“You traded me your cookie for half my sandwich, and like I said, that trade is always available in the future, especially when the caterers do those white chocolate ones and when they’re straight out of the oven and the chocolate’s still kind of melted…”
He laughs against my skin then reins me back in to the topic at hand, tacking on one more reason for me to love him. “All right, how about this? I didn’t take that kiss in the mess hall any further even though I was tempted to.”
My eyes widen. “I would have killed you.”
His brow arches and his fingers grip my panties just below my hips. He starts to tug them down and goose bumps bloom across my skin. “Would you have?”
I watch his every movement as he draws the silk down my thighs. His gaze falls heavy between my legs and my first instinct is to hide myself before I realize it’s Ethan looking at me like that. Ethan.
None of it makes sense and yet…it all does.
Fate has such a funny way of conducting business sometimes. I would have appreciated a simple meet cute. Maybe he could have just offered to buy me a beer at that bar and we would have got to talking. Through polite conversation, he would have come to find out about my predicament and offered me a job here on his crew.
Instead, I stole his wallet.
And well…as much as it pains me to think something as cliché as this, the fact is, Ethan was the real thief in the end.
“Ethan?” I say, drawing his attention back up to my face.
I reach down and drag my hands through his hair, knowing there’s definitely a better time to say this. We’re half-naked and he’s about to go down on me. It’s not exactly roses and champagne in front of the Eiffel Tower, but I don’t want to wait another second before telling him the last piece of truth I’ve been keeping locked away.
“I love you. I think I started falling for you the first night in that bar, which is why I got so carried away in the weeks that followed. We really let each other have it.”
He smiles then, and the way it lights up his face makes my insides flip upside down.
“It does feel like we’ve been through a war.”
No kidding.
“Truce?”
I hold up my hand for him to shake, and instead, he grabs my palm, turns it face up, and plants a kiss directly in the center.
“Truce.”EpilogueTaylorSix years later“Taylor Larson Stone.”
The announcer’s voice rings out over the loudspeaker in the arena and I stand frozen for a millisecond before my brain screams, That’s you! GO!
With shaking limbs, I start to cross the stage, knowing I have a little fan club somewhere watching. I kept thinking I’d be able to listen for them when it was my turn to get my diploma, but it all happens too fast. I walk to the center, shake the dean’s hand, pose for a photo, and then they’re on to the next person. I shouldn’t be crying as I descend the steps. No one else is crying. In fact, the guy in front of me immediately starts texting again, bored out of his mind.
Maybe to some people, a college degree is a given.
For me, it wasn’t.
I never thought I’d be here, a graduate of the University of Texas School of Engineering. For the last six years, I’ve been anything but the typical student. For my first couple of semesters, I took all my courses online while Ethan and I finished up work on Pine Wood Resort and then moved back to Austin together. There, I continued working for Lockwood Construction in a part-time position, all the while continuing to take courses at the community college.
Ethan was the one to convince me to apply to UT. It still felt like a pipe dream, especially considering McKenna was only a year away from applying herself. She was at the top of her class back in Oak Dale, president of everything. She had college in her future no matter how many ways you slice it.
Still, I applied, if nothing else so I could say, Well, at least I tried!
I didn’t think I would get in. In fact, I was so sure of it that I didn’t factor it into our plans. Ethan and I were both eager to take the next steps in our relationship. We wanted marriage and kids. We wanted a family of our own.
We had a tiny wedding ceremony back at Pine Wood, right on the edge of the lake where we used to spend our weekends swimming and reading. I stood across from him, pregnant, though I didn’t know it at the time. We said our vows while the breeze from the lake rustled the flowers pinned in my hair. Mckenna and my mom cried the whole time, which in turn made me cry the whole time, but you better believe our hair looked amazing.