The Hero of Hope Springs - Maisey Yates Page 0,105

been great in the days following his revelation. Not between them.

He had thought that it would be easy to throw the words out there and not ask for anything back. And he could see that no matter what she said about labels and how words didn’t change anything, they had. Because for the past few days his Samantha had been running scared from him, avoiding his touch, avoiding his kiss. And he wasn’t going to push. Not here, not now. There had been a time when he would have. But not on this.

He couldn’t. Because there would’ve been no pushing him into this revelation, either.

He had a lot of theories about why it had happened, at the Mustard Seed Diner, over a hamburger. Why the words had rolled through his soul like the first rumblings of thunder before a catastrophic storm.

Because love was like that, he supposed.

That it could be there, growing inside you and you wouldn’t know. For all that time.

At least, that was how it was for him. But Logan telling him that he was in love with Sammy hadn’t made him understand the words for himself. And the first time they’d made love, when he’d known that joining his body to hers had changed the fabric of what he was forever, hadn’t spoken those words to him, either.

Wedding vows hadn’t done it.

Because there was nothing on the outside that could ever make you see. Not when you didn’t want to.

It caught him in the moment she had bitten into a french fry. The most innocuous and normal thing he could even think of.

But every moment, every scent, every sight, was more beautiful because of her. There wasn’t a breath he could take that wasn’t infused by the loving of her. And the simple truth was it was so deeply a part of the entirety of who he was that the words hadn’t formed around it until all those changes had happened. It had taken every last one of them. Sex. Pregnancy. Marriage. Fear. And in those spaces, the words had finally found purchase on his soul.

And now they were imprinted there, he couldn’t unknow it. That he loved her more than he loved anything.

He had known that he would kill for her, but now he knew he’d die for her. He had known that he couldn’t live without her, but now he knew that he would do whatever it took, change whatever he had to, to live with her, which was an infinitely harder, sharper and more brilliant fantasy than the fear of loss could ever be.

The joy and the challenge of bending yourself and your life around someone else. Finding the better in the worse, the rich in the poor.

Yeah. Realizing that he was in love with her changed nothing. And everything, all at once.

And now she was here, and the breath in his lungs caught and held as he braced himself for what might come next. She looked beautiful. That ray of light she’d always been, streaming into his life and warming him with her brilliance. Lighting the path for him.

“Hi,” he said.

Weird now how sometimes it was hard for him to find the words to say to her. They never had that problem before all this. But it was like West had said. The interactions between them suddenly felt heavier. And the potential for pain much larger.

Everything had a higher cost, a higher weight.

“I came to... I thought we might take a walk,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, putting his pitchfork down. Immediately. Because if she wanted his attention, he was going to give it.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked as the two of them set off down the path toward the river that flowed through the property. She didn’t hold his hand. And she wasn’t looking at him.

“I just wanted to... To be with you.”

“All right,” he said, knowing he sounded skeptical and cautious. Feeling a bit skeptical and cautious.

But he couldn’t deny her. Couldn’t turn away from her.

He would follow Samantha Marshall wherever she went for as long as he lived. She had snared him that day seventeen years ago with a sugar cube in her outstretched hand and hope in her eyes and he’d been a goner ever since.

And he wasn’t even sorry about it. Not at all.

They made it down to the thick, dense package of trees that was near the water, that protected them from the harshest light of the sun. That was when she turned to him, wrapped her