Small Town Pretender by Brighton Walsh
Nash was killing time, and it was annoying the hell out of her. Nat had flown enough that she no longer got nervous, but there was no denying the fact that she was sick to her stomach. Which meant she sure as hell didn’t want anything to eat before her flight, but Nash still kept trying to ply her with food.
“How about some eggs?”
“Nash!” she snapped. Okay, so, she yelled. “I swear to fuck, if you don’t stop tryin’ to stuff me with food, I’m gonna kill you.”
“If you kill me, how’re you gonna get to the airport?”
“Steal your keys and drive over you on my way.”
“Harsh,” he said. “I’m gonna whip some up. Sure you don’t want any?”
She folded her arms on top of the table and rested her head on them. Nat wasn’t a crier—as Nash had so eloquently pointed out last night—so she didn’t know spending hours blubbering into her pillow meant she’d wake with a headache that rivaled any hangover she’d ever had.
“I’m ignorin’ you now.”
“And I’m missin’ work for you, so show me some love.”
“Don’t pretend like that’s a big deal for you. You own the company.”
“Correction,” he said, stabbing a fork in her direction. “I co-own the company. With your sister, I might add. Take a minute to think about how much she loves that I’m skippin’ out when we’re already on a tight schedule.”
“So, what you’re sayin’ in she wears the hard hat in that relationship?”
Nash flashed her a grin and poured the eggs into a skillet. “How about instead of talkin’ about my relationship, we talk about yours?”
“You know all about my relationship with her because I’m certain she fills you in on every little detail.”
“Cute,” he said flatly, clearly not finding it cute at all. “You know damn well I’m talkin’ about your marriage.”
She sat upright and dropped her hands into her lap, twisting her ring around and around her finger. She hadn’t wanted to leave it for Asher when she’d gone. Hadn’t been able to bring herself to do so. Actually, it went a little deeper than that. The thought of removing it, never to wear it again, filled her with so much dread, her stomach had churned because of it.
“The marriage was fake, Nash. Y’all talked about that, right?”
“He told me what it was supposed to be, but I can guarantee you that’s not what it turned out to be.” He picked up his phone for the hundredth time in the past ten minutes.
“Why do you keep checkin’ your phone?” she snapped. “If you were worried about me runnin’ late, we’d already be on the road.”
Never mind that she didn’t actually have to be at the airport for thirty-six hours, and he’d already called her on that. It just made her antsy to be in Havenbrook when she wasn’t with Asher, and that was a shocking thought. Maybe that had been the problem every other time she’d visited without him—that she hadn’t had him to ground her. To calm her storm and let her settle into her skin.
Nash walked over carrying two plates full of eggs and set them on the table. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Eat these eggs? No, I already told you that.”
“Fucking hell, Natalie. You are the biggest pain in my ass.”
Her mouth dropped open on an incredulous huff. “Did you just Natalie me?”
“Damn fucking right, I did. Quit bein’ so obtuse. You know I’m talkin’ about you and Asher and what a mistake y’all’re makin’.”
She blew out a breath, her shoulders sagging as she rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Rory already tried this this mornin’, you know.”
“Oh, this mornin’ when she was off and runnin’ before six?”
“Yes…?”
“You have no problem sleepin’ the night before a flight and hate wakin’ up before noon.”
“I hate scrambled eggs, and yet you insist on feedin’ them to me. What’s your point?”
“Some reason you couldn’t sleep?”
“I slept just fine.” If crying into her pillow could be counted as sleep. “I’m finally goin’ to Ireland. Why wouldn’t I be thrilled?”
“I don’t know, but you’re clearly not, so you should probably ask yourself that question.”
She was just rusty, was all. Because it’d been so long since she’d traveled, she needed to get back in the swing of things. It had nothing to do with the gigantic Asher-shaped hole in her heart she was going to have to walk around with for the rest of her life. She needed to get used to it, so she might as well start now.
“Nash, please. Can we just go?”
He looked at his phone one more time, his eyes lighting up briefly before he tamped it down, and then he nodded. “Fine. Let me just eat both of these,” he said, scraping the contents of Nat’s plate onto his own. “And then we will.”
Fifteen minutes later—she’d never seen a grown man eat so fucking slowly in all her life—he grabbed her bags and held the screen door open for her. She shuffled her way down the porch steps and to the gravel driveway where Nash’s old truck was parked. It felt like she was walking through quicksand, each step a little harder than the previous. But she intended to keep that to herself. Nash didn’t need to know how much she didn’t want to go.
No, that wasn’t quite true. While she’d grown to like Havenbrook much more than she’d ever thought possible, it wasn’t the town she was desperate to stay in. She was certain she’d be feeling the same way if they’d lived in San Francisco or Miami or Atlanta.
Nash carried her bags to the truck, then placed them on the gravel instead of tossing them in the back. He pulled out his phone once more.
“Seriously, Nash, I’m tired of this. What has you stallin’?”
He glanced up at her, and then his gaze fell on something just over her right shoulder, a smile sweeping across his face. “That,” he said, tipping his head toward whatever was behind her.
Nat turned around, lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and looked in the direction Nash had gestured. She’d filled her life with the kind of adrenaline-seeking that meant she’d experienced nearly every kind of high there was—some illegal varieties included—but none of them compared to how she felt in that moment when her eyes connected with Asher’s.
He stepped out of the car and walked toward her, carrying something in his hand. His eyes darted over her face, his brow pinching at whatever he saw. He swept his gaze over the rest of her and to the bags at her feet that Nash still hadn’t put in the truck.
