“I’ll sneak out in the morning before Emily and Sophie are up,” I say. “I just don’t want to spend one more night away from the woman I love.”
She smiles, her eyes lighting and more of the sadness in them ebbing away. “The woman you love?”
I wrap my arms around her waist and kiss her sweet lips. “Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that I’m completely, desperately, head over heels in love with you?”
She melts in my arms. “You did forget to mention that.”
I kiss her again. “Well, Gentry Lendew, I am so in love with you I feel like I’m missing a vital piece of my heart whenever you aren’t with me. You are the strongest, most giving, most amazing woman I’ve ever met, and I’m so in love with you I’d probably give up everything I have and move to the moon if you asked me to.”
“Wow,” she says, her smile mischievous. “That’s giving me an awful lot of power.”
“I’m giving you my heart and all of me, because I trust you with it. And I trust you’ll never ask me to move to the moon.”
“You know one of the best things about teenagers?” she asks, kissing me.
“What?”
“They sleep in really, really late.”
I laugh and hug her close. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s get out of here.”
We’re in her car and halfway to her house when I remember I haven’t told her everything. “Noah’s going to pay for your art classes at Maple Ridge, and May Gregory wants an exclusive contract for first dibs on all of your artwork. I told her you’ve already agreed to give those to Holly, and May reluctantly agreed to second dibs.”
She sucks in a gasp of surprise so hard she chokes and starts coughing. Thankfully, there’s no one on the road at this time of night. She eases the car onto the shoulder and parks, twisting to face me as she gets her cough settled. “I can’t accept that. It’s too much.”
“It’s no favor from May. She stopped by to ask if she could help out. When I showed her your painting from Yuletide, she begged to show your art. She’s also been looking for someone to paint portraits as part of her wedding photography business, but I told her she’d have to talk to you about that.”
“I could do portraits,” Gentry says thoughtfully. “If she’s interested in that and thinks I’m good enough.” Her eyes light. “It’ll be so good to get back to art, I’ll do anything to make money at it.” She sobers. “But I can’t accept Noah paying for my classes.”
“He said he’ll be saving the world from you as a nurse,” I say and laugh at her annoyed expression. “I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell me, but I’ve heard rumors Noah’s got a huge trust fund that he makes a habit of using to help people who need it.”
She opens her mouth as if she wants to argue.
“He wants to do it for you because he cares about you. Accept it, Gentry.”
She nods, her eyes glazed. “Okay. If he really wants to do it, I’ll accept it and be so grateful.”
I kiss her for her willingness to accept the gifts people want to give her, and we take a little longer than we planned getting back to her house. At least this time, we don’t get arrested.
Epilogue
Gentry
Three Weeks Later
Levi pulls me back in against him as he leans against my front door. He’s wearing sweats and a t-shirt, and he’s in no hurry to leave my warm house on this sunny November Sunday.
“I told you to wear a coat,” I say. “You’re going to freeze to death out there.”
He kisses me long and hard. I want nothing more than to drag him back up to bed, but my sisters and I are supposed to be having a girls’ fun day, something we started shortly after Dad left, and I don’t want them to catch him here.
It’s been three weeks since we got back together, and he’s slept over here at least three times each week. So far we haven’t been discovered, but there’ve been one or two close calls.
We haven’t heard from our father since he left, which might have something to do with his being in jail. Turns out he was financing his loan sharking with a handful of scams Trisha was running on an Internet donation site. The stories Trisha and my dad concocted to bring in money were truly heartbreaking tales of loss, illness, and violence.
The stories were good enough to bring in tens of thousands of dollars. I can’t imagine what Dad and Trisha might have accomplished if they’d used their talents for good.
They shut down all the pages as soon as the police started looking into Dad in Cheyenne, but started them back up once they were in Iowa. If they’d left them dormant, they might never have gotten caught.
