grill, meet her assistant, Damion.”
Rylan nods a couple of times. “Livin’ in the tiny house?” he finally asks.
I grunt. “For a minute.”
“Probably literally.” He chuckles.
“Got that right.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
STEPHANIE
Damion rolls his eyes at me, obviously just as exasperated with me as Ford was when I mentioned that he may not be comfortable with Damion sleeping under his roof.
“Girlie, there is no reason for you to be upset, worried, or scared. I’m not an alpha male, but I am a man. I’ll be just fine. I’m excited to meet these people who knew you way back when. This is going to be fun.” He grins.
“He wants to move forward, full throttle,” I whisper as I fall back on the bed.
Damion lays down next to me. Our hands find one another’s and we lace our fingers together. “I’m happy for you, I really am. Sebastian was a douche and just one look at you and your cowboy together, I can tell what you and Sebastian had was nothing but surface. This is real with him, he’s real and you’re so relaxed around him, even when you’re nervous and jittery.”
We spend the rest of the evening chatting with one another. I find that I’m melancholy just talking with him, because I know that this is going to be one of the last times that this will happen, and I’m going to miss it.
I sleep like shit, not because of the future, but because I’m closing a door on the past that just cannot be reopened. I don’t want it to be either, but I am also nervous about what’s to come. I don’t want to lose Damion, but I know that eventually I will.
The next morning, I pack what little items that I’d taken out of my suitcase. Damion packs up all of his food in plastic bags. I laugh because he has more food than he does luggage. Together, we carry our things out of the hotel before I check out.
Then, once we’re all loaded up, I inhale a deep breath and drive toward the country. “He really does live out in the sticks,” Damion point out when we’re about twenty minutes outside of town and driving down Ford’s county road.
“He lives on a working cattle ranch, I told you that, right?”
There’s a moment of silence as we pass Wyatt and Beaumont’s properties, then I pull up to Ford’s gate.
“You told me, but I couldn’t picture it.”
Laughing, I shake my head as I shift the car into park. Just as I push my door open, I hear Damion gasp. Lifting my head, I look up and see Ford on Starlight. He jumps off and walks over to the fence, unwinding the chain, then tugs the gate open and stands to the side.
“How did he get hotter the second I saw him on that horse?” Damion whispers.
“He did, didn’t he? You should see him wrangling cattle,” I sigh.
“I can’t see that, my body and heart can only handle so much.”
Ford waves us by. I slowly drive up his dirt road, knowing that it’s a pothole mine. I know when Damion sees the farmhouse. I hear his intake of breath and know that he thinks it’s just as majestic as I always have.
When I was a teenager, before I contemplated leaving for Hollywood, my dreams were filled with this old farmhouse. With how I would decorate it, with how I would fill it with Ford’s babies and a lifetime of love and laughter with the man that I loved.
“I really fucked up by walking away from him all those years ago, didn’t I?” I ask.
“Not at all,” Damion whispers. He takes my hand in his as we stare at the old white house. “You had a dream to fulfill, a detour, but you’re back here and you’re going to be just fine—both of you.”
“I hope so,” I whisper. “I want this to be perfect.”
Damion laughs. “Nothing is perfect, so this won’t be either.”
“I know, I just want it to be our perfect.”
The door opens and I grin, looking over to see Ford with his chin dipped, his cowboy hat affixed in place and a smile on his lips. Unclicking my seatbelt, I shift my legs over and stand up, immediately throwing my arms around his neck.
“Fuck,” he bites, burying his face in my neck as he squeezes me and lifts me up off of the ground before he spins me in a full circle. He lets me down, keeping his arm around me as he