Take the Chance (Top Shelf Romance #9) - Brittainy Cherry Page 0,308

be a lover, a husband, a father. And I would stay with him for the rest of my life.

But for now, I’d enjoy the fall.

Epilogue

Jack

I woke up even earlier than usual, but I wasn’t surprised.

Today was a big day.

After checking to make sure that Margot was still asleep, I slipped out of our bed without even kissing her cheek like I wanted to. I couldn’t risk waking her up.

Quickly and quietly, I hurried down the hall. When I passed the room that used to be Cooper’s, I smiled. It was empty right now, and Cooper was asleep in his new “big boy” room across the street, but I hoped it would contain a crib and rocker again soon. Maybe even within a year.

My heart tripped with excitement as I took the stairs down a few at a time, careful not to hit any of the ones that creaked. I knew this house so well—its familiarity was a comfort to me. When I’d first moved out of the cabin, I’d been worried it would feel too big for me. I’d thought living there alone might make me sad, remind me I had no family of my own to fill it with.

But I hadn’t been alone for long.

For a few months, Margot and I had dated long distance, but by Thanksgiving, I’d asked her to move in with me. She already spent several days a week up here, had clothes in the closet, a toothbrush in the bathroom, a table she used as a desk in a spare bedroom.

Hell, she had a horse in my barn.

I loved when she was here and hated when she left. My days were always better when I kissed her good morning, and my nights were always better when I held her close. I still battled anxiety and nightmares sometimes, but Margot took it all in stride. She was my calm, my rock, my haven. She pushed back when I needed it and let me breathe when I didn’t. She understood me. She loved me.

And I loved her.

Silently closing the kitchen door behind me, I remembered when we first said the words, not too long after we began dating seriously. She’d come up to help me move into the house, and after a long day of cleaning and hauling and unpacking and organizing, she said she had a surprise for me.

It was a bubble bath.

I had to laugh as she undressed me and told me to get in the tub. But the scent of those bubbles and the feel of her wet skin beneath my palms took me back to a night months before, when I’d felt close enough to her to tell her everything.

Something in me must have known even then.

And as she rested her body on mine, her head on my chest, I wrapped my arms around her and felt an overwhelming sense of peace and warmth and gratitude that I was alive and well and here with her.

“I love you,” I said out of nowhere.

She went completely still and then picked up her head. Her eyes searched mine and saw I was serious. “Jack,” she whispered.

“Those are words that have never come easy to me, and I probably won’t say them nearly as often as I should, but I want you to know that I do.”

Her eyes filled. “I know. And I love you, too.”

Margot didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t say the words much, even though I thought them—felt them—all the time. In fact, she told me she liked that it wasn’t something I threw out there casually. It meant more to her when she heard them, she said, knowing that they didn’t come easy.

And maybe the words didn’t, but the feeling sure as hell did. I’d only loved one other woman, and I’d known her so long I couldn’t remember falling for her this way—fast and hard and head over heels. I’d loved Steph deeply, but I loved Margot with a kind of intensity that shocked me. I hadn’t known I was capable of it.

It made me want things—a ring on her finger, my last name on her driver’s license, a house full of kids.

I’d never be rich, never be able to give her all the things she’d grown up with, never own a vacation home in L’Arbre Croche or a Mercedes Benz. But I knew Margot well enough by now to know that she didn’t care about those things as much as she cared about me. About us. Oh, she