More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Ollie, what am I going to do? It feels like the sky is falling.” “If the sky falls, I’ll hold it up for you.”
“I am always going to be here for you.” I tipped up her chin, my eyes boring into hers. “Not just for the summers, Cuddlebug. If you need me to transfer schools and come live here in Switzerland, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything for you. There’s no mountain too high, no ocean too deep, no planet too far for me to reach you. This is my oath to you. You will always have me. You will never, ever lose me.”
And in that kiss, she sealed my fate. I could never love another. Briar Rose was it for me.
My heart was all the way across the pond, in Europe, with a girl I hadn’t seen since I was nineteen.
Chasing her benefitted me for the same reason pretending to be a dumbass did—it threw people off my scent. It made them believe I was a shallow, perverted creature of zero scruples.
My persona—the women, the money, the glam—was merely a Venetian jester mask, designed to subterfuge my one tragic, fatal flaw. I cared. Too much. All. The. Fucking. Time.
They were what I’d run away from for fifteen years and counting. Briar Rose. My Briar Rose.
“That I’m yours. Completely. Unconditionally. Tragically. I will take your hate over anyone else’s love. Your anger over anyone else’s compassion. Your tears over anyone else’s smiles. A moment with you over anyone else’s forever. You’re the one.”
Over the years, I’d tried every kink in the book to get my better half going. It took ten years to finally admit that my only kink, my only type, was Briar Rose Auer.
“This woman, whom we’ve never met, is your childhood sweetheart, who now hates your guts, but she suddenly suffers from amnesia, so she thinks you two are getting married?” I gritted my teeth together. “You’re making it sound ridiculous.” “It is ridiculous.” Zach took a sip of his coffee, recoiling from the taste. “It sounds like a straight-to-cable romcom.”
Nostalgia is the heart’s way of holding on to what time can’t keep.
“A man’s shadow is designed to hide
woman’s light. It seeks to contain what it cannot control.”
“I’m grateful to be going to Harvard with you. Grateful that, from now on, I’ll spend holidays with your family. And I am so freaking grateful for your devotion, your dedication, your love…but you’re just one person. You’re an island, Ollie. My island. My happiness, or lack of, is solely dependent on you. If you vanish from my life—” “I’ll never vanish from your life.” She smiled sadly. “If you vanish from my life, you take away the best parts with you. In fact, you take away the only parts I care to lose. You’re the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to me, Oliver von Bismarck. If I
...more
“It feels like the sky is falling.” “If the sky falls, I’ll hold it up for you.”
“I am home.” She flattened her palm against my heart, and it thudded so violently against it, I feared I was hurting her. “Home is where you are, Ollie.”
Sleep was a rehearsal for death. And I fucking loved sleeping.
“Hell is not a place. It’s a state of mind. And let me assure you, sweetheart, I’m already there.”
“It’s amazing how I grew up thinking you would be in my epilogue when it turns out you’re nothing but a badly written prologue.”
There are two types of love—one fades, the other consumes. The endless fire is the one that burns, and few can survive the flames.
“It feels like the sky is falling,” I confessed. “You’re strong enough to hold it up,” he told me, his words proud but his eyes sad. “Thank you.” For teaching me how to fly. For helping me regain my wings. For letting me go.
“If I don’t marry you—and that’s a big fucking if—I’ll make the worst husband in the entire world. Because I’ll spend every second of every minute thinking about you. When I make her laugh, it’s your giggles I’ll hear. When I kiss her, it’s your lips I’ll feel. And when I slide deep inside her, it’s your pussy I’ll imagine, dripping wet around my cock. You’ve
ruined me, Briar. Completely and utterly destroyed me for every other woman on this planet. It’s you or nothing.”
Sometimes things that never happened haunt you more than the things that did. Don’t live with regret, Oliver.”
“You’ll understand if you decide to have a child of your own.” Cooper offered me the sad smile of a man who’d made peace with his ghosts. “The moment you became my daughter, you inked yourself into my soul. Not for one day, or one year, or even one decade. Forever. That’s what being a parent is. A lifetime commitment. That paternity test? It’s just a fancy piece of paper. It doesn’t tell the real story.”
Colleen and 3 other people liked this
“Family has nothing to do with blood. It’s about the people who enter your life and fill up empty spaces you didn’t know existed until you can’t imagine life without them.”
“I will always search for you, Briar. Even if I never found you, I would keep scouring every corner of the earth on the slightest chance that you’d find out and realize the truth. You were always wanted. There has never been a moment in your entire life that you weren’t loved.”
Well, I’m done. I’m done pretending I can live without you. You’re not a chapter in my life. You’re the whole damn story.”
She was the beginning, middle, and end.
