Bound to the Bachelor (20 page)

“Come on, sweetheart. In you go,” he said gently, steering her into the shower.

She hesitated on the threshold, looking back over her shoulder at him. “Come in with me?”

He didn’t say a word, just started to pull off his clothes, his chest aching with gratitude that she wanted him, that she was turning to him for comfort.

Following her beneath the water, he took her ever so carefully into his arms. The water ran over them, warm and clean, and Lily started to cry, her face pressed to his bare chest. He closed his eyes and tried not to gather her more tightly to his body, even though every instinct told him he needed to be close to her.

“I thought I was going to die,” she said after a short while. “I thought I was going to die and I’d never see you again.”

He’d thought the same thing, too, during the long, torturous race to her apartment after Andie’s call. He’d thought about the five years he’d held her at arm’s length, and all the times he’d avoided being in her company, and he’d vowed he would never, ever waste another second with this woman.

Lowering his head, he pressed a kiss to her wet hair and laid his cheek against her head. “I love you, Lily.”

Her arms tightened around him, and she pressed her face into his shoulder. “I love you, too. So much I can barely stand it. I know it’s not what you want right now, but I can’t change the way I feel and –”

“What I want right now is you. Only you. In my bed, in my life. Only you, Lily.”

She tilted her head back so she could look at him. It hurt something in him to see her puffy lip and bruised eye, to know she’d been in pain and scared, and he hadn’t been there to protect her, but he tried to keep his feelings from showing on his face.

“You were in my head,” she said. “You saved me, you know, even though you weren’t there.”

“
What?
” He stared at her.

“He was coming at me, and I was terrified, my mind a complete blank, and then I heard you telling me to go for his nose, his throat, his eyes. And when he got me on the ground, I did what you showed me I could do. I used my arms and my legs and I kicked at him…”

His eyes burned, and slid a hand up to cup her jaw, careful of her bruises. Stunned that so much spirit, so much energy and goodness, and sheer grit could be contained in such a small person, and so grateful the few things he’d taught her had helped sway the outcome in her favor.

“God, I love you,” he said.

She smiled, then turned her face and pressed a kiss into his palm.

“Ow, ow, ow,” she said, flinching. “My lip hurts.”

She lifted a hand to finger it gingerly.

“It’s split, and a little puffy, but it should settle in a day or two,” he said.

“I suppose I’ve got black eyes as well?”

“Just the one.”

“Huh.” She thought for a beat. “I think I might have split his lip.”

She looked proud of herself, and even though he’d been sure he was never going to smile again, his mouth curled up at the corners.

She was irrepressible, this woman he loved. This amazing, resilient, sexy, smart, gorgeous woman.

“I love you,” he said, unable to stop himself from saying it again.

After years of dodging commitment and avoiding entanglements, he couldn’t believe how easily the words came now that he had the right woman in his arms.

Lily rested her head against his chest again, and they stood under the streaming water, neither of them saying anything for another few minutes.

Finally, Lily stirred. “I guess we should go put your sister out of her misery,” she said.

He smiled, imagining Andie pacing and fretting and hypothesizing while Heath tried to calm her down.

“Yeah. I guess we should.”

He turned off the shower, and they both dried off. He dressed in his discarded clothes while Lily slipped into fresh underwear and a long t-shirt that skimmed her thighs, covering the lot with her fluffy bath robe.

“Okay. Let’s do this,” she said, holding her hand out.

He slipped his into it, and together they left the bedroom to go face the music.

“I freaking knew it,” Andie crowed the moment they entered the living room. She did a triumphant fist pump and hooted as though she was at a football game. “I always knew there was something between the two of you, the way you sniped at each other all the time.”

She did a little victory dance on the spot, like a quarterback who’d just scored a touchdown.

“All right, all right, settle down. There’s no need to be smug about it,” Lily said.

“What did I tell you,” his sister said, turning to her husband. “Opposites attract, right? Didn’t I say it?”

Beau caught Lily’s eye and they shared a secret smile.

Lily wasn’t his opposite, she was his soul mate, the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

The woman he was going to die loving.

And long might it be so.

‡

Six months later

“S
o, the front
door is going to be about here, right?” Lily asked, referencing the blueprints Beau was holding open for her inspection before gazing at the bare, churned up earth where Beau’s cabin used to be.

“That’s right,” Beau said.

“For some reason I always imagined it being more over there.” She pointed to a spot further to her left.

“That’s because you can’t read plans,” Beau said fondly.

She smiled at the big blonde man standing next to her, not bothering to respond to his dig. She was too excited about the fact that in the next few weeks, McGregor Construction was going to break ground on their new home.

As in, hers and Beau’s.

This would be the house they would live in together, the house their love would flourish in. And – if they were lucky – the house where they would have children and grow old together.

