Chapter 9
9
MALLORIE
I had a date.
Memphis was picking me up at the front door in his truck and taking me to dinner. It wasn’t my front door—well, not the front door of the rental cabin anyway.
No, I’d been called down to the show cabin because a guy said he was going to drop by to get some information about having one built. I’d shown him around the cabin, then paced the floor for the full forty-five minutes until I saw Memphis’s truck through the window.
My heart immediately jumped into double time. This was the first date I’d had in a couple of years—unless dinner last night counted.
But this was different than all my previous dates. I was getting in a truck with a man who was straight out of a fantasy. He was almost too good to be true. And he wanted me. I just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It dropped as soon as I climbed into the truck. Something was off—I could tell just by looking at him.
“Hi,” he said. “Ready for dinner?”
His voice was pinched, like he was forcing the words past a closed throat. I nodded and pulled my seatbelt over my chest. Maybe I should just stay silent.
But no, that wasn’t going to be the way this went. If I was working a relationship into my busy life, I’d be damned if I’d play games.
“What’s the deal?” I asked. “Something’s wrong.”
He’d been shifting the truck back into drive, but he didn’t move to press the gas pedal. Instead, he sat back and stared straight out the windshield.
“I can’t do it.”
My heart sank. This was it. I was being dumped. Or maybe he was about to reveal that he had a secret wife hidden away somewhere.
No, that was impossible. If he was about to dump me, it was one hundred percent because he just wasn’t that into me.
“Can’t do what?” I asked, sounding a lot stronger than I felt.
I’d put on a brave face if he was about to dump me. I would not beg. But shit, had I really misjudged the situation that much? No way would I have even thought for a second that this was one of those situations my friends were always getting into. They’d fall for a guy, only to be dumped almost immediately. I’d always said I’d never be that person.
Was I that person?
“I can’t kill a deer. Not when I know how you feel about it.”
What? That made no sense.
He turned to look at me at the same time I turned to look at him. Our eyes met and held, and in that long stare, I knew he wasn’t about to dump me. The opposite.
“I made a commitment to help cull the deer population,” he said. “I never break a commitment. I always do what I say I’m going to do.”
I didn’t dare breathe. If he wanted to kill deer, I wasn’t going to stand in his way. I just didn’t want to know about it. But yeah, deep down I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. It would bother me if I knew he went out every morning with his rifle, shooting innocent animals. I suspected he had probably done worse than that during his days in the military, but that was his past.
“The city isn’t going to give two fucks if I don’t fulfill my vow to shoot twenty deer,” he said. “Even if they did, you’re more important than the city or responsibility or anything else. You’re my future. I don’t want to scare you with that talk, though.”
Oh lord. He didn’t scare me at all. In fact, I couldn’t stop the smile that was spreading over my face.
“You don’t scare me,” I said. “No way. This is exactly what I want. You are exactly what I want.”
And as I said the words, I realized just how true they were. As he’d put it—he was my future. He wouldn’t get in the way of me achieving my dreams. He’d be part of my dreams.
And I knew he’d support me in whatever I wanted to do.
“Let’s go get dinner,” he said.
As we sped out of the parking lot and headed toward Adairsville for a romantic steak dinner—our first true restaurant meal together—I realized everything was finally clicking into place. This was what I’d been missing all along.
I couldn’t wait to see what the future held.