Molly used the crank to lower the jack and slide it out. She stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. “So now we’re even. You saved me back in Duncan’s Market and now I’m the one saving you on the side of the road.”
“That’s the thing, though, Molly.” He hefted the old tire into the back of the truck. “I initially thought I was rescuing you, but it turned out that you saved me in more ways than you could imagine.”
Her heart spun like a propeller and her head began to buzz. “What do you mean?”
Kaleb turned to her. “I was so absorbed in my company, in my life back in Seattle, in all my electronic gadgets. But then you bumped into me and suddenly I had something else to focus on. Something that was real, that wasn’t just a game or a way to improve profits. For the first time in a long time, I felt needed. I felt necessary.”
Her throat tightened. She’d never been anyone’s focus. All her life, she’d been flying under the radar, trying not to draw any attention to herself. How did she respond to this?
“I’m pretty sure that you were the one who bumped into me,” she murmured, not knowing what else to say.
“And I’m pretty sure that even small-town grocery stores have video surveillance.”
“Well, if anyone could get their hands on it, you could.”
He winced. “Listen, I’m sorry about calling the Pentagon and all that overhanded business with your commanding officer. It was totally out of line. And I promise I’ll never get involved in your life like that again.”
The propeller feeling stopped and she gulped. The finality of his statement sounded more like a threat than a promise because it was coupled with the fact that he was leaving today. Of course he would never get involved in her life again because he had no future plans to ever be in it.
“So...” She handed him the wrench. “Were you on your way to Boise or did you arrange for your corporate jet to meet you at a local airfield?”
His eyes did a double blink behind his glasses. “No, I was on my way to Shadowview but my watch battery died and my alarm didn’t go off. I guess I missed your doctor’s appointment?”
“Wait. You were driving to see me? At the hospital?”
“That’s where you were, right?”
“Yes. But what I mean is, why?”
“To apologize. And, you know, to provide some moral support when you got the lab reports.”
“But you just said you weren’t going to interfere in my life again?”
“I meant like a boss.”
“Is there a different way for how you do things?”
“Not really. But if we’re going to be together, you might have to indulge me sometimes.”
“Be together? Like as a couple?”
“Look, I know you said that you weren’t ready for a relationship and needed some time to figure your life out. I have no problem with that and am more than happy to wait.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Kaleb Chatterson, have you ever had to wait for anything in your entire life?”
He looked to the side as if he was doing some quick calculations. “Not really. But I’ve waited twenty-eight years for you already, so I figure what’s a couple more weeks?”
“A couple more weeks? You’re pretty confident of yourself.”
“Nah. I’m just confidant that you’ll come to the right conclusion,” he said, putting his hands on her waist and drawing her closer. “Eventually.”
She wiped the grease off his nose. “And what conclusion is that?”
“That I love you.” His lips brushed across hers and she lost her breath. “That I need you.” His second kiss lasted a split second longer and she became light-headed. “That I can build you your very own flight simulator.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, joy ricocheting inside her. “Maybe I don’t need a few weeks, after all.”
“Was it the flight simulator that convinced you?” Kaleb nuzzled her neck.
“That was part of it.” She smiled.
“What was the other?”
“The promise of another family vacation with all the Chattersons?”
He groaned and squeezed her tighter.
She giggled. “Okay, I give up. The other part is that I love you, too, Kaleb.”
“Yeah?” He tapped the screen on his watch. “Say it again so I can record it.”
She brought his hand back down to her waist. “I love you. I didn’t realize it until last night when my sister came to check on me and I was so disappointed it wasn’t you.”
“I was going to run after you, but my dad told me I should let you cool off. And he was worried I’d get pneumonia and my mom would blame him.”
She cringed. “Sorry for sending you into the dunk tank.”
“You have a pretty good arm, but I deserved it. I never should have interfered with your life like that. You trusted me with something huge and I tried to use it to my advantage.”
“I never should have made you keep my condition a secret in the first place. When the military placed me on leave, I had never been so lost and so afraid. I thought my condition was bigger than me, and as much as I needed to control it, I couldn’t. I’d always been able to do things on my own and then, in a matter of weeks, I felt all alone. But then I came to Sugar Falls and it’s quite impossible to ever feel alone here. Like seriously. Nobody would leave me alone. And I needed that. I needed you to show me that it was okay to allow myself to be vulnerable, to let someone else look after me. I needed my sister and Kylie and Julia and all the other ladies in town to show me that it was okay to share, to be myself. I’m not saying that I’m glad I have diabetes or that things are going to be easy from here on out. But now that everything is out in the open, I’m finally seeing how strong I can be.”
