Pushing His Luck - Rhyannon Byrd Page 0,36

forward with him…and then, after he’d left her the flowers and note, because he’d deliberately stayed away while he started meeting with the therapist his partner had recommended to him.

The flowers and note. Oh man, she still got chills whenever she thought about how romantic it had been. On the Tuesday morning after Paul had driven her to the hospital, and she’d spent the entire weekend texting with him, Karin had woken up to a message from Sophie telling her to open her front door because Chris had seen that something had been left for her on her doorstep, when he went out for his early-morning run. Wondering what was going on, Karin had opened her door and nearly fallen back on her ass in surprise.

There hadn’t been a bouquet of flowers—there’d been twelve of them. A dozen freaking massive arrangements, with almost every type of flower and color she’d ever seen, and she’d already been doing a strange combination of laughing and crying as she’d knelt down to pick up the white envelope nestled in the green leaves of the central arrangement, her nickname written across the paper in a bold, masculine script. With trembling fingers, she’d opened the envelope and found a handwritten card inside that read:

Wait for me, Rin. It might not be fair, but I’m asking anyway. I’m going to sort my shit out, so please, baby, fucking wait for me.

Love, Paul

That’s when she’d really started laughing and crying, completely charmed by the beautiful jerk. And while his behavior in March had most definitely been of the massive-douche kind, she would have been lying if she said she wasn’t falling for him even harder now than she’d been before.

Yeah, he’d made a mistake. A few of them, actually. But he hadn’t been thinking straight at the time, and she truly believed that he was sorry for what he’d done. And while she would never forgive him for doing something like that again, she couldn’t help but feel that this time—that this guy—deserved a second chance.

In truth, though, she’d already started softening toward him before the flowers and note had even arrived. After she’d literally shut her front door in his face that Friday night, she honestly hadn’t been sure if she would ever hear from him again. But he’d texted her early the next morning, wanting to check in on her and Jase, and her heart had freaking melted at the fact that he was worrying about her son, asking about him when his own father hadn’t even bothered to do so. She’d written him back with an update, telling him that Jase was feeling good, snuggled up on the sofa watching one of his favorite TV shows, and from there they’d fallen into an easy, ongoing conversation that had never quite managed to stop.

And while he hadn’t actually visited her or his brother’s condos since that Tuesday morning, he was surfing again with both Sean and Chris. Her cousin confessed to her that Paul had tracked him down for lunch on the Tuesday after Jase’s fall—the same day he’d left her the flowers and note—and had “laid it all out on the line.” She wasn’t exactly sure what that had entailed, though she suspected it’d involved some explaining about what had happened with Jenna, how he’d handled it, and a hefty promise that he wouldn’t ever pull that kind of crap again. Chris had admitted that Paul’s apology seemed genuine, but had wanted to make sure it wouldn’t make her uncomfortable if he hung out with him. God, she really did love the dude like a brother, and knew she was lucky as hell to have Chris in her family and her life.

After that, the three guys had started surfing together again nearly every evening, and more often than not, Chris would come up to get Jase when they were done, and then they would all play soccer down on the beach with her son, while Max, Chris’s adorable black Labrador, ran around in the surf. It had just about fucking killed her the first time she’d stood on her balcony and watched Paul playing soccer with Jase—something that Ben had never done, and would undoubtedly never do. And the more time that Paul spent with Jase, Chris and Sean in the evenings, having a kick around in the sand, the more her little boy talked about him. He loved that Paul was a surfer and a cop, which made him a hero in her