Page 97 of Always Been His

More than anything.

He pulls back and looks at me with his hands still at my waist, his thumb moving once across the flannel at my ribs.

“I am madly in love with you Grayson Douglas,” I say, searching his crystal blue gaze for something I can’t name.

“I love you.” He takes my hand, pressing his lips to my knuckles. “Now. Forever, and to the end.”

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Chapter 1

Iris

“Come on!” I groan, turning the key for the tenth time. The starter churns, the engine catches for half a second, and hope rises in my chest right before the engine dies again. “Ugh, why Henry?! Why would you do this to me?”

The problem with driving a car older than most of my relationships is that it likes to die at the worst possible moment. Like right now on the shoulder of Route 9, halfway between town and the kind of nowhere that doesn't even get a name on the map, with the Maine sun pouring through the windshield and turning the cab into a slow roast and one sad bar of service blinking on my phone like it's embarrassed to be associated with me.

I drop my forehead against the steering wheel and let out a long, guttural groan that nobody is around to hear.

If Grayson finds out this car gave up on me again, I'll never hear the end of it. He'll recite our net worth, remind me how much I've poured into repairs, threaten to take my keys, then buy me some new German thing I will ignore while I have another set cut for the Runner. The infuriating part is that he is right. We have the money.

We have the kind of money where a new car is a phone call, where the dealership drives the thing to you and calls you ma'am the entire time, where budget is a word that happens to other people in other towns. I could have anything with four wheels and a warranty parked in the alley behind my bakery, Butter Treats.

I drive this instead because it was my mother’s. The cracked tan dash still holds a trace of her perfume underneath the motor oil and the years, and the little brass lighthouse on the keychain has the paint worn clean off the dome where her thumb used to rest. The passenger seat still carries the dip of a body that is not in the world anymore.

The Runner is loud and ugly and unreliable and it strands me on the side of the road with a regularity that should embarrass me, and it's the only piece of my mother I've left, and I'd drive it straight into the harbor before I'd let it sit in a garage so I could be precious about it.

The one real flaw in this otherwise airtight plan is that I have no idea how a car works. I know where the gas goes, and I know smoke is bad, which means every breakdown leaves me dependent on my phone, a passing stranger, or this town being small enough that everyone knows my face.

I'm the Douglas daughter. Nobody around here is dumb enough to leave the daughter of the family that owns half the county sweating to death on the shoulder of a state route.

I shove the door open and the heat hits me like a wet wall. Sweat gathers at the back of my neck under all my hair, which felt like a fun choice this morning and has become an actively hostile one now. I stalk to the front of the car, fight the latch, and heave the hood up with both hands.

I stand with my hands on my hips and stare into the engine as if it might explain itself. I reach toward a hose near the front and give it a hopeful jiggle. The engine repays me with a snap of heat against my fingertip, and I yelp, yank my hand back, and jam the finger into my mouth.

Wonderful, I've now been physically assaulted by the only thing I own that I actually love, and I deserved it because I knew better than to touch it and I touched it anyway.

I pull my finger out of my mouth and pull my phone out of my back pocket, and I'm bracing myself for the call, mouthing the opening line of Grayson's lecture under my breath so I can have my defenses loaded before he even picks up, when I hear it coming up the road behind me.

I hear an engine that is not mine, since mine is currently on strike.

This one is low and rolling and a little mean, all throat, the growl of an engine carrying far more horsepower than any errand in this town could possibly require, and it's slowing down. Gravel pops and crunches under the tires.

I turn with one hand lifted against a sun that's clearly made my suffering its personal project and watch a red pickup truck ease off the road and stop a few feet behind my dead car. My stomach tightens.

Because I know that truck. I've spent an unflattering portion of my adult life pretending not to clock it in the bakery lot, on Main Street, and outside The Whaler. I'd know it anywhere, and now it is pulling up behind my dead car.