gotten Jamie back, and now I’d lost him again. As brave as I’d sounded in the car, I didn’t want someone else to come along and love me. I only wanted him. Why couldn’t he let it be him?
Strong arms wrapped around me and I melted into Asher.
Then his scent registered.
It wasn’t Asher.
“Doe, don’t cry,” Jamie pleaded in my ear. “I’m sorry, baby, don’t cry. Forgive me for always making this so damn hard on you.”
Anger, relief, and fear flooded me, and I grabbed onto him, my fingers curling into his shirt as I breathed him in.
“I’m so fucked up.” He squeezed me closer, hurting my bruised and battered ribs, but I didn’t want him to let go. “Loving me will be nowhere near as easy as it will be for me to love you. You get that, right?”
I lifted my head and he gently wiped at my cheeks, trying not to press where I was stitched and swollen and bruised. “It might not be easy now, but we’ll find our way there.”
“I’m a selfish bastard who can’t walk away from you. The minute you said goodbye, I knew I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to survive without you, Jane.” He bent his head toward mine, eyes blazing with emotion. “Aren’t you sick of just surviving?”
I nodded, wrapping my hands around his wrists. “I vote for living instead.”
His answer was a careful, loving kiss. When he lifted his head, he slid his arm around my shoulders, drawing me into his side.
Asher waved at us, giving me a relieved smile, just before he pulled from the curb and drove away. Jamie guided me back to the Porsche, and we both stopped to look up at the house.
“Let’s live instead,” he repeated before turning to me. “But not in Los Angeles.”
I smiled a little, remembering our plans when we were kids to live somewhere quiet where he could write and I could paint. Despite the hell of the last twenty-four hours, I felt happiness soak through me like sunshine prickling my skin. I’d missed that feeling. I hadn’t felt it in a very long time.
“I’ll go anywhere with you, Jamie McKenna.”
Epilogue
FIVE YEARS LATER
JANE
Colorado
The sound of eighties music filtered into the lake house from the deck. Jamie liked to write chapter notes by hand while he listened to the radio out there.
While the distinctive vocals of Phil Collins sounded in the background, I took a sip of iced tea and turned the page in the sci-fi novel Asher had recommended. These days I was tired a lot more quickly and the second bedroom that had become my art studio was in the middle of being packed up.
Jamie had hired a contractor to build a separate studio for me, but it was Sunday, so our peaceful retreat was thankfully free of construction noise. Still, we were enjoying the lake house while we could because we’d be returning to Portland in a month. We split our time between a city that had a relaxed, creative vibe that fit us, and our little slice of heaven near the Rio Grande River in Colorado.
Usually we spent the entire summer in Colorado, but we wanted to be closer to the city since I was six months pregnant with our first child.
Caressing my belly, I grew distracted, as I often did lately, and stared out of the sliding glass doors that led onto the deck and provided a beautiful view of the lake. Trees surrounded the edges of our land, and the lake glistened like a sheet of glass beneath the afternoon sun. I could see the back of Jamie’s head where he sat in his chair, daydreaming about the characters currently renting space in his imagination.
Sometimes I couldn’t get over how far we’d come. How the seven years that had shaped us so greatly often felt like they were a part of another life. I knew Jamie didn’t quite feel that as much as I did. His years in prison were filled with memories that would stay with him forever. I had my own memories, too, that I’d never be able to let go of.
Yet, if someone had told me five years ago that Jamie and I would have the life we’d always longed for, I’d never have believed them. There were bad days when I waited for the other shoe to drop, but Jamie liked to kiss those days away. He reminded me that we had what people everywhere hoped to find and never did. That