Best-Kept Secrets & Second Chance Cowboy by Lisa Jackson

Author:Lisa Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-06-23T19:36:23+00:00

* * *

Through a veil of pain, he heard the door open and expected that it was the nurse bringing much needed medication.

“Thorne?”

Nicole’s voice. His heart leaped, but he didn’t move. Nor did she turn on the light as she walked to his bedside. Carefully she laid a long-stemmed rose on his chest. “I—I don’t know what to say.”

He didn’t respond. Didn’t move. In his semiconscious state a few hours ago, he’d heard her claims of loving him yet not wanting him, of saying it would never work out, so he’d thought she’d gotten the flowers and had rejected him. He hadn’t been able to respond then, didn’t know if he could now. He barely remembered the accident. There had been a problem, an engine had died and he’d been forced to land in a field, nearly made it when the plane had crashed into a copse of trees...he was lucky...

“I got the flowers. Dozens and dozens of them. You shouldn’t have...oh, Thorne,” she whispered, dragging him back to the present, to Nicole. Beautiful, sexy Nicole. “I wish you could hear me. I want to explain....”

Here it comes again. She was going to repeat what she’d said earlier. Without moving he braced himself for the worst.

“I was—am—overwhelmed.” She cleared her throat and he felt her fingers find his. “I read the card.”

He felt like an idiot. Why had he bared his soul to her? She didn’t want him, she’d made that clear enough. He braced himself against the pain.

“And I wish I could make you hear me, that you’d understand just how much I love you. Marry you? Oh, Lord, if you only knew how much I wanted to do just that, but I saw your picture with that woman at the fund-raiser in Denver and I—I thought you weren’t ready to settle down, that you never will be and so, I don’t know what to do. If there was any chance that we could be together, you and I and the girls, believe me I’d—”

Despite the pain, he forced his hand to move. His head felt as if it might explode, but he grabbed her hand then, held on to it fiercely. The rose dropped to the floor.

“Oh! Dear God—”

“Marry me,” he rasped, forcing the words through lips that felt cracked and swollen. Pain screamed through his body but he didn’t care.

“But—what? Can you—”

“Marry me.” He squeezed her fingers so tightly that she gasped again.

“You can hear me?”

He forced his eyes open, blinked against the fragile light that seemed to blind. “Nicole—would you please just answer?” Somehow he managed to focus on her face—God, it was a great face. “Will you marry me?”

“But what about the other woman, the one in the paper?”

“There is no other woman. Just you.” He stared at her hard, willing her to believe him. “And there will always only be you in my life. I swear it.”

He watched her swallow hard, bite her lip, fight the indecision.

“I will love you forever,” he vowed and then the tears came, slowly at first and then more rapidly, falling from her gorgeous amber eyes.

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