Forever with You (Starlight Hill Series Book 5)

by Heatherly Bell

  “No doubt. But we both have our versions of how everything blew up, and I’d bet mine is a little different from hers.”

  “That’s usually how it is.”

  “You don’t need to worry. If anyone gets hurt, I guarantee it won’t be her. I’d stake my life on it.” He met Scott’s eyes. “Satisfied?”

  “For now.”

  Chapter 8

  The first time Sophia ever laid her eyes on Riley Jacobs, she ran to hide in the ladies’ room.

  “I thought you didn’t have to go.” Melanie, Sophia’s new roommate, stood in front of the mirror fluffing her long blonde ringlet curls.

  “I don’t. I’ll just hang in here with you for a minute.” Sophia turned on the faucet and washed her hands. Best to keep busy, as Mama always used to say.

  “Ah, jeez. What is it? Did you see any family out there?”

  “No.”

  Sophia hadn’t wanted to celebrate her freedom from Berkeley University in Starlight Hill, not that there were many places to celebrate there anyway. But the whole subject of dropping out of school was still a sensitive one to her family. And in a town the size of hers, practically everyone was ‘family.’ She’d considered the San Francisco night life on Saturday night, but she and Melanie had finally settled on Henry’s. Only thirty minutes from Starlight Hill, it still seemed far away enough and safe enough.

  Until she’d walked in and seen him.

  She’d managed to catch the attention of a man who made her feel like her whole body was on fire. Not a comfortable feeling. Thus, the ladies’ room. And washing hands, a comfortable and safe routine.

  “Well, c’mon,” Melanie finished fluffing. “You have some drinking to do. I’m your designated driver, so take full advantage of me.”

  Oh right, drinking. That was what young people did when they wanted to cut loose and get wild and crazy. She’d been a college girl. She understood. Problem was, she’d never thought of it as a big deal. Her parents had been old school Italian Europeans who let her and her two sisters drink red wine at the dinner table from the age of ten. It was not a big deal, simply a drink with dinner and nothing to get excited about. Living in wine country and owning a family restaurant, her parents had trained her to distinguish wine properties, not drink so much she’d wastefully throw it all up.

  The minute she went through the hallway into the bar area, she sensed him staring at her again. Sophia used Melanie as a sort of shield, walking around the bar, while she tried to get a good look at the guy. She wanted a second where she could check him out without him noticing, but no matter what she did this guy was dialed into her every move even when he was simply standing next to his friend taking a pull of his beer.

  Did she want him to catch her checking him out? Um, no. But yet it happened. When he’d caught her staring, he’d simply grinned and winked.

  “Dang, look at that guy.” Melanie elbowed Sophia. “I think he just winked at me. Holy crap, he’s hot. He screams hot, wild sex.”

  Melanie was right about the hotness factor once Sophia got a good long look at him. He wore black jeans and a worn navy blue t-shirt. Big combat books and close- cropped hair. Military guy, she’d bet her life on it. It would make a lot more sense for this guy to go for Melanie, who’d been Starlight Hill’s homecoming queen and now worked as a dental hygienist in town. Her teeth were perfect, her hair was perfect, and so were her long slim legs. Sophia was an idiot to go anywhere with her, but they’d been friends since junior high school and it couldn’t be helped.

  Now Sophia could hardly believe the fact that it seemed as though this guy wasn’t interested in Melanie at all. His laser focus seemed to be on Sophia alone which didn’t make sense. Being short (the Italian in her) with an okay figure had done nothing to earn her homecoming queen status. Even if Melanie insisted Sophia had a great ass, a compliment which would have been better coming from anyone else.

  He slammed his beer bottle on the bar and headed straight towards Melanie and Sophia.

  “Hold up, he’s coming over here.” Melanie licked her lips and fluffed her curls.

  “Oh, crap.” Sophia hid behind Melanie.

  But the man walked in a straight line to Sophia, which meant that he had to almost step around Melanie to do it.

  “Oh hey, how are you?” Melanie breathed, in her sex phone operator voice.

