When did you do that?”
“Don’t worry—I didn’t spend a gazillion dollars.”
She loved that he knew that would matter to her. That she wasn’t the sort of woman to want a big, flashy, expensive ring. That she’d care more about the budget, about making sure he could afford this.
Yet somehow, he’d still managed to surprise her.
“William Marie Frank,” he said, smiling a little at the rare use of her real name. “Willa,” he continued. “In less than a year, you’ve become the most important person in my life. You’re my favorite board-game companion and showering partner. You tolerate my mini-golf play, and you make me laugh at least a hundred times a day. More than anything, though, you make me a better version of myself.”
Tears clogged her voice, and she dashed one away from her cheek with the back of her hand. “I feel the same. When I’m with you, I’m the best person I’ve ever been.”
He grinned. “And you were already pretty bangin’.”
She laughed and swiped at the tears again. “I didn’t expect to get all weird and emotional.” Another surprise. A good one, the best kind.
Grady grinned and slid off the bed, dropping down onto one knee in front of her. “I can’t imagine life without you. Will you marry me?”
“Yes.” She choked out the word, nodding hard enough to send a fresh trickle of tears down her face. “Yes,” she said again as she let her gaze drop to the ring for the first time. A simple, perfect circle with a small diamond and a plain gold band. “It’s beautiful, Grady. Where did you…”
She touched the ring, memory flickering in the back of her mind. There was something about it…
“Oh my God.” Her breath caught in her chest as she realized how she knew this ring. Why it was so familiar, so tinged with nostalgia. She met his eyes, looking for confirmation. “It’s my mother’s.”
Grady nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“But I thought—” She tried to recall the details of that conversation with her mother. “She told me she’d pawned it. That she sold it for a ticket to go back to Florida for treatment.”
“She did,” Grady confirmed as he slipped the ring from the box and held it out to her. “I asked her about it when she visited. When you were out running with Kayla? She told me the rest of the story.”
“There’s a story?”
He nodded. “Her parents,” he said. “They convinced her she couldn’t go back. Not to you or your dad, but they agreed she should have some sort of token. Her father called the pawn shop and bought it back from them. She’s had it all this time.”
“I can’t believe it.” Another tear slipped down her face. “I thought I’d never see it again.”
He slipped it onto her finger. It was a little loose, but the daintiness of it was just right.
“We can get a different one if you want,” Grady offered. “If you see it as a bad omen or you want something nicer or—”
“No, it’s perfect.” She held up her hand, making the tiny diamond sparkle in the light. “It’s simple. Exactly what I would have wanted.”
“Good.” He grinned, looking relieved. “That’s what I hoped. It seemed like your kind of ring.”
She tilted her fingers back and forth, imagining her mother doing this same thing so many years ago. “I can’t believe she kept it,” she whispered. “All these years, it must have meant something to her.”
“She kept it for you,” he said. “She knew she’d probably never see you again, but she always held on to the tiniest hope.”
She threw her arms around him, getting tear marks on his shirt. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”
“I kinda do.”
“You do, don’t you?” She drew back and looked up at him, smiling into his eyes. “Thank you for loving me the way I am. For understanding and accepting the whole package instead of trying to change me into something I’m not.”
“Oh, I think we’ve both changed for the better,” he said. “That we’re not too stuck in our ways to realize when we need to compromise.”
She laughed and held out her finger to admire the ring. “Thank you, Grady. I’m so glad I found you.”
He leaned down to kiss her, claiming her mouth with his. It didn’t take long for things to heat up, just like they always did.
The next thing she knew, he was pushing her back onto the bed, his hand moving up her skirt as she wrapped her hands around his back and breathed him in. Husband. He was going to be her husband.
How had she gotten so lucky?
When they pulled apart, they were both breathing hard. “So this is forever,” she said. “Really for real.”
“Yep,” he said. “Want Stevie to be the ring bearer?”
“We should probably set a date first,” she pointed out.
“True,” he agreed. “Weddings require a lot of planning.”
She snuggled against him. “Or we could elope,” she said. “I’d be okay with that, too.”
As she said the words out loud, she realized they were true. An elaborately planned affair, a spontaneous ceremony at the courthouse, or something in between—it was all okay, as long as they were together. “Thanks for being the best date I’ve ever had,” she said. “And the only one I’ll need forever and ever.”
“I like the sound of that.”
She kissed him again, grateful she’d reached the end of her dating game.
And the beginning of the rest of her life.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Huge, heaping helpings of gratitude go to the folks at the Redmond Air Center in Redmond, Oregon, for filling my brain with gobs of great details about the lives and careers of smokejumpers. I’m especially thankful to Bill Selby, Sam Johnson, and Tony Selznick for sharing your time and your stories. Any fudging of facts or creative play with the details of the smokejumping world are totally on me.
