The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass - Maisey Yates Page 0,99

of manic service mode since he’d moved in. But then, he realized this was new for her. Sharing space with another person in the way that they were. It had been a long time for him too. And he couldn’t say it was anything like he’d experienced before, because Iris wasn’t anything like he’d experienced before.

He got in his truck and headed up the mountain, headed to the building site. To the house.

The house.

He stood there for a long while, surveying the place and thinking, the revelation he’d had up there the last time he’d come turning over in his head.

And then...

Then he started thinking about the talk he’d had with Ryder. About what he’d said to him.

I can’t give you any guarantees...

Why not? That was the thing.

Why not?

The realization hit him in the chest like a brick, and it hurt. It hurt like hell.

Because the last thing he’d ever wanted in all the world was to find another woman that he wanted to marry. Was to navigate falling in love and...

He thought back to when he’d seen Iris holding her niece.

It was so painful. That image. Because it should make him turn away. It should make them feel some kind of deep, unending trauma. And instead, it filled him with longing. And for so many years the image of a woman holding a little girl had been a futile kind of longing. A longing for a child he no longer had. For a wife he no longer had.

But now when he saw that, he thought of possibility. He thought of a potential future. A wife he could have. A child they could make together, not just an avatar for the one that he’d lost.

And it wasn’t about simply replacing them. No. Not ever.

Because they...

Mel and Emma were part of him.

That was the simple truth.

He had thought of them as gone, and had thought of himself as no longer a husband and father. But he had known that love, and he carried it in him. He knew a father’s love. It was still part of who he was, of everything he was, everything he did. And he was... He wasn’t honoring their life by choosing not to carry that love forward.

If he kept it to himself, hid it all away, then their memory went along with it.

It was a waste. That’s what it was. And it always would be in its way. There was no way around it. You couldn’t resurrect the dead.

But there were better ways to honor their memory than what he’d been doing.

Building the shrine to a life he could no longer have. To people who would never live in it.

He was...

What if he could marry Iris?

What if he could love her?

Oh that hurt, it hurt like a bullet, at the center of his heart.

The risk in that. To love again...

Loving somebody again.

He’d been ready to accept that he cared. Love was a whole other thing.

But it wasn’t a decision. That was the thing. It just wasn’t. It was a reality. She’d come storming into his life, and with it, she brought his heart back into the world. He told her he couldn’t feel those things anymore, and when he’d said it, it had been true.

But she created in him something new, something miraculous, something he hadn’t thought possible. An alchemy of hope that joined together with desire and created love on a level he never thought he could experience.

This was new. It wasn’t recapturing something old. No.

It wasn’t an easy realization. It wasn’t an easy thing to want. There had been a time, when he’d been a young man with his entire life set out before him. Every dream he could’ve possibly conceived of like brilliant, pristine diamonds lying on the surface of the ground. There to be picked up, to be marveled at.

But now he’d had them, and he’d lost them. And finding dreams now, was getting down on his hands and knees and digging through the rocky soil with his bare hands. Coming up with bloody knuckles and bruised and battered fingers.

Now, mining for dreams was to know the cost of them.

He had wanted a wife, and he had wanted children because it was a natural thing. The order of the world.

And then, he thought he had that, and never again. But he’d thought of it back then in terms of replacing.

Now he saw it for what it was. To take a heart that had been so scarred, so bruised and cut, flayed open,