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“Gas, sweetheart.
“I would never insult you by calling you something as generic as nice.”
It wasn’t his words that got me—it was his eyes. From the first time he looked at me until now, I felt Weston Ryder saw me, no matter how hard I tried to hide.
He brought the truck to a halt, undid his seatbelt, and slid across the bench seat to me. Before I registered what was going on, his hands were on my face. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” His hands moved from my face to my neck to my shoulders, down my arms and back up. “Are you okay?”
I was crying now—my warm tears mixed with the cold rain as both of them rolled down my face. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried, but the thought crossed my mind that I might have been crying for more reasons than just a calf in the storm. “Please,” I said again. Wes pulled me to him and held me tight. “I’m not going to leave her, sweetheart. I would never leave her,” he murmured in my ear.
Wes kissed my temple.
I imagined that this is how some people might feel when they saw a man carrying a baby. I wasn’t a big fan of babies, but apparently I was a big fan of baby cows, because Weston Ryder had never looked better.
The sound of her voice made my heart do a backflip.
If I was half in love with Ada a couple of weeks ago, I was all the way in love with her now.
When she saw me, she hit me with the quiet smile that had become my favorite.
“Don’t treat him like your final destination if he’s just a pit stop. I don’t think he’d recover from that.”
nothing about Wes felt temporary, and I didn’t know how to treat him like he was.
“So let me break this down for you: I fucking adore you, Ada. You are, without a doubt, the most brilliant and purposeful woman that I’ve ever met, and I would be the stupidest man alive if I let something as stupid and surmountable as distance take you away from me.”
“I know you.”
“The little things are the big things, Ada. They’re the things all the big things are made of. I might not know you all the way, but I want to, and I’m just asking you to give me a chance to do that.”
“You say you’re not nice, or warm, or bright, or any of these other stupid fucking words that people use to describe the sun, but I never asked you to be the sun.” I rolled my eyes, trying to move them in a way that would stop the tears from falling. “I would rather have the moon anyway.”
“You’re the moon,” he said. “And I’m the tides. You pull me in without even trying, and I come to you willingly. I always will.”
I wrapped my arms around her waist, and she leaned into me. I kissed her shoulder—right in the middle of one of the roses. “I’m happy,” I said.
That’s my girl.
“I want you,” I said. “I want to be with you.”
“You can go to Arizona. You can go anywhere you want,” he said. “And I’ll come to you when I can. And then, when your project is over, you can come home—like everyone else does when they’re done with work.”
“Do you mean that?” I said into his shoulder. “Every word,” he said.
“I wanted to say that first,” he said. “You didn’t have to say it.” I shrugged. “You showed me.”
Ada leaned in and whispered, “I think I’d like to do that someday. With you.” I looked at her questioningly. What did she mean? She must’ve seen it on my face, because my entire world stopped for a minute when she said, “Get married, I mean.” I kissed her temple and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