I’m so thankful to the members of my street team, Fenske’s Frisky Posse, for your creative ideas, your name suggestions, and your shared drooling over photos from my visit to Redmond Air Center (er, sorry, Sam… Also, it’s a total coincidence that the guy on the cover kinda looks like you).
Thank you to Wonder Assistant Meah Cukrov for keeping my crap together, and for being an all-around awesome person. Thanks to Linda Grimes for your feedback and moral support. You’re the best agency sistah and critique partner a girl could wish for.
And speaking of agents, I’d be nowhere without the support, cheerleading, and career steering of Michelle Wolfson of Wolfson Literary. It’s amazing how much the industry has changed in our 12+ years together and also amazing that I still hyperventilate when seeing your name on my caller ID. Thank you for everything you’ve done, and continue to do, for my career and my sanity.
I so appreciate my readers, whether this is your very first time reading a Tawna Fenske book or you’v
e devoured all 30+ titles in my backlist. I couldn’t do this without you!
Much love and thanks to Cheryl Howard and Liana Ottaviano for loaning me your beloved Monopoly games for research. I promise I didn’t do anything inappropriate with them. Much.
Thank you to the entire Entangled Publishing team, especially Liz Pelletier for the tipsy brainstorm session in Denver. I’m grateful to all of you for your hard work and dedication to making my books the best they can be. Big hugs to Jessica Turner, Melanie Smith, Heather Riccio, Heather Howland, Curtis Svehlak, Stacy Abrams, Meredith Johnson, Katie Clapsadl, and anyone else on the Entangled team who I might have inadvertently forgotten here. Love you guys!
Endless thanks to my family for all the love, support, and laughter. Dixie and David, Russ and Carlie and Paxton, Cedar and Violet—you guys are the best fan-damily I could have asked for.
And thank you to Craig Zagurski for continuing to rock the role of romance author husband. You’re the hottest hero I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in real life, and I’m so grateful you’re my happily ever after.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When Tawna Fenske finished her English Lit degree at twenty-two, she celebrated by filling a giant trash bag full of romance novels and dragging it everywhere until she’d read them all. Now she’s a RITA® Award finalist and USA Today bestselling author who writes humorous fiction, risqué romance, and heartwarming love stories with a quirky twist. She lives in Bend, Oregon, with her husband, step-kids, and a menagerie of ill-behaved pets, where she loves hiking, stand-up paddleboarding, and inventing excuses to sip wine on her back porch. She can peel a banana with her toes and loses an average of twenty pairs of eyeglasses per year.
tawnafenske.com
Discover Credence, Colorado, a small town sure to leave you in stitches.
Available now wherever books are sold!
Read on for a sneak peek...
CHAPTER ONE
Joshua Grady—Grady to all who knew him—didn’t want much out of life. Just this ranch, Sunday night football, and to be left the hell alone. At thirty-five, with twelve years in the military, including a tour of Iraq and two of Afghanistan, he figured he’d earned the right.
He was a goddamn war hero. He even had a shiny medal and a fancy piece of paper from the government to prove it.
Unfortunately his uncle, who owned the ranch, had other ideas.
New tenant incoming.
Grady scowled at the text. Then scowled at the plume of dust advancing in the distance as a vehicle made its way slowly down the rutted road leading to his cabin. Jamming his Stetson on his head, he strode out to the porch, his big hands curling around the circumference of the rough-hewn wood of the railing as he sucked in the frigid December air. His scowl deepened, and Grady shoved his hands on his hips as the car rounded the bend and appeared from the center of the dust.
He blinked twice at the beat-up old van with lurid green and pink panels emblazoned with huge yellow flowers. Jesus. It was the Mystery Machine. And about as out of place here in rural Colorado as a tractor on Fifth Avenue. The vehicle pulled to a halt and the engine cut, and Grady half expected Scooby and the gang to tumble out as the door opened.
They didn’t.
A woman slid down from the cab. Grady had been expecting a woman—Susan something something, his uncle had informed him when he’d arrived to get the cottage ready yesterday—but it didn’t mean he had to like it. Living outside Credence meant not having to be sociable with anyone, least of all a woman who filled out blue jeans in ways that made him remember how much he liked women in denim.
Grady had decided a long time ago on a solitary life and was not, consequently, settling-down material, despite his well-meaning uncle’s assertions about the joys of holy matrimony. He’d sure as hell stayed away from Credence during the summer when a nationwide ad campaign had brought busloads of single women to the small eastern Colorado town, hoping a few might stay and make Credence their home—and some of the Credence bachelors their husbands.
A couple of dozen had stayed, but he wasn’t interested in any of them. Or this woman, either. He’d told his uncle repeatedly the last couple of weeks that he didn’t want the cottage rented to some artist, and it was hardly his fault accommodations were scarce due to the sudden spike in population.
That ridiculous ad campaign hadn’t been his idea.
