Love Story (Love Unexpectedly 3)

Not surprising, perhaps, given that the man had isolated himself for years even before the cancer had taken its toll.

What was surprising was that his own daughter hadn’t showed yet.

Or maybe not. Trish Sullivan hadn’t looked back when she’d skipped out on her family a decade ago. Lucy wasn’t all that shocked that apparently even funerals weren’t worth her while.

She didn’t blame Trish for needing some distance when her mom had died and her dad had turned into a zombie. Lucy did blame her for leaving her much younger brother to fend for himself.

No matter. This wasn’t about Trish.

This was about Reece.

Lucy swallowed as she reached the front row, and before she could lose her nerve, walked straight to him, sitting in the chair directly to his left.

He glanced down at her in shock.

Reece opened his mouth, and she braced for him to tell her to get the hell out of here, but before he could speak, there was a throat-clearing from the front of the room, and a pastor stepped up to the small podium beside Jeff Sullivan’s casket and started his somber opening remarks.

“Just until it’s over,” Lucy said under her breath. “Then you’ll never have to see me again.”

Reece fiddled with a wrinkled piece of paper in his hands. It looked like it had been folded and unfolded a million times.

A eulogy, she realized.

Her eyes watered. Poor Reece.

He didn’t move the entire time. Not until he briefly left his seat to stand and give a short, wooden-sounding eulogy about his late father.

When he returned to his seat, Lucy briefly searched his face. There was no trace of tears, and that somehow made it all the sadder.

Without thinking, she slipped her hand into his. The first time she’d touched him in six years.

He stiffened, and she braced for him to shake her off.

Instead, his fingers very slowly spread apart until they were palm to palm. Then he linked his fingers with hers, and squeezed hard. Lucy’s eyes watered, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the pressure of his grip, or from the pain she felt coming off him in waves.

Reece had no one now.

Once, he might have had her, but that ship had sailed in the most heartbreaking way possible.

True to her promise, she’d left after the funeral was over.

All without Reece Sullivan saying a single word to the woman who’d once loved him with all her heart.

Chapter 10

Reece

The motel that Lucy directs us to is as crappy as I expected given the price. The “swimming pool” looks like a wannabe sewer, and the roof is one tropical storm away from caving in.

But she tells me it’s “near the river,” whatever that means.

I pull into the parking lot and turn off the ignition, the silence the first respite we’ve had in hours of an ongoing radio war. Nudging the volume up every time we changed the sta

tion wasn’t exactly mature, but damn if it didn’t feel kind of good.

The silence now is deafening, though, and as I glance toward the crooked check-in sign, the awkwardness of the situation hits me.

Here are two reasonably attractive twentysomethings checking into a motel at four o’clock on a humid afternoon, with…separate rooms.