Handle with Care by Nina Croft

Author:Nina Croft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Entangled, Amara, Accidental Pregnancy, Across The Tracks, One Night Stand, Opposites Attract, Redemption
Publisher: Entangled Publishing, LLC
Published: 2018-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

She was tall for a woman but still only came to just over his shoulder. Her arm was tucked inside his, and she was steering him in the direction she wanted him to go.

And Josh let her. He liked that she seemed so confident, to know what she wanted and how to get it.

The sun was warm on his back, there was the faint hum of insects in the air, and a whiff of salt filled his nostrils, mixed with the sweetness of flowers that lined the lawn. He reckoned they weren’t far from the sea. If he could have envisaged paradise when he was locked in the grayness of his little cell, then this would have been it. The colors were so vivid, the blue of the sky, the green lawns.

The last couple of weeks, something had changed inside him. Up until then, he hadn’t really recognized his constant companion.

Fear.

Fear of being free, of fucking up, of closed-in spaces, and wide-open spaces. Of never enjoying anything because he was too fucking scared it would be taken away again. That he’d been locked away too long and now would never fit. Fear that the world had moved on without him.

Spending time with Mimi had been a revelation. Seeing how she lived—fearlessly going after what she wanted, standing up for the things she believed in and loved—had made him recognize that his own fears were petrifying him, locking him into a dark place.

And once he’d recognized his fears for what they were, they had lost some of their power. At some time over the past couple of weeks, those fears had loosened their hold on him. Not totally. They were still lingering, and maybe he would never be entirely free of them. But perhaps he could be free of their control. Maybe he could find a life worth living. Somewhere like this, with nature all around him and the smell of the sea on the air.

He cast a glance down at the woman at his side. What did she want with him? She was so far beyond him that under normal circumstances he would never have even noticed her existence. But she’d made him notice, and now he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

They were around the same age, but that was the only similarity. Their lives couldn’t have been more different. She had grown up among all this, never wanting for anything. He’d never had anything. He’d spent the first eighteen years of his life somehow surviving on the streets of New York, then five years in the Army. And that was a blur. He’d made sergeant, but only because everyone around him had died. Hell, he’d even gotten a medal—not that that had ever helped with anything. He’d been injured out just before the end of the war, spent nearly a year in the hospital.

After that, it had just been a struggle to survive.

No one wanted to employ a black guy with a limp, even if he did have a medal.

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