  “Good. I want to meet your friend, the one hiding behind you.”

  “Who? Sophia?” Melanie asked.

  “You got any other friends hiding back there?” He rocked back on his heels. “Sophia, come on out.”

  Melanie stepped aside. “This is my friend, Sophia Abella. And you are—?”

  “Riley Jacobs.”

  He smiled at Sophia, a naughty boyish grin and it seemed someone had hit her over the head with a bat. Her heart jumped to her throat and started beating at one thousand beats per second. This guy was not part of Sophia’s Grand Plan. Now that she’d dropped out of Berkeley, she would dedicate herself to the restaurant and grow it into the best little Italian bistro in the Bay Area. Patrons would come from far and wide to eat, drink and celebrate special occasions. After a couple of years, she’d find a man who would work at the restaurant alongside her, just like Mama and Daddy-o had for years. Probably someone Italian. They’d get married and have two point five children, the first one before she was twenty-five. Last one before she was thirty.

  Riley wasn’t part of her plan, but someone forgot to tell him that.

  Melanie found another man to tantalize and left the two of them alone. Riley was confident and self-assured with intelligent chocolate brown eyes. By the end of the night, he’d bought her a drink, and introduced her to his friends (yep, all military guys).

  “Do you want to dance?” he asked.

  “But there’s no dance floor.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He tugged her to a small corner at the side of the bar.

  Riley’s form of dancing wasn’t like any she’d ever experienced before. It included touching and holding each other, with occasionally moving to the left if someone passing by the bar got too close. It didn’t matter if the song piping through the bar’s speakers was slow or fast. Tempo seemed insignificant to him, like the song was actually playing only in his head. The music switched from country to hip hop and back again, but neither she nor Riley stopped touching.

  She had her arms around his neck much of the time, occasionally bringing a hand up to rest against the short bristle of dark hair on his head. She stared into his eyes and seemed to have lost every brain cell. He caressed her face, nuzzled her ears and tugged on one earlobe, then kissed her neck. He kissed her hand, her temple, everything but her lips. Was he warming up to it? Making her imagine what it was going to be like in crazy anticipation? Because it was working!

  “This isn’t just for tonight,” he said, tugging on a lock of her hair.

  “What isn’t?”

  “You and me.” When the song ended he bent his head low to meet her lips.

  And. Wow. Sophia had never been kissed like that before. Riley took his time with the kiss, getting comfortable like they were about to have a long conversation or perhaps even hibernate. It didn’t seem to matter that a couple of people bumped into them and Sophia could hear Melanie calling out that it was time to go home. He kept kissing her. She let him, of course, because he happened to be the greatest kisser in the world. And yes, he moved fast. Faster than she was accustomed to. She’d seen cheetahs that moved slower than Riley.

  Finally, he broke the kiss when a bartender tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Closing time, Jacobs. Out.”

  He walked her and Melanie to the car. “I’ll call you.”

  “You don’t have my number.”

  “Put it in my phone.” He handed her an old flip cell phone he carried.

  In the car, Melanie got philosophical about the evening as she drove them both home. “This is one of those nights you’re always going to remember. You’ll probably never hear f
rom him again but someday you’ll be sitting in front of the fireplace as an old married lady with a bunch of kids and you’re going to remember tonight. Your husband is going to fart or say something ridiculously stupid and you’re going to think about this night. How this hot guy swept you off your feet and you never saw him again. What’s special about it is that tonight can’t be ruined. It’s a moment in time.”

  “He said he would call.”

  “They always say that. Did he also tell you he didn’t need to write your number down because he’d remember it?”

  “No, he had me put it in his phone.”

  “Oh.”

