He wasn’t alone. Comfortably clad in a flowery dress and a pair of maroon cowboy boots, his mother nailed the Texan matron look down to a tee.
“What are you doing here?”
“I come here every week. Why wouldn’t I visit my grandson?” Her weathered hand stroked the name, and Landon lowered his face, said softly, “He’s not mine, Mother.”
She didn’t jerk at the news, only regarded him with that impenetrable coolness of hers. “You were always the one ready to make the tough decisions for the family. And I think you’re so used to making them, you can’t believe anything can be good and simple anymore.”
“Nothing in my life has ever been good or simple.”
“But it is. Bethany fell in love with you. And you with her. Good. And simple.”
Landon didn’t respond, fought not to think of her, remember the ways her lips curled into all kinds of mischievous or shy or soft smiles.
He tossed a twig into the air. “I’m not sure she loves me. I’m not even sure what was real and what wasn’t.”
“I know what you were fighting for, Landon. You’ve never been vindictive. You’ve always done the honorable thing. You weren’t fighting for revenge, you were fighting for a family. The family you deserve. A woman touched your heart, even when you didn’t want her to, and you were fighting for her. Are you going to quit now? When you’re so far ahead in the game?”
He remembered her. Her dense lashes had glittered with tears. She’d annihilated his mind and senses. How could she have filtered through his defenses?
Because he’d seen her uniqueness and he’d let her.
And she’d let him in, as well.
And he knew then that he would have no other family.
But the one he’d already claimed before the world as his.
Exactly one month after moving in with her parents, Beth wiped a hand across her moistened brow and sighed in satisfaction as she gazed across her new one-bedroom home. Only five closed boxes remained, stacked neatly to one side of the small foyer, but compared to the forty loaded monsters she’d started with, what remained was nothing.
Easily tackled in an hour, if not less.
Sighing, she opened the front door to check if any boxes remained out on the porch and frowned when she spotted a small one.
The plain brown box sat meekly on her doorstep, just over the new rug that read “Welcome.”
Beth didn’t remember having seen it there before.
Confusion mingled with curiosity as she shook the box. Something thudded inside. “What the…” Her hands flew to open the package.
A brand-new little black book. That’s exactly what she discovered.
A brand-spanking-new little black book exactly like the one that had once brought her and Landon together. Halifax was in jail and wouldn’t ever bother her or David. So why this sense of nervousness at the sight of the new book? And where, God, where, did this strange excitement come from?
Because it reminds you of the day you met Landon…
Her throat filled up with emotion at the bittersweet memory, and, carefully, afraid of what she’d find, or maybe more afraid of what she wouldn’t find, Beth opened the book to page one.
Her pulse shot up. There, inside, on the first page, lay a note, written in Landon’s handwriting. She read the note once, failing to go back for a second read when her eyes blurred. It was a silly note, from a man who’d always criticized anyone for writing his sins in a little black book. And now he was writing one of his.
Landon Gage is a fool, it read.
Eyes stinging, Beth looked up and saw him as a big dark blur. Him. He was there, standing there, his presence warm as a sun. He stood on the steps of her new home, looking clean and manly and slightly rumpled without a tie.
Beth blinked, feeling like a thousand angels were sweeping her off her feet, but it was only one man. Just one man, a prince to her.
A frisson of expectation went through her as she waited for him to say something, please say something, because she seemed to have lost the ability to speak.
He leaned against the front porch balustrade, under the shade, watching her somberly. “Hi.”