Needless to say, she had high expectations. She’d asked their draftsman to resize the fireplace three times to make sure it was just as decadent and furnace-like as Heath and Andie’s, and she’d pushed Beau to opt for a three car garage because she knew he had a secret hankering for an expensive sports car that he wasn’t quite ready to indulge just yet.

“Just think,” she said as she contemplated the churned earth in front of them. “This time next year, we’ll be standing on our deck looking down at the river.”

“I’ll be on the deck. You’ll be in the kitchen, making me dinner,” Beau said, somehow keeping his face straight.

“It is so sweet you have these little fantasies,” she said, reaching out to pat his hand.

“What sick fantasies does my brother have?” Andie asked from behind them.

Lily spun to face her.

“I thought you guys were looking for berries,” she said, her gaze going to Heath as he joined them.

Andie and Heath and driven up the house site with them to check things out before the build started next week, but Andie had professed a hankering for berries twenty minutes ago and led her husband down a rough trail toward the river.

“Andie got tired,” Heath said.

“So Heath insisted we come back before we found a single berry,” Andie said, rolling her eyes.

Lily considered the burgeoning bump stretching the front of Andie’s T-shirt.

“How many more weeks do you think it will be before he locks you in the house and only lets you out for medical appointments?” she asked.

Andie gave her husband an assessing look. “Probably about two or three, the way things are going.”

“I just want you to be okay,” Heath said, spreading his hands wide.

“I’m pregnant, not explosive,” Andie explained. “We’ve got another twenty weeks of this to go yet. You’d better pace yourself, my friend.” Having dealt with her husband, Andie turned her gaze on her brother. “Where were we again? Your perverted fantasies, is that right?”

Lily laughed and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “He keeps having this delusion about me learning to cook.”

“I know it’s never going to happen,” Beau said easily. “I just like to poke your cage every now and then.”

“Do you now?” She gave him a challenging look, and he simply cocked an eyebrow before a slow smile spread across his mouth. She couldn’t help but smile back.

God, she loved this man. More so every day. He made her laugh. He cooked her meals. He made her amazing coffees. And he worshipped her in bed with his gorgeous body.

Of course, he also infuriated her on occasion, but that was part of the fun, too.

“Okay, all right, break it up, break it up,” Andie said, making the time out sign with her hands. “There are children present. Enough with the eye sex, please.”

“You can talk. You and Heath are at it night and day,” Lily told her friend.

“That’s different.”

“How so?”

“Because Heath isn’t my brother.”

Heath looked up from checking out the plans. “Nice of you to notice, sweetheart.”

They shared a private smile.

“See, you just did it then. Hypocrite,” Lily said, cuffing her friend lightly on the shoulder.

“You want to go pace out the deck?” Heath said to Beau. “See if you want to go that extra few feet wider that we talked about?”

“Sure.”

The two men wandered off with the plans, both of them slim-hipped and broad-shouldered in faded denim, work boots, and casual shirts. Lily’s gaze followed Beau, drawn like an iron filing to a magnet to his loose-limbed, cowboy-to-the-rescue walk.

He had been so wonderful in the months since Darren’s assault. Even though she knew it had killed him, he’d stood by her when she’d advocated for her stepbrother as his case progressed throughout the legal system. At this stage, it seemed unlikely he’d be found competent to stand trial. His years of drug use combined with the damage wreaked by Luther’s long-term abuse had left him deeply damaged. Lily hoped with care and patience and the right support, Darren might one day find a way of overcoming the past. In the meantime, he was a patient on the acute psychological ward in Bozeman and was likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t a perfect outcome, but it could have been a whole lot worse, and it had the potential to get better.

Beau and Heath had stopped and were consulting the plans, the two gesturing broadly as they sketched dimensions in the air. Watching the sunlight play over Beau’s strong features, Lily tucked her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans and rocked back on her heels a little.

“You know, right there is the best ten thousand dollars I ever spent,” she said.

Beau glanced back over his shoulder. “I heard that,” he said, nailing her with a look that said she’d get hers later on.

She certainly hoped so.

“You were meant to,” she said, then she and Andie started to laugh.

Sometimes, when you least expected it, life handed you an opportunity. Hers was standing twenty feet away, looking tall and cocky and gorgeous in the afternoon sun, and she intended to make the most of him for every moment of every day for the rest of her life.

Amen.

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Sarah Mayberry
is the award winning, best selling author of more than 30 books. She lives by the bay in Melbourne with her husband and a small, furry Cavoodle called Max. When she isn’t writing romance, Sarah writes scripts for television as well as working on other film and TV projects. She loves to cook, knows she should tend to her garden more, and considers curling up with a good book the height of luxury.