“Just know that you don’t always have to be strong.” He pulled her closer. “I’ll love you whether you’re having a bad day or a good one.”
She stood on her tiptoes, pressed her lips to his and showed him just how great of a day she planned to have.
Epilogue
Seattle, four months later...
“Did I really need to put on my old flight suit for this, Kaleb?” Molly asked, her voice echoing inside a cavernous room on the ground floor of Perfect Game Industries.
“I wanted everything to be authentic,” Kaleb replied, his hand still covering her eyes.
“Can I look yet?”
“Almost.” He positioned her a few inches to the left. “I feel like we need Hunter here to do his knife and fork drumroll on the table.”
“Kaleb!”
“Okay. One. Two. Three. Open.”
Molly’s eyes widened and her mouth formed an O. “Whoa!”
“Well, what do you think?” Kaleb asked, a proud grin stretching across his face.
“When you said you were going to make a flight simulator, I thought you meant like one of those faux cockpits you sit in at the arcade. I didn’t think you meant an actual, full-scale model of an FA-18 Hornet.”
The replica jet sat on some sort of raised mechanism that housed all the components for a moving simulator. A huge movie screen lined the wall in front.
“Well, this is a one-of-a-kind prototype. The final models will be a third of this size because they’ll be cheaper to ship and won’t take up as much room in the VA rehab hospitals.”
“Still, how were you able to make this look so realistic?”
Kaleb cleared his throat. “You know my contact at the Pentagon? Well, he talked to the people over at McDonnell Douglas and they sold me the prefabricated pieces—at double the government cost, I might add. Plus, I had to get top secret clearance and sign these papers promising I’d never sell it to our enemies.”
“This is amazing. Looks like you didn’t need to hire me as a consultant, after all.” Molly had been traveling wit
h Kaleb to various air and space museums around the country—the pilot of the corporate jet always letting her ride up front with him when she wanted—so they could do research while she waited for her discharge paperwork to come in. She would’ve thought that being around all the planes might depress her, but it ended up motivating her to go back to school and get her graduate degree in aeronautical design. She’d moved into Kaleb’s apartment two months ago and registered for classes at the University of Washington.
“Oh, don’t worry. You’re going to earn your paycheck. I need you to climb inside and tell me if the motion part is realistic. But I’m forewarning you, we have a lot of bugs to work out still.”
He followed her as she scrambled up the steel caged steps to the cockpit. She used the outside crank to open the dome-shaped canopy. She was about to climb inside when he said, “Wait!”
He pulled off a piece of tan paper taped to the side of the aircraft to reveal the stenciled letters.
CAPT MOLLY MARKHAM
Her hand flew to her mouth. “You mean it’s mine? You built me my own jet?”
He shrugged as if all he’d done was given her a gift card to the Cowgirl Up Café. “I didn’t want you to miss out on your old life.”
“Kaleb, you are the most incredible man I’ve ever met.”
“Keep that in mind when you see the next part.”
“What next part?” she asked, and he motioned to another rectangle of tan paper after her name.
She peeled it back to see a hyphen and an additional name. It took her a second to put it together and when she did she gasped.
CAPT MOLLY MARKHAM-CHATTERSON
“Does this mean...” she started to say as she turned to look at him. Tears filled her eyes when she realized he was down on one knee, holding open a jewelry box with a... “Um, is that a smartwatch?”
Kaleb looked down.
“Hold on,” he said as he tapped on the screen. When it lit up, a picture of a diamond solitaire blinked back at her.
Molly tilted her head to the side. “Are you proposing to me with a digital ring?”
“The real one is hidden inside your flight suit,” he said, reaching for the zipper at her neck. “If you agree to marry me, I’ll help you find it.”
Molly’s heart spun into a nosedive and all she could do was tearfully nod yes, then happily, actively, help him search.
* * * * *
Don’t miss Christy Jeffries’s next book
THE MAVERICK’S BRIDAL BARGAIN
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by Rochelle Alers
A SOLDIER IN CONARD COUNTY
by Rachel Lee
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SOLDIER, HANDYMAN, FAMILY MAN
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The Best Man Takes a Bride
by Stacy Connelly
Chapter One
This was going to be a disaster.
