pictures.”
Tucker gave me a questioning look, and I nodded. “Yeah, we’re coming.”
“Hopefully by tonight, at least,” he murmured. I burst out laughing as he set me down.
He was holding my hand tightly as we walked back toward the sound of chattering people. Then he stopped.
“What?” I asked.
“I forgot to ask, why’d you bring my Aunt Belle with you?”
I laughed. “Oh that.” I ran my hands up and down his forearm. “I paid her a visit yesterday, bribed her with a peach pie from Donner Bakery, and asked if she’d take my spot in the kissing booth.”
“That so? How come?”
I hummed. “Because the thought of kissing anyone but you from here on out sounds like a crime against the universe, if you ask me.”
He leaned down and nipped at my bottom lip, smug, male satisfaction rolling off of him in waves. “I like that answer, Pretty Girl.”
Maxine popped her head back in and sighed. “Good Lord Almighty, keep it in your pants, Haywood. I’ve got a stack of twenties out here and no one told me I’d be playing cashier.”
“For what?” I asked, pulling away from Tucker with a laugh.
Maxine rolled her eyes. “For you, young lady. Everyone wants the famous Green Valley photographer’s book. ‘Course they also just want to see if they’ll have their picture in it. Bunch of prima donnas.” She held up a crisp twenty-dollar bill. “But I’d like you to know that I preordered the very first copy. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
My smile was so wide, it felt like my cheeks would split right open.
Tucker wrapped an arm around my shoulder, laughing with me as we heard Maxine yell, “Oh calm your feathers, she’s comin’.”
He held my hand again, and we pulled down the curtains together.
Epilogue
Grace
One Month Later
“Another one?” he asked.
I scrunched my nose. “Is there room?”
“We’ll make room.” Tucker leaned forward and kissed me, or as best he could with a giant box of books in between us. He shifted his grip on the cardboard as he backed away and went to add it to the stack in the guest bedroom of his house.
It was still his house, even though I was there just about every night. Every time Tucker tried to politely coerce me to move in, I told him that I needed just one meal with his parents where his mom could get through it without apologizing again for meeting me the way she had.
Once the ‘interrupting during truck sex trauma’ was behind us, and not the first thing she thought when she looked at me, I could cross the bridge of cohabitating with her son.
And even though I wasn’t living under the same roof as Tucker, my newest babies were. The book that he’d announced at the fair had, for lack of a better term, blown the hell up.
Everyone in town, it seemed, wanted one for their bookshelf, their coffee table, as a present for their friends or family. Once the fair wrapped up, I had so many preorders that it still made my head spin. And that was nothing on how many people asked me whether I was available for weddings and engagements and maternity shoots.
I hit the ground running, working for days upon days to perfect the shots that would go in my book. Work on the layout of the pages so they were exactly the way I envisioned. And Jennifer Winston, though she’d been smart not to hire me for my abysmal baking skills, had loved the idea of displaying my artwork along the walls of both Donner Bakery locations, each one labeled with a small price tag.
“Do you want me to count these?” he asked from the spare room. “You know they shorted your last order by three copies.”
“Yeah, go ahead. Check the spines too. I wasn’t happy with how they packaged them.”
I settled into the corner of the couch and dragged my computer onto my lap. Instead of working on my own project, tonight was work for a completely different client.
Tucker’s hands landed on my shoulders, and I looked up. He was peering at the computer screen as his thumbs started some delicious pressing along my spine.
“Oh yes,” I groaned. “Right there.”
He increased the pressure, hitting a spot that made my toes curl. Not like the typical ‘sex with my boyfriend was always earth-shattering’ toe curl, more along the lines of ‘I’d been hunched over my laptop for too long’ toe curl.
“Keep making those sounds, Angry Girl, and you won’t be getting much more work