Red Dirt Heart 3 (Red Dirt Heart #3)

by N.R. Walker

He rubbed his hands over my back, spreading his warmth into my body. “You okay?” he asked quietly. “I am now,” I answered. “You have some weird magic power to make everything less heavy.”

I guess it took my mother turning up to show me that family is what sticks by you, not what walks away.

“You’re kind of wonderful, you know that?” “You can thank me later,” he said, starting the engine. “Oh, I plan to.” “Twice.” “Deal.”

He made me lose myself. With every thrust, with every groan, he made the world disappear, he made everything but us disappear. He made me his.

“It still gets me,” I whispered. Travis opened his eyes slowly, as if he was drunk and completely unaware of what he’d done. “What gets you?” “You and your nose nudges,” I answered. “I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of it.”

I fell asleep wrapped up in Travis with him tracing circles on my back. I dreamt of blue eyes, smug smiles and Southern drawls, and even in my dreamin’ sleep, I’d never felt so loved.

“You wanted to bring your wombat to a park? I think he’s a bit young to be using the slide, Charlie.”

“A mother doesn’t love with her hands, Trudy. She loves with her heart.”

ANSWER ME THIS. HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT YOUR HEART CAN STILL BEAT IN YOUR CHEST WHEN IT BOARDS A PLANE TO TEXAS?

“It’s like having one lung removed. I can still live and breathe, but God, it’s not the same. My chest hurts and I have this hollow emptiness that weighs me down. And sometimes I think of him out of the blue and it stops me right where I stand, and I have to catch my breath.”

I wasn’t alone. But there’s a mile-wide difference between bein’ alone and bein’ lonely.

I checked on him a few times over the afternoon, and he’d barely even moved. He’d wrapped himself around my pillow, which was kinda sweet until I realised he was also drooling on my pillow, and then I decided to make that one his pillow.

“If he’d been awake for almost thirty hours,” Laura said, “then he probably won’t wake ’til the morning.” I might have pouted. They all might have tried not to smile.

He smiled, just a little, just one corner of his mouth. And then he did that thing. The thing that fries my brain and steals my breath. He nudged his nose to mine.