Relief softened his features. “He does always have a way of being at the right place at the right time.” He brushed his foot over the grassy edge of the driveway as if searching for something in the shorn green spikes.
“Reese, we need to—”
“Ivy, I—”
Both of them laughed like a couple of nervous middle schoolers at their first dance.
Reese looked up at her. “Go ahead.”
“Can we talk? Really talk.”
He gestured to the porch where he’d been sitting before. “We could go sit. I’ve got lemonade if you’re thirsty. The sun’s on its way down. It’s a beautiful view right there.”
Her insides squirmed at the thought of sitting beside him, gazing up into his eyes. “I’m kinda in the mood to walk, if it’s okay.”
They strolled the perimeter of the property, their shoulders bumping as they went. Ivy rolled words around in her head, hunting for an opening to the conversation.
Reese Dylan Wright, I’ve loved you my whole life. I’ve tried to ignore it, but I can’t any longer. A little too much.
Hey buddy, I didn’t hate kissing you as much as I acted like I did. Nope. Not that one either.
“Did you find out anything new?” Reese studied her as they continued to walk.
She took a steadying breath, willing her voice not to break over the words she knew she needed to say. “After I got so off track, so broken down, I thought I needed to know more about my past to know who I am, what I want. But I was wrong.” Her chin trembled and her pulse throbbed in her ears.
Reese stopped and she followed suit. Under the branches of the sycamore tree, he angled toward her, like they were two ends of a cracked-open book. She turned her face away from the depth of his gaze and swallowed.
“And what is it you want, Ivy?”
Her mouth went drier than drought-parched earth when she braved looking into his eyes. She prayed there would be no pity turning down his features when she spoke the words that had been burning in her heart as long as she could remember.
“You, Reese. I want you.” A tear quivered in the corner of her eye. Her heart filled with hope and fear in equal measure.
He blinked and swallowed. His eyes searched hers. The corners of his mouth twitched.
He reached forward and ran one finger from her wrist down to the tip of her pinky. She drew a sharp breath as every nerve in her body woke.
His eyes floated closed, lashes thicker and darker than any man’s had a right to be. The rasp in his tone made his words swirl through her core. “Right now it’s taking everything in me not to pull you into my arms and kiss you like there’s never going to be another chance. But the last thing I want to do is make you feel afraid in my arms. So, I’m askin’, Ivy. Please . . . once and for all, come here to me.”
That single step crossed a chasm.
He reached to brush away the wayward strand of hair that had slipped across her face, the slightest tremor in his fingertips.
Ivy leaned into his solid chest, wrapping her arms around his trim middle. She rested her cheek against his shirt front and listened as his pulse thrummed wildly, matching her own. She savored the strength in his arms when he returned the embrace. He rested his chin on top of her head. Like experiencing the safety and comfort of coming home and being shot to the moon all at the same time.
After a moment he released his hold. With the crook of his finger, he lifted her chin, a question in his eyes. His expression was so vulnerable and sweet all her reservations dissolved. She rocked forward on her toes, melting into a kiss far too long in coming. All the questions bouncing inside her head stopped and ceased to matter.
He brushed his fingers over her cheek and tangled them in her hair. An involuntary sigh rose in her throat as they broke apart and he pressed his forehead against hers. He’d been right. That thing that happened at the pond was not a kiss. Nor were any of the others in her lifetime.
A little while later Ivy sat in the sycamore swing, and Reese pulled back on the rope and let the swing carry her. Her brain tried and failed to catch up with her heart.
The crickets chirped and the fireflies danced in the dusky light. The fearless girl she’d once been didn’t seem so far off as she once had. Maybe it was a silly notion, or the rush of the kiss talking, but suddenly it seemed it wasn’t too late to believe she could fly after all.
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
APRIL 1, 1995
Over the past five months, not a minute went by that wasn’t plagued with thoughts of Ivy. Where she was. If people knew she liked to be burped halfway through her bottle, and that light purple brought out the flecks of green in her brown eyes. Was she loved?
And for the past five months the tally tree tormented him. Forty-one marks for the forty-one days his sole focus had been protecting Ivy. What bothered him, though, was the empty space below the notches—the missing marks after he’d moved in with Pearl. After he’d stopped counting days.
Tangled in the lives around him, his life had become something beyond keeping Ivy safe. It had been about Pearl. And Thomas and Miriam. And—finding a place where he belonged.
He needed to face that those things were gone. He needed to forget.
Harvey grabbed his hatchet and approached the cedar. Over and over again he hacked into that empty space below the marks he’d made. The dull blade biting into the bark—Harvey cried out from his gut with every blow.
“Harvey Ethan James.” Her soft, aged voice cut him to the quick. He was hearing things now? A new low. He turned. The hatchet fell from his hand.
Pearl stood at the edge of his ring of pines, hands on her hips, something fierce blazing in her eyes.
His mouth gaped, and then he spoke the only intelligible word he could muster. “Ethan?”
“Well, I don’t know your middle name, and Ethan slipped out. You deserve a middle-naming. It’s a . . . a mom thing. Young man, do you realize I’ve been driving up and down this five-mile strip of highway every day for five months?”
He sighed, shoulders falling. “You shouldn’t have.”
She shuffled closer until she had to tilt her chin skyward to see his face. “You think you can drift off like you were never a part of my life?”
Tightening his fists to give his tension a place to go, he glanced toward the creek. “That was the general idea.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“It’s worked every other time in my life.”
“This isn’t that. You matter to me. And I . . . I think I matter to you. Come home with me. Move back into your room. Be my . . .” She heaved a shaky breath. “Be my son.”
He stood taller, shoulders raised, heart slamming in his chest. “Miss Pearl, I’m a thirty-year-old man. I can’t come home and be your son.”
She shook her head, her breaking heart reflected in her eyes. “You think a mother stops being a mother when her son turns thirty? Age doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with it. You need a mother, and I need . . . you, Harvey. Please come back.” She stepped forward and reached up to place her hands on his upper arms—a ferocity and longing in her grip surprising for her age and stature.
He darted his focus around, anywhere but on those teary blue eyes of hers, lined by years of hard choices and loss. “I left. I already left. It’s finished.”