“Delayed flight?” he asked.
Well, she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that her big plan was to sit at the airport for half a day until she qualified to fly standby on her original flight just to get out of there earlier. So instead, she just nodded.
“What’re you doin’ here?” She glanced down at the book he carried—it was fairly large, maybe twelve-by-twelve, an album of some sort.
“If you’re gonna go, I wanted to make sure you saw this before you did.”
She took the album with shaky hands and opened it, her eyes welling up at the first photo inside—her and Asher on their wedding day, the two of them laughing, their heads close together, their eyes sparkling as they regarded each other. As if they already knew the crazy journey they were about to embark on—the laughter and the tears, the late nights and early mornings. Cleaning up vomit and reading approximately twelve hundred bedtime stories and making memories through just living.
She stared at the image until she could no longer see it through her tears. She’d managed not to cry more than a handful of times in her adult years, and yet she couldn’t seem to stop now. Maybe that was because she’d never had something like Asher on the line. She’d spent her life fleeing from place to place, escaping everything before it got too hard. Before she got too attached. Before she fell in love. All the while, pretending like that was some great life.
But she was already attached to Asher. Had already been halfway in love with him before she’d ever stepped foot back in Havenbrook. She’d just needed a little push.
Maybe she’d had this all wrong. Who said she had to fly all over the world to experience what life had to offer? What rule said she couldn’t do that right there in her hometown? Or Memphis? Nashville, New York, Portland, or any of another dozen other cities? As long as he and the kids were there with her, she’d feel like she was on the adventure of a lifetime.
She gasped as something registered, her head snapping up to frantically search the yard, then the car, which was empty. “Oh my God, did you forget the kids at home?”
He breathed out a laugh as if he’d been holding his breath and shook his head. “First of all, the kids are safe. I dropped them off with Gran on my way here. Second, I’m really fucking glad to hear you call our place home.”
“You are?”
“Yeah.” He stepped up to her, so close she felt the heat of his body seeping into hers, and brushed her hair back from her face. “Because I don’t want you to leave, Nat.”
She sputtered, blinking at him in the blazing sun. “Well—I can’t just—”
He pressed his thumb over her lips to stop her garbled words. “That came out wrong. I do want you to leave, to keep doin’ what you do. But only if you promise to come back to me and the kids and this life we pretended we had. It doesn’t have to be pretend, though. It wasn’t—not for me. And I don’t think for you either.” He cupped her face, his fingers delving into her hair as he swept his thumbs along her jaw. “I let you go because I thought that was what you wanted. You couldn’t wait to escape Havenbrook—it was always too small to keep you, and I didn’t want to hold you back.”
“You don’t. You wouldn’t.”
“I know that now. If you could’ve gotten that through my thick skull yesterday, I could’ve saved us a lot of unnecessary angst,” he said wryly as she breathed out a laugh. “Our jobs are both gonna take us away from here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make this work—that we can’t make us work. I want our house to be your home base. I want to be your home base.”
Her breath caught, and the tears welling in her eyes finally spilled over as he told her everything she’d wanted to hear, everything she’d been secretly hoping he’d say.
He wanted her to stay.
“How do we make that work?” she asked, heart in her throat and hope clinging on for dear life.
“I don’t know the logistics, but we don’t need to yet. We’ve got a year till June starts school, and there’s a whole stretch of highway I’m pretty sure you’ve been wantin’ to capture.” He smiled and traced the outline of her lower lip with his thumb. “I can write songs anywhere. All I know is we can figure it out…we can make anything work if you’re mine.”
She was basically a fountain now, her tears free-flowing as Asher handed her everything she never knew she wanted. But she wanted him. And she wanted those kids. And she wanted this life they’d had together. They could figure everything else out along the way.
“And you’d be mine?”
“I already am, wifey.”
He leaned forward as if to kiss her, but before their lips could connect, a car door slammed, startling them apart. The two of them glanced toward the sound and found Nash strolling back from Asher’s car.
With a grin, Nash waved. “I figured I’d save y’all some time and tossed Nat’s bags in the back seat. I’d invite y’all in the house, but Rory’d lose her shit if you two boned on the couch, and I can see where this is goin’. Call me when you get back from wherever the fuck, and we’ll hang out.”
The screen door shut behind Nash as he disappeared into the house, and Asher breathed out a laugh against Nat’s smiling lips.
“Guess he told us,” she said.
“Guess so. It’s probably better he disappeared. He’d be unbearable to be around since he’s probably feelin’ pretty fucking cocky about bein’ right.”
Gazing up at him, she clutched their wedding album to her chest with one hand and tucked the fingers of her other into the pocket of his jeans. “Oh yeah? What was he right about?”
Asher hummed and brushed a lock of windblown hair away from her face. “He might’ve insinuated that we had our heads up our asses and didn’t realize we were both in love with each other.”
“We are, huh?” she asked, her head tipped to the side. “You sure it’s not just for show?”
“It might’ve started that way, but I can promise you that’s not how it’s ending.”
Closing the distance between them, he pressed his lips to hers. Tentatively at first, until she reached blindly behind her and placed the album on the truck bed and then wrapped her arms around him and clutched him to her as if she were afraid he’d slip through her fingers again. But she’d be damned if she let that happen.
How was she lucky enough to find this love? A love that wasn’t suffocating or confining. It wasn’t demanding, only accepting. Being with him had never felt like she’d been locked up tight, trapped with no way out.
The two of them together—the four of them making a life—felt like nothing but possibilities.