Authors: Christie Ridgway

Tags: #Women Librarians, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Fire Fighters, #General

RUNAWAY (19 page)

Then she whirled, sensing Owen behind her. He
stood in the doorway, his gaze trained on her face. She looked away, because what she was feeling was too big, too scary, too hard to speak of. He moved aside as she approached the door and then trailed her up the stairs to the next level.

In his bedroom, she found the clothes that had been in boxes in the garage hanging in the closet. A pair of scruffy slippers shaped like jalapeno peppers that she’d had since high school and never gotten around to throwing out peeked from under the bed.

Owen cleared his throat. “There were some god-awful flannel granny nightgowns. I took the liberty of tossing those.”

She still couldn’t look at him. Her gaze hit on another familiar item. It was propped on the pillows in the center of the bed. One of her friends had embroidered the heart-shaped thing for her eons ago. “My night has become a sunny dawn because of you.”

Blinking rapidly, she turned her head, only to find something that sent the tears cascading down her cheeks. On the bedside table—on the side that
he
slept on—was a beautiful frame. And inside it—their marriage certificate.

Her gaze jumped to her side of the bed, and there, in a matching frame, was a photograph from their wedding. Magnetlike, it drew her, and she took it in her hand, her vision blurring so that she couldn’t see
the image of the two people who had found each other through some unexplainable intersection of luck and fate.

It didn’t matter. She remembered exactly how the couple had felt.

Happy. In love. Ready to face the future together.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and then looked over at her husband. He was smiling at her, and she guessed that he knew his gesture had been the exact right thing to get through to her. The exact right thing to make her believe.

“You made a place for me here,” she said.

“Because I want you in my life,” Owen answered. “Forever. Do you think the rolling stone can settle down awhile?”

She sniffed, and had to wipe at her wet face again. She’d lived nowhere because there’d been no one she’d felt like this about. “I like Paxton. You know I’m in love with you.”

Grinning now, he came closer. “I counted on it.” He placed the photograph back on the table and then took her into his arms.

“I can count on you.” The knowledge was the sunny dawn that warmed every lonely and empty corner of her soul. After a childhood filled with unreliability, it was this that she needed. To know that she could count on him. He’d proved it to her, hadn’t he, by putting her things side by side with his. “I can really, really count on you.”

“Yes. On my support, on my partnership. On my love.”

Izzy hugged Owen to her, hearing his heart beating steady in her ear. “I am going to make you so happy,” she said fiercely. “Wait until you see how stubborn I can be about that.”

He tipped her face up for his kiss. “No more running?”

“Only to you,” she answered. “Always.”

ISBN: 978-1-4268-3258-1

RUNAWAY BRIDE RETURNS!

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^*Montana Mavericks: Home for the Holidays

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