Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“Yeah…”
“Or how about making sure that you have every available technology advancement you could possibly have?” I teased. “Or was that huge Amazon order that I placed with all the voice tech stuff not what you were thinking about?”
She sighed. “Garrett…”
“I will go to the end of the earth for you, Bindi Lea Howe,” I asserted. “And now that I have your father’s permission, I’ll make you my wife while I’m at it.”
She gasped. “Garrett…”
“I’m not asking you because you need a place to live,” I shared. “I’m asking you because you mean the world to me. To be completely truthful, I fell in love with you the first day I saw you in a hotel lobby in Dallas.”
She blinked. “What? When?”
“You were wearing a black slip dress that hugged every single curve on your body. And you were walking behind that asshole you once called a fiancé, and he was berating you for not hurrying up,” he said. “I wanted to walk up to him then and show him exactly what he was about to lose.”
“You were there?” she asked. “Why?”
I explained what I was doing there that day, and she shook her head in amazement. “I wish you’d done it.”
I tucked a lock of her curly hair behind her ear, just to watch it spring back forward again, before saying, “You don’t know how much I regret it. Maybe if I’d made the approach…you might not be blind right now.”
She leaned into my hand, and I uncurled my fingers to cup her face.
“I don’t regret anything that led me to you, Gee,” she whispered. “Not a single ounce of suffering was too much. Because in the end, I got you. And I think that’s a great trade-off.”
I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against hers as I said, “You’ll move in?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be my wife?” I pushed.
She snorted. “That remains to be seen. I don’t have a ring yet.”
I chuckled. “I don’t have one yet.”
“Then ask me again when you do,” she teased.
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m going to get my keys.”
She giggled. “We have to start preparing for Thanksgiving.”
“Y’all do,” I teased. “I don’t know how to cook.”
“And I’m blind.” She laughed as she threw her arms around me. “Between the two of us, we can make a whole cook!”
“Okay, so then maybe I’ll ask you after I go buy you a ring,” I grumbled. “Maybe the diamonds will be on sale for Black Friday.”
She snorted. “The one you’ll want to get me will be the only one not on sale.”
I grinned and pulled her back into the house.
I stopped short when I closed the door and saw what was happening in the kitchen.
“Your parents are totally making out,” I whispered.
They broke apart at the sound of my voice.
“They’ve done that since I was a kid.” She laughed. “Like that one time that someone broke into our house, scared me and traumatized me to death, and then my parents get home. The police leave. Then they start making out.”
“It wasn’t a make-out session,” Ruben grumbled. “I was trying to calm her ass down!”
“Oh, boy,” Lea said as she flushed. “Let’s get back to cooking.”
“First make sure you wash your hands,” Bindi teased.
Lea did.
Ruben grabbed a beer and went to the bar.
I washed my hands and did what Bindi told me to do for the next four hours.
Don’t worry about me. Worry about your eyebrows.
—Bindi’s secret thoughts
BINDI
“My brother was shot because of me,” Garrett said to my father.
I whipped my towel toward him and heard the satisfied tap of it hitting a limb.
But then my dad yelled, “Oow!”
I winced. “Sorry, that was meant for Garrett.”
Garrett was chuckling, which was better than him blaming himself, so I counted it as a win despite the wrong target.
“She doesn’t like when I say that my brother was shot because of me,” Garrett admitted. “Truthfully, whether she wants to admit it or not, it really was.”
“What happened?” Dad asked as he started heading up the front walk of Garrett’s brother’s place.
Mom was holding my hand, and each of us was balancing a tray of pies.
She squeezed my hand when I went to interrupt again. “Shhh, honey. Let him speak.”
I shut my mouth just as Garrett started talking.
“A while ago, I had a hit put out on me because of some shit that went down when I was undercover. I guess as they tried to rebuild, they’d forgotten about it. But just because they’ve forgotten about it, doesn’t mean that it’s gone. You know what I mean?”
Dad muttered a “yeah.”
“That’s why I stayed away from your daughter for as long as I did, because that hit finally caught up to me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to put her in any danger.”
“Is that how you got the scar?” Mom asked as we came to a stop at what I assumed was the front door.