But the land—several thousand acres of it—including the cabin and the cottage belonged to his uncle, and Burl Grady had the final say. Not that Burl had ever played that card until now, but it was the first time in three years Grady had regretted knocking back his uncle’s very generous offer to sign over the ranch to him forthwith rather than waiting for it to come to him in his uncle’s will.
He had enough money to buy his own damn ranch but his uncle had wanted to retire, and taking over the reins had been the one way Grady could think of to repay his aunt and uncle for stepping up during the worst time of his life.
Except now he had to put up with Little Miss Blue Jeans for a month.
She didn’t see him as she walked toward the white fence that partitioned off the field to the front of the cabin, but Grady couldn’t look away. She was hard to ignore. Her hair was contained in a bright-green knitted hat, so he had no idea whether she was blond, brunette, or redhead, but her knee-high Ugg-type boots and her sweet rounded ass swinging in those jeans were way more fascinating anyway.
Neither short nor tall, she was amply proportioned, a fact emphasized by her leaning on the top rail of the fence, which pushed out her ass. Grady shut his eyes. He’d never gone for skinny—he liked fullness and curves and this woman needed a flashing neon sign attached to hers.
Opening his eyes, Grady diverted his gaze, concentrating instead on seeing the vista in front, a sight of which he never tired. A couple of his horses grazed in the field on the grass that was getting sparse now, given the onset of winter. He’d need to feed them later but, for a moment, he forgot his chores and the angst about his unwanted guest and sucked in the deep, clean air of eastern Colorado.
The sky was a brilliant cloudless blue, the winter sunshine more for show than effect, given it was a brisk forty-two, but they’d forecast snow for the next week, so he’d take the sunshine—weak or not. Too soon the sky would be bleak, tree branches would be a parched frozen gray, the fields blanketed in white.
Right now, there was still a tinge of green, and the sight of it filled him with a sense of belonging so profound it swept his breath away.
Even if there was a woman in blue jeans messing up the picture.
Blue jeans and no coat—just a thin-looking long-sleeve T-shirt. For God’s sake, she was going to freeze to death out here.
As if she knew he was thinking about her, she moved back from the rail a pace or two and slowly turned in a circle, her face lifted to the sky, her arms outstretched. It was the kind of pose kids adopted when it was snowing, opening their mouths to catch some flakes. She wasn’t opening her mouth, but she appeared to be trying to catch some sunshine.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about her face. She wasn’t stunningly pretty or ethereally beautiful or even chipmunk cute. She was kind of average-looking. Not the sort of face that launched a thousand ships. More…girl next door.
That should have made him feel better. It didn’t.
It was on her second turn that she spotted him standing with his hands on his hips, staring at her like some creeper, and she gave him a little wave. Grady didn’t return it.
“God…sorry,” she called. An easy grin spread over her face as she broke into a half jog.
“You must be Joshua.” She pulled to a stop at the bottom of the four steps, her warm breath misting into the cool air.
Her cheeks were flushed and her nose was pink and there was absolutely nothing average about her eyes. They were lapis lazuli, and they looked at him with such f
rankness, like they were assessing him and not just physically but mentally, cataloging and memorizing every single detail, even the ones he didn’t want anyone to see.
“Grady,” he ground out, feeling exposed and pissed off that this woman who couldn’t even dress for the weather and was driving a cartoon car was having such an effect on him. “People call me Grady.”
If she’d picked up on his surliness, she ignored it, tramping up the stairs to stand beside him, holding out her hand to shake, which Grady took reluctantly. “I’m Suzanne St. Michelle.”
She pronounced it Su-sahn Saan Meeshell, which sounded very posh and very French and made Grady think about French kissing and then just kissing in general. He dropped her hand.
What the ever-loving fuck?
“Man,” she said, her accent 100 percent New York as she half turned to the view and inhaled deeply. “You’re really living the dream out here, aren’t you?”
Grady gave a ghost of a smile. He’d learned a long time ago that dreams were made of dynamite and horseshit. She didn’t appear to need an answer, though, as she chatted on.
“It’s so easy to forget in the city that there’s all this space and land and sky. It’s so flat, and there’s nothing for miles except fields and cows and horses. They’re such beautiful creatures, aren’t they?”
Her question appeared to, again, be rhetorical, and she barely drew breath before leaping into a change of subject.
Christ. She was a talker…
“I bet the stars are magic out here, aren’t they?” She paused to look at him this time but held his gaze only for a beat or two before she glanced back at the field and kept right on going. “Yep. No light pollution out here in the middle of nowhere. I bet it’s dark as pitch in the middle of the night. It’s the kind of sky that would have given van Gogh wet dreams.”
She faltered slightly, barely a hiccup in time, just enough for her to frown slightly, like she knew she’d just said something a little inappropriate. But, flattening her hand against her belly, she forged on.