Jamison Porter eyed the dress shop with a sense of dread. Early-morning sunshine warmed the back of his neck and glinted off the gilded lettering on the plate glass window. Frilly dresses decorated with layer after layer of lace and ribbons and bows draped the mannequins on display, a small sample of the froth and satin inside. All of it girlie, delicate and scary as hell.
The forecast promised a high in the low seventies, but Jamison could already feel himself breaking into a sweat.
He swallowed hard against the sense of impending doom and fought the urge to jump in his SUV and floor it back to San Francisco. Back to his office and his black walnut barricade of a desk, matching bookshelves lined with heavy law books, and rich leather chairs. All of it masculine, substantial—the one place where Jamison never questioned his decisions, never doubted his every move—
He felt a tug at his hand and looked down at his four-year-old daughter’s upturned face. Big brown eyes stared back at him. “I wanna go home now.”
Never felt so useless as he did when he was with Hannah.
His daughter’s barely brushed blond curls tilted to one side in a crooked ponytail. Her mismatched green T-shirt and pink shorts, both nearing a size too small, were testimony to the crying fit that ended their last attempt at clothes shopping. Jamison at least took some small comfort that Hannah had been the one to leave the store in tears, and not him. Because there were times...
Like now, when he didn’t even know which home Hannah was referring to. Back to Hillcrest House, the hotel where they’d be staying for the next couple of weeks? Back to his town house in San Francisco? To her grandparents’ place? To the house where she’d been living with her mother...
“I know, Hannah Banana,” he said, fighting another shaft of disappointment when the once-loved nickname failed to bring a smile to her face. “But we can’t go home yet,” he added as he set aside the question of where his daughter called home for another time. “We’re here to meet Lindsay, remember? She’s the lady who’s getting married to my friend Ryder, and she wants you to be her flower girl.”
Hannah scraped the toe of a glittery tennis shoe along a crack in the sidewalk. “I don’t want to.”
Her lack of interest in playing a role in Lindsay Brookes’s wedding to Ryder Kincaid didn’t bother Jamison as much as her patented response did. Not because of all the things Hannah didn’t want, but because of the one thing she did.
The bell above the shop’s frosted-glass door rang as the bride stepped outside. Dressed in gray slacks and a sleeveless peach top with her dark blond hair caught back in a loose bun, a smile lit Lindsay’s pretty face. “Hey, you made it! Not that I thought you wouldn’t.” She waved a hand, the solitaire in her engagement ring flashing in the sunlight. “I mean, it isn’t like any place around here is hard to find!”
Ryder had told Jamison his hometown near the Northern California coastline was small, and he hadn’t exaggerated. Victorian buildings lined either side of Main Street and made up the heart of downtown. Green-and-white awnings snapped in the late-summer breeze, adding to the welcome of nodding yellow snapdragons, purple pa
nsies and white petunias in the brick planters outside the shops. Couples strolled arm in arm, their laughing kids racing ahead to dart into the diner down the street or into the sweet-smelling café across the way.
It was all quaint and old-fashioned, postcard perfect and roughly that same size. Jamison figured it had taken less than five minutes to see all Clearville had to offer even while obeying the slower-than-slow posted speed limit. “No trouble. Didn’t even need to use the GPS.”
Finding the shop had been easy. Making himself step one foot inside, that was a different story.
“Good thing,” Lindsay said with a laugh, “since cell coverage can be pretty spotty around here.”
Jamison fought back a groan. In a true effort to focus on Hannah and leave work behind, he hadn’t brought along his laptop. But he’d been counting on being able to use his phone to read emails and download any documents too urgent to wait for his return. “How does anyone get things done around here?” he grumbled under his breath.
She lifted a narrow shoulder in a shrug. “Disconnecting is tough at first, but before long, you find you don’t miss it at all.”
“Can’t say I plan to be in town long enough to get used to anything,” he replied as the driver of an SUV crawling down Main Street called out to Lindsay and the two women exchanged a quick wave.
And despite his own words, Jamison couldn’t help thinking that, back in San Francisco, had a driver shouted and stuck an arm out the window, the gesture wouldn’t have been so friendly.
A Proposal for the Officer Page 18