Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 69452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
I wasn’t wishing my life away.
I loved my life.
I loved seeing the kids grow up and become one of the best accomplishments of my life.
I had four children, ten grandchildren, and thirty great-grandchildren.
Mary and I couldn’t have done any better.
And, like it always did when I thought of her, my heart started to ache.
She was my reason for continuing on with this life.
I just knew when we met up again, if I hadn’t given it my all, she would’ve had my ass.
And though I would’ve loved her having my ass when we first saw each other—because her temper was one of the things that I missed the most—I wanted her hug more.
God, I missed those hugs.
I missed the way she used to run her fingers through my hair.
I missed the way she used to hug me tight when we rode on my bike.
I missed the way I used to find her hair on my clothes.
Hell, even years after she died, I still found the stray hair or two inside a shirt sleeve, or buried deep into a blanket I hadn’t used for a year.
But even those eventually dried up.
“Papaw,” Bayou said in annoyance. “Are you even listening to me right now?”
I grinned.
Bayou was a lot like my Mary.
So fuckin’ short tempered. All. The. Time.
“What?” I asked, not bothering to pretend I’d been listening.
I hadn’t been.
Out of all my grandchildren, Bayou was by far the one that would’ve noticed. He noticed everything.
Just like my Mary.
“Why are you ignoring this?” he asked.
I touched the last of the ornaments.
“He’s not ignoring it,” Hoax grumbled. “He’s purposefully doing it because he’d rather act like this than think about the fact that he’s dying.”
I was dying.
Thank God.
I was so ready to be home.
With her.
Mary.
I ran the tip of one shaky finger over the edge of the photo-inlaid ornament on the tree beside my chair, my gaze staring longingly at the two healthy people we once had been.
“Tell us about that one.”
I glanced at Phoebe, Bayou’s wife, and grinned.
The girl, just like her father, was a little hellion.
She’d heard the story before.
They all had.
I loved talking about my Mary, though.
“Oh, that grin looks bad.” Pru, Phoebe’s sister as well as Hoax’s wife, laughed.
“Not bad.” I sighed, pulled the ornament off the tree, then took the chair next to the fire.
This place, the exact placement of the furniture and the décor, was frozen in time. The last time it was touched was the day before my Mary died.
It had a layer of dust that likely couldn’t be scraped off with anything but a damn scraper, but it’d stay exactly like it was until the day that it died. Because that table, it was all my Mary. Everything that I loved about her.
I stared at the ornament and smiled.
Then launched into my story.
Chapter
Two
Most likely to deck a hoe.
—T-shirt
DIXIE
Past
I walked into the bar, my eyes immediately trying to adjust to the darkness of the interior.
The first thing I saw once my eyes had adjusted was the neon blue BEER sign above the bar, followed by the woman with ice-blonde hair, shadowed with blue from the sign, standing below it.
My gaze greedily took her in.
“Get in already, brother,” Stetson, the president of the Dixie Wardens MC, Tuscaloosa Chapter, urged.
I didn’t blame him for his urgency.
It was literally zero degrees outside.
Us country boys didn’t do well with that kind of temperature, and I didn’t care how many of us lied that we could.
I stepped aside, my eyes locked on the woman.
She was short.
So short, in fact, that she could barely be seen over the bar.
“Grab us a beer when you go talk to her,” Stetson ordered.
Stetson walked away, leaving me to my own devices.
Which, of course, was why I walked right up to the bar, stopping when I was directly in front of her.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
I grinned. “Your telephone number.”
I was never home.
In fact, I was gone more often than I was home, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have the ability to call her from a hotel phone.
“Are you even old enough to be in this bar?” she asked.
I chuckled at her attempt to force some distance.
I ran my hands through my hair. “Doesn’t it look like I am?”
“You don’t look all that old to be having that white of hair,” the woman said, taking me in.
“Genetic anomaly,” I explained, smiling devilishly. “My dad passed on this gene that literally makes it to where we don’t have any pigment in our hair. Hence the white.”
She studied my hair. “I like it, though. Suits you.”
I preened like a damn peacock.
“What can I get you from the bar?” she repeated her earlier question, blinking rapidly and drawing my gaze to hers.
“A couple of pitchers of whatever beer you have on tap,” I answered, my enamor getting stronger by the second. “Do you serve food here?”