  But Sophia didn’t actually believe she’d ever hear from Riley Jacobs again. She wasn’t supposed to find ‘the one’ at a bar, that was for sure. He’d given her a memorable night out and the experience of, for once, not being second best to Melanie, a night she’d always recall fondly and that would be enough. And if she wondered why he’d singled her out, why he’d picked her out of all the girls he could have been with that night including Melanie, she’d probably never know. It didn’t make sense, and she figured he’d go home and come to the same conclusion on his own. Instead, he’d phoned her the next day and wanted to take her out to dinner that night. Sophia didn’t even consider saying no, but even if she had, he hadn’t actually asked her a question. She quickly learned Riley usually stated what he wanted. If a person disagreed, it was up to them to mention it. He wasn’t about to suggest they could disagree with him.

  On the day of their date, she opened the front door of the small cottage house she shared with Melanie to find a smiling Riley. He removed his reflective sunglasses and said, “Take off that dress.”

  I don’t know you that well was the first thought in her head, but instead she smiled and said, “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s our transportation.” He hooked a thumb towards the driveway and the motorcycle parked there.

  A motorcycle! How adventurous. Her sister-in-law Brooke used to ride one. Had actually once broken her arm in an accident. Billy had one too, not that either of them rode much anymore. They had a baby now. As for Sophia, she’d never ridden one because her father thought they were instruments of the devil.

  “I should change.”

  And she loved riding on the back of Riley’s Harley, even if she had to wear a helmet so that her hair couldn’t blow around in the wind like in those old Easy Rider movies she used to watch with her dad. Still, she held on tight to Riley’s waist and imagined they were flying. It was summer and the days were longer, the air carrying with it the faint sweet grape smell that wafted through town near harvest. He drove them clear outside of Starlight Hill on the back roads.

  They rode up the coast to Sonoma State Beach in Bodega Bay and found a picnic table. Dinner turned out to be sandwiches that he’d brought for each of them from the delicatessen in town, along with a bottle of Cabernet from Trader Joe’s. The cheap stuff. She might have been offended, but on that day she learned a lot about Riley Jacobs. His life story, in fact. He didn’t have much of anything, though he’d grown up in Napa. Joined the Marines at eighteen since college was out of the question. Always wanted to be a cop. The light supper and cheap wine took on another meaning. She realized Riley was giving her all he had. The Harley was old and used, the flip cell phone dated. He lived in a run-down studio apartment not far from his sister.

  And he was on leave from the Marine Corps between deployments, scheduled for another one in a few months.

  “You probably want to go home now,” he said. “Have I scared you enough?”

  “I think you’re really brave.”

  “To ask you out? Probably.” He grinned and reached for her hand.

  “No, silly. I never met anyone like you before.”

  She’d lived a fairly sheltered life until Berkeley. At school she’d met some interesting people, but no one like Riley. They’d mostly been like her and privileged. Mostly wealthy. Sophia knew that wasn’t who she was on the inside, no matter what her outward circumstances reflected. Her environment might have changed, but she was still that ten-year-old who grew up sharing one bathroom with two sisters in the little understated home on Cherryview Lane. Only Riley seemed to see who she really was. Not a rich spoiled girl, but the girl for him. A girl who still belonged on Cherryview Lane and not on Mansion Drive.

  Two weeks after their first date he asked her to marry him.

  Correction. Not exactly true. He didn’t ask so much as he told her. They were in bed together at his place one morning, a small studio apartment in Napa. He’d brought her coffee at the crack of dawn as usual, let her take a sip, kissed her and let her go back to sleep. This had become somewhat of a routine even in a short time. It didn’t seem to bother him that she wasn’t a morning person. He just kept trying. But this time instead of getting back into bed to snuggle with her, he’d knelt on the side of the bed until she opened one eye and stared at him through a puff of hair.

  “What?”

  “I have to be in North Carolina in three weeks.”

  “That was fast,” she mumbled.

  “And I want to marry you.”

  She was half asleep and couldn’t have heard him right. But if so, why did her heart slam against her rib cage? “Marry me?”

  “Well, okay, it’s kind of sudden but yes.” Then he smiled and holy cow, she was a goner.

  Hooked. Reeled in. Head over heels.

