burning building and get everyone out alive without questioning one move.
A small laugh emits roughly from his throat. “Isn’t that the show I put on? Truthfully, I’m better at acting confident than actually being it. If you fool yourself long enough into thinking you know exactly what you’re doing … at some point, those around you start believing it. Even if you know, deep down it’s a lie. That’s my dirty little secret if you want to know the honest truth of it. I pretend to be the strong leader, my actions show a level-headed, responsible man who knows the correct path. But inside, I’m just as goddamn scared as everybody else. I lie awake at night wondering if my life means anything; if I’ve made the right choices. I’m not sure of myself, Presley. It’s a house of cards. One stiff breeze and I come crumbling down.”
His confession shakes me to the core, and I feel the raw honesty ripple through my gut all the way out to my fingertips. They tingle as I try to wrap my mind around something. Because Keaton admitting that he’s just as scared as everyone else, that his confidence is a lie, doesn’t make me want to run from him.
That feeling I’m trying to grasp? It’s bottomless, hopeless love. The kind I have no shot at falling out of. This man, the one I originally thought couldn’t hold a candle to me or my fast lifestyle, has opened my eyes to a world of feelings I’d had no idea existed within me.
But instead of confessing that, I decide to give him just a small piece of me back.
“Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell my seventeen-year-old self that she was enough. That she is enough. I grew up thinking that everything I did and everything I was just never measured up. I wish I could tell her that things get so much better. That she should laugh more and stop worrying so much about what other people think. I wish I could tell her that she doesn’t have to have a conventional dream or even a conventional life. She doesn’t need to move to a city and get a high-paying job. Most of all, I wish I could tell her that the strength she needs is already inside her if she would just open her eyes and look.”
He doesn’t speak, and our mutual confessions hang in the air.
At the exact same moment, we reach across the hood, our fingers lacing, the crackle of electricity between our hands the only response we both need.
26
Keaton
I hadn’t felt like getting out of bed this morning … so I hadn’t.
Presley had felt too good, and I was getting used to waking up to her in my house. The past two weeks, since the night a sheep’s labor interrupted our backyard dinner, we’d been inseparable. Aside from work, and the occasional family or animal emergency, I was with her.
The redheaded temptress who made me laugh just as much as she drove me absolutely crazy with lust. In almost three short months, Presley had completely taken over my life, inserting herself in all of my thoughts and every decision I made.
Last week, I’d told two after-hours calls to wait until my office was open in the morning. I ignored a request from Mom to come over and cut the lawn, instead passing the task off to Forrest. Who, by the way, was still texting me bitching about it a week later.
And Fletcher …
While worry still needled my brain every five minutes I thought about my little brother, my heart tugged me in the direction of the kind, spontaneous woman who kept surprising me around every corner. I hadn’t heard from him in a week, and I was trying to be okay with that. I was his brother, not his father.
Like Presley had said … I didn’t have to be everyone’s hero.
And now that I thought about and had spent the past two weeks living my life the exact way I wanted to—tangled up with the girl who didn’t know yet that I was in love with her—I saw just how much my strength and responsibility were taken advantage of.
I wasn’t just a helping hand or the stoic leader … I was their errand boy. The fact that Forrest was complaining about mowing his mother’s lawn for the first time in five years that I hadn’t felt like doing it? It was pathetic. So was the fact that