I shrugged. I had more money than my children’s children could ever spend in their entire lives. I’d been blessed, and it was time to do good. Life had been unkind to my sweet sis, robbing her of the love of her life and stealing the father of her kids when she least expected it. All the man ever wanted was to provide a good life for his family and support his country. In the end, he paid the ultimate price. Someone had to take care of them. I planned to buy them a big house in the near future too, though it’d be a surprise because she’d never let me do it if she knew.
“Oh my God!” Ivy turned her attention toward Dakota, who’d been standing back the entire time. “Dakota?”
“Hi, Ivy.” Dakota offered a polite smile, though she still seemed to be in a daze from when I’d kissed her.
“What are you doing here? Where’s Addison? Oh, sweet Jesus. You look amazing!” Ivy rambled on and on, gushing left and right and hurling more compliments and kind words at Dakota than she knew what to do with.
“Ivy, calm down,” I chuckled. “Don’t you need to get back to work?”
She stopped yammering and glanced at her phone. “I took an early lunch, but yeah.” She sighed, beaming at Dakota with a wistful look in her bright copper eyes. “I should head back. Do you guys want to go get drinks tomorrow night? It’ll be a Monday, so the bars will be dead. I can get a sitter. We can catch up?”
“Oh,” Dakota said, staring my way. “Um.”
“I’m up for it.” I shrugged, staring back at Dakota. “I think we need to remind our old friend here that we still know how to have fun in Darlington.”
“She forget, did she?” Ivy did a little hop-step as she hurried back to her car. The girl was like a bottle of fizzy orange soda and had been all her life. How a woman could lose so much and be so damn resilient was beyond me, though I suppose with the little ones, she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Gravel dust trailed behind her as she sped down the long drive and turned back toward the highway.
Dakota stood back a ways from me, eyeing me carefully as if she was still trying to figure out if she was okay with me kissing her. Judging by the half-scowl on her lips and the burn of her stare, things weren’t looking to be in my favor.
“I’m going to look at some horses in a little bit,” I said. “You can come with if you want.”
“I’ll probably go back into town and visit Mom,” she said after clearing her throat, her voice slightly shaking. Her arms hugged her sides, almost in a defensive stance, like she was protecting herself from me.
“All right then.” I rested my hands against my hips, thumbing my belt loops. “Guess I’ll see you back here tonight.”
She nodded, glancing up at me through her lashes and apparently opting to keep her opinion to herself. Adjusting her purse strap over her shoulder, she marched toward her rental car and sped off.
Ruby whimpered from the bed of the truck, reminding me she needed help getting out. I hoisted her up and out and placed her gently on the ground. “Sorry, girl. Got a little distracted there.”
She licked my hand and moseyed back up to the front porch where she found her favorite sunny spot and collapsed herself into a furry ball of snoring dog.
Lowering myself into an old white rocker, I drew in a long breath and recalled the first time I knew I had to let Dakota Andrews go.
11 years ago
We were parked outside the Dairy Barn in town enjoying a lazy May afternoon as Dakota finished her senior year of high school, her sun-kissed legs kicked up across my dusty dash as she licked chocolate soft serve off a red plastic spoon. She finished off the last bite before reaching into her faded pink backpack and pulling out a starched white envelope with a royal blue return address stamped from the University of Kentucky.
“Look what came today,” she said with a sing-song drawl. “I wanted to open it with you.”
I turned my body toward her, watching intently as she drew in a long, slow breath and tore at the white paper. She yanked out a single page, and my heart fell as I watched her eyes well up as she read it. I readied myself with an apology and a few words of encouragement until she finally spoke up.
“I got in.”
“What?” I should’ve been happy for her. And I was. But her words were a bullet to our future, sealing our destiny, at least for the foreseeable future. “That’s great.”
“They’re giving me a full ride. An academic scholarship, Beau.” She wiped her eyes and pressed the letter across her heart as she smiled big.
I leaned across the truck and kissed her lips, tasting the happy tears that streaked her cheeks and fell onto her pretty lips. Cool and salty, it was a taste I would never quite be able to forget.
“You know what this means, right?” she asked, looking up at me as if she needed my permission to pursue the best damn thing that’d ever happened to her.
“I know,” I said. “It means we just have the summer.”
“I want to spend every single day with you,” she said. “Up until the very end. Before I leave.”
I nodded. All relationships were a gamble, but putting a time stamp on the best thing that had ever happened to me stung like nothing else. “I’m happy for you, Kota. I really am.”
I glanced into the soft blue eyes I’d grown dangerously in love with over the course of the last few years, never forgetting the first time I saw her at school. Helping one of the disabled kids after they spilled the contents of their backpack all over the floor of a busy hallway, she was the only person kind enough to stop what she was doing and assist the flustered and embarrassed guy.