  But then she had to tell Daddy-o, who at this point had met Riley exactly twice. A day after she’d asked Riley to marry her (technicality), she drove to Daddy-o and Eileen’s mansion outside of town, the one Billy had bought her with his first baseball contract. She had a pleasant roast dinner and conversation with her father and Eileen, and waited until after dessert, after everyone had enough time to digest their food before she dropped the bomb. The last time Sophia had given her family the bad news that she would be dropping out of Berkeley, she’d done it at a family dinner and ruined the evening for everyone. This time she chose a better time.

  She joined Daddy-o and her stepmother Eileen as they enjoyed their evening sherry on the veranda. They talked about the restaurant, the winery, about Scott’s engagement, and a thousand other things that were no longer any of Sophia’s concern.

  Finally, she couldn’t wait any longer. “So. I’m getting married to Riley.”

  Daddy-o coughed. “Are you out of your mind? This cannot happen. You barely know the man. No, no.”

  “I love him,” Sophia said.

  Her father turned to his wife. “Eileen, are you hearing this?”

  “I heard,” Eileen said, her brow knotting.

  Even with three grown boys of her own, two daughters-in-law and another one on the way, Eileen still couldn’t resist interfering in Sophia’s life. But once in a while Eileen helped smooth things over with Daddy-o, and Sophia kind of counted on her now.

  Because she had even worse news for him, and she planned on handing it out piece-meal.

  “First you drop out of university even though you’re as smart as any of those kids! Now you want to get married to a guy you hardly know! What did I ever do to deserve this? Someone tell me, please!” Daddy-o’s face turned crimson and Eileen kept patting him on the back like you’d burp a little baby.

  “Nothing. This isn’t about you. You raised me to be a girl who knows what she wants. And I know I love Riley. We’re getting married.”

  Daddy-o rubbed his chest, and that could only mean the heartburn medication was about to make an appearance.

  Sophia stood and turned to face the sun setting over the horizon in a splash of orange and gold. Her life now was so different than it had been a month ago but she felt happier than she’d ever been. She loved Riley Jacobs with all her heart. Until he came along, she’d been sleep walking through her life. Missing Mama so much but finding comfort in the restaurant and memories of her there. Until she’d met Riley and realized that could never be enough. Mama had also loved a man with
her whole heart.

  “Mama left her home and family to be with you.” Sophia said the words out loud. “Maybe I’m just like her.”

  “Is that what this is about? You can’t live your mama’s life, bella. You have to live your own. We were very young when we got married, true. It was different. Stop trying to be so much like her. Live your own life.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do!”

  “Then be smart. Marrying Riley, that’s not so smart.” Daddy-o clutched his chest. “Unless. Say you’re not pregnant! Say it!”

  “I’m not pregnant. I love him!”

  “If you love him, honey, then why not wait a little while? What’s the rush?” Eileen said.

  Daddy-o glanced lovingly at his wife, as if she’d just found the solution to war and world hunger. “Yes, yes. Exactly.”

  Sophia took a deep breath. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “There’s more?” her father roared.

  “Riley will be here any minute and we can tell you together.” She wanted reinforcements. He’d actually wanted to be here at dinner when she told her father, but she’d talked him into letting her smooth things over first. So far the smoothing over wasn’t going well.

  “Tell me now. I don’t need him here.”

  Eileen had a stricken expression on her face and it was almost as if she already knew. “Maybe we should wait. The young man wants to do the right thing.”

  “I don’t need him here. This is between me and my daughter. Speak up!”

  Sophia sighed. They both knew that Riley was a Marine, and that was of course part of the problem. Daddy-o had a deep and great respect for American servicemen, as long as they stayed the hell away from his daughters. Very old school Italian of him.

  “Okay,” Sophia said. “He’s going back soon and I’m going with him. That’s why we have to get married fast. All I need is a courthouse wedding, nothing fancy.”

  The words spilled out of her like they sometimes did when she was nervous. Daddy-o continued to stare at her like he’d just leaned his daughter was a Nazi spy. Eileen ran inside, probably to get the antacid.