“All the photos of Olivia are gone.” It wasn’t a question, but she was wondering about it. Perhaps she didn’t know what she was asking, or if she even had the right to ask.
“Not all of them,” I said, pushing her hair over her shoulder, allowing me to see her whole face. “The kids each picked one to keep in their room, and I left one up of all four of us. But the rest are put away. It was time.” My thumb stroked her cheek, watching as her eyes gave away all the thinking going on in her head. I brought my thumb down her face, over her chin, then up a little to feather over her bottom lip, trying to keep it from hiding between her teeth.
“I never would have—”
“I know. And that’s one of the things I love about you.”
She stilled at my words, but spoke almost immediately.
“There’s more than one?”
“There’s a lot. I find a new reason every day. Sometimes two.”
“Devon,” she whispered. I could tell my words were scaring her, but I hoped it was scaring her because she felt the same way, and not because she didn’t. So I did stop, but only because I grabbed her under her arms and pulled her up my body, bringing her mouth right to mine.
A whisper-quiet moan escaped her, but then her mouth answered mine, parting her lips and welcoming me in. My hands roamed her back, tangled in her hair, and held her close to me. Her hands found the sides of my neck and held on, her hair falling like a veil around us.
She let me kiss her, if only for a few moments, before she pulled away with a worried look on her face.
“Devon, please, we have to talk about this.”
“About what?” I asked, still playing with the hair that was draped around us. “The pictures, or me loving you?”
“Both,” she said, the word falling from her mouth on a breath.
I kissed her again, this time wrapping my arms around her and rolling her under me. I wanted her totally present for the conversation and didn’t want her wiggling away from me—either emotionally or physically. We were going to talk about this until it was clear to her that she was it for me.
She let out a tiny squeal when she realized what I was doing, and I pushed up on one arm so as not to squish her beneath me. My other arm was next to her head, my hand still in her hair.
“It was time for the pictures to go, Grace. Regardless of my dating status, we don’t need a shrine to Olivia in the living room. There are still plenty of photos around the house and in the kids’ bedrooms, and I can always pull them out of the garage when the kids want to look at them. I didn’t take them down for your sake. But I’m not going to lie and say you, and my feelings for you, didn’t have something to do with it.”
“You’d be doing it even if I wasn’t in the picture?”
“Eventually.” I could tell my answer made her uncomfortable, so I simply leaned down and kissed her. I nipped at her bottom lip until she opened for me, and then swept my tongue through her mouth, trying to convey even one fraction of the way I felt about her in our kiss. It was deep, passionate, all-consuming, and made me breathless. “I don’t want to talk about the pictures anymore,” I said, pulling back slightly. Only enough so that I could speak.
“Okay,” she whispered back. “What should we talk about?”
I kissed her bottom lip again, this time tugging gently on it only because I knew she liked it. I was rewarded with a small groan from her. I smiled, moving my lips over her cheek and down her throat. “I want to talk about how much I love you,” I said against her neck, grinning when she moved her head to the side, giving me better access.
“How much?” she said, half moaning the words and half pushing them out on a breath.
“More than is reasonable,” I said, smiling against her. I placed one more kiss against her neck, just behind her ear where I knew she liked it, then pulled up to look her in the eye. “I love you, Grace. More than I think I deserve to, sometimes. I don’t know how I got so lucky to find you, to find this happiness again, but I’ll never stop trying to make you feel my love for you.”
Her hand ran up my chest, stopping right over my heart where I was sure she could feel it thumping. “I love you too. I love you. And I’m so scared,” she whispered, her eyes narrowing.
“I know,” I said, my voice matching hers. “But I promise you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. I’ll spend the rest of my life loving you, if you’ll let me.”
“I want that.”
I leaned down and kissed her again, slowly this time, letting our words seep into her, hoping they’d fill some of the cracks I knew were left behind.
“Do you remember the first night we met?” I whispered to her a while later as we lay in my bed, nothing between us except love.
“Back in Fairbanks?” she asked, drawing a circle on my chest with just her finger.
“Yeah.”
“Of course.” She looked up at me, gorgeous hair crazy and wild, eyes so blue that not even the ocean could compare.
“I remember telling you that every day I woke up and only hoped that day would be better than the last.”
“I remember that too.”
“You make every day better, Grace.”