Come Home to Me by Jessica Scott

Author:Jessica Scott [Scott, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-942102-01-4
Publisher: Jessica Scott

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The admission hurt: it was staring at the reality of his own failure. He’d tried to be strong, tried to keep from laying his own burdens on her. In doing so, he’d left her alone when she needed someone, anyone to lean on.

He’d never thought that she’d leave him. Maybe it was his own naiveté that they’d get through the war and figure things out on the other side. He’d always respected what she stood for, what she needed. He’d never pressured her to get married. He knew how important it was to her to keep her name, to feel like she could do things on her own. She was stubborn like that.

She’d been burned badly by Natalie’s biological father. He remembered the first time he met her. He’d been at BookPeople in Austin, one of his favorite haunts when he wasn’t working.

He’d seen her standing in the politics section. She’d looked adorable in a pale blue and white sundress. It had taken him a minute to recognize her from work. A lot of military women looked completely different out of uniform, and Sam was no different. Her hair had been down, spilling down her back and brushing over her shoulders.

Then she’d glanced toward him, and he’d seen the tears streaming down her face.

Before he’d seen those tears, he’d been on the fence about approaching. About saying hi. But those tears had punched him in the gut. She was always so strong at work. So confident.

In that moment, he’d made a decision that had changed the course of both their lives.

He’d approached cautiously. “Whoever it is, I’m sure it’s nothing a good kick in the balls can’t solve.”

She’d been embarrassed. She’d tried to shrug off his concern.

But he’d convinced her to cross the street with him and let him buy her lunch.

She’d confided in him that day. Told him about the boyfriend who hadn’t just run out on her, but had emptied her bank accounts and run up her credit cards first. He’d left her broke and betrayed everything Sam thought that she’d had with him.

They’d been dating for a month when she’d dropped a land mine on both of them.

She was pregnant. And since they hadn’t yet made love, she hadn’t had to tell him that it wasn’t his.

God, he could still see her face when she’d told him the news. She’d braced for him to walk out on her.

But he hadn’t. And over the years, he’d gotten used to the careful balancing of her independence with her relationship with him.

“I never pushed you on the paperwork for Natalie because I never thought I’d have to,” he said now, sitting on a snow-covered road behind a stopped tractor-trailer in the middle of central Maine. “And we managed to make this stuff work without being married.” He looked at her then, and crossed the boundary he’d never broken with them before. “I get that you have your stuff. We all do. But I never thought you’d take her away from me.

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