I Just Need You - J. Nathan Page 0,80

push each other’s buttons like no other. But it all added up to one thing. There was no one out there in this world who could handle us. So, I did the only thing I could when expectant Caribbean blue eyes stared back at me. I nodded my head.

“Yes?”

“Yes, yes, yeeeeees!”

He leaned down and pressed his lips to mine, kissing me with so much love I could feel it coursing through my body.

I pulled out of the kiss with a smile on my face. “But you’re only twenty-five. You sure you should be getting married?”

He smirked recalling our conversation in my dorm room. “People get married at all ages.”

“If they’re crazy,” I said, using his words on him.

“Oh, we’re definitely crazy.”

“May I have my ring now?” I asked, holding out my hand and wiggling my fingers anxiously.

He slipped the ring onto my finger. It was gorgeous just like his proposal. “Thank you, Tristan,” I said, sincerity replacing my humor. “I’m going to make you the happiest man in this entire world.”

He shook his head. “Not possible.”

My brows pinched together.

“I already am.”

THE END

Enjoy a Sample of For Finlay

Finlay

“Hey, sweetheart. Why don’t you bring me a little something over here?”

I sucked back what I really wanted to say to the big oaf wearing only his shoulder pads and football pants as I crossed the locker room filled with college football players in all stages of dress. I plastered on my ‘I could give a damn’ face and maneuvered around the players, careful not to get too close to what they didn’t bother covering up with me in the room. I extended a water bottle to the idiot.

A smug smile slipped across his face. “I didn’t say I wanted water.”

The room exploded with cackles and hoots of laughter.

I stifled my annoyance as I pulled back my shoulders and turned away from him like it didn’t faze me.

“Hey. Where you going, sweetheart?” he drawled.

I caught the sky-blue eyes of the quarterback seated on the stool in front of his locker lacing up his cleats. He looked surprised I’d held my tongue. Hell, I was surprised I’d held it when all I really wanted to do was tell the offensive lineman I’d come to hate—the one who’d been razzing me since I’d begun with the team a week before—where to stick his jock strap.

My eyes flashed away, seeking out my spot in the corner of the room where I waited for someone who actually needed a drink to signal me over.

Coach Burns burst into the crowded locker room rattling off the game plan for the start of their first closed scrimmage of the season. Fall semester began in a couple weeks. Football players and team staff started early, hence my presence on campus during the last few weeks of summer.

I looked out at the football players, all primed with black paint under their eyes for a battle against a local college. They sat focused on the coach’s words like football was life. Like it meant anything in the grand scheme of things.

I inhaled a deep breath. I could do it. I could be there. A hundred miles from home. Starting college at a school I never planned to attend. One I never even considered attending. It was never my dream. It had always been his.

* * *

Cole ran across our backyard. He was taller and leaner than most of the ten-year-old boys in town, owing his athletic build to football. He played every day whether he had practice or not. And on days when he had no one to play with, in other words when I wasn’t around or didn’t feel like it, he threw into a tire swing our dad hung from an old oak tree in the backyard.

I pulled back my arm and tossed Cole the ball. Though a little wobbly, he reached over his head, nabbed the off-center pass, and tucked it against his side. He took off running toward our mother’s flower bed at the edge of our property, celebrating when he reached it like he just caught the game winning pass in an actual game.

I brushed my long dark hair out of my face and dug my hands into my hips, waiting for his excessive celebration to stop. Even at ten, my twin’s confidence drove me nuts. He was such a showoff. Rightfully so, but it still irked me. So did my friends who came over to play with me but ended up staring at Cole the entire time.

He finally