Start With Me - Kara Isaac Page 0,124

she wasn’t sure how she had ever thought she would be okay without him.

Victor stilled as if he couldn’t quite believe she’d said the words.

Lacey leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I fell in love with you that night on the beach.”

Victor funneled his hands through her hair and pressed the kind of kiss to her lips that had her missing it before it was even over. “I’ve loved you since you tore shreds off me on that bus.”

She couldn’t stop smiling.

“And, we have,” Victor looked at his watch. “Eight hours until you’re officially my boss, and this won’t be allowed while I work out my notice. We should go on a date.”

Lacey grinned up at him. “I’m paying out your notice. I’ve already told Jen to send me the bill.”

Acknowledgements

This book. Wow. It feels like an absolute miracle being able to sit here and type these words. I started writing Start With Me in mid-2018. Now here I am in 2020, writing the acknowledgements in the middle of a global pandemic. And it feels like an entire lifetime in between the first words and these final ones.

As many of you know, I stopped writing in March 2019 after we lost a dear friend suddenly and my sister was diagnosed with cancer. I truly did not think I would ever write another book.

Our family will never forget the people who walked-and are still walking-through the hardest of hard with us. The people who showed up physically and virtually in the months where putting one foot in front of another felt impossible. The meals, the co-parenting our kids, the baking, the messages, the books, the prayers, the passing of tissues and shoulders for tears, the love and care we received will never be forgotten. I’m not even going to try and name you all because I know I will forget many. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Josh, it has been a year plus some of all kinds of hard. Thank you for still choosing me and showing up every day. I love you.

Team Bonnevie, Team Collins, Team Isaac, Team Athea, Team Beard, Team Benson, Team Conway, Team Williams, Team Holmes, the SisterChucks, the Boulcott Bistro Brigade, there will never be the words to describe what you mean to us.

Eternal gratitude to my sister who read the first messy disjointed 30,000 words in July 2019 and told me that I had to finish it because it was the best thing she had read in months (almost undoubtedly not true but it was what I needed to hear to start writing again!) and who has always been my first and last reader when I’m writing a new book.

Laurie Tomlinson who months later read the world’s ugliest 2/3 of a first draft and sat with me on a couch in Nashville for hours when I was so sick and jet-lagged I could barely think and helped me find my way out of some enormous plot holes and believed in Victor and Lacey’s story until I did too.

Jaime Jo Wright for reading early chapters and helping me with guns which I know absolutely nothing about. Any firearm mistakes are hers (no, not really, they’re her husband’s ).

Iola Goulton and Kristin Avila, editors extraordinaire whose combined powers made this book so much better than I ever could have managed on my own, and Evelyne Labelle from Carpe Librum Book Design for the gorgeous cover.

Finally, but most importantly, Jesus. We would never have chosen this season and we’ve only made it so far because of you. Thank you for grace upon grace upon grace over the last 18 months. For sustaining us, providing for us in every possible way, and going before, behind, and beside us every day.