SunnyWithAChanceofTrueLove (12 page)

Tulsi sagged against him in relief. “Thank goodness. I’m not ready.”

“Me, either,” he said with a laugh. “I want a few more years of having you all to myself.”

She tipped her head back, gazing up at him with a mixture of wonder and disbelief. “Did you just say what I think you said?”

“What?” he asked, an uncertain note in his voice. “Don’t you want to have kids with me someday?”

Tulsi nodded numbly, worried her chest might explode from an overload of joy.

“Too soon?” he asked when she was silent for another long minute. “Should I pretend I’m not crazy in love with you?”

Tulsi’s nod transformed into a swift shake of her head, making him laugh.

“Good.” He dropped a kiss to her bare shoulder. “Because I am, and I’m going to figure out a way for us to be together. I promise.”

The rest of the weekend passed in a blissful haze and Tulsi practically floated back to school Monday morning. Her friends Mia and Bubba knew immediately that something was up, but Tulsi refused to say a word, wanting to keep what she’d found with Pike to herself for a little longer. She’d waited so long for him, she wasn’t ready to share him with the world just yet.

The weeks before graduation seemed to drag with unnatural slowness, even as weekends with Pike flew by. They spent their time alone riding horses, learning each other’s secrets, and making love like it was their mission on earth. After a week, Tulsi drove into San Antonio to get a prescription for birth control pills, and by the end of May she and Pike were taking full advantage of their newfound freedom, making love in the river during a swim, on the side of the trail while they watered the horses, and in the back of Pike’s truck after Tulsi’s graduation, the night before Pike left to go on the road with his team.

They stayed together until the sun came up, and Pike couldn’t put off leaving another moment.

“I’ll call as soon as I can,” he said, kissing her goodbye. “I love you.”

“Love you, too,” Tulsi said, trying not to cry as she watched him drive away. Things were going to be harder with him on the road, but what they felt for each other was real, the kind of love people wrote songs and stories about. She had no doubt—her and Pike’s love was going to last.

She believed that with every fiber of her being…right up until the day he proved she’d been a fool to trust a man who craved freedom more than anything else with every piece of her heart.

But by then, it was too late. Her fate had been sealed that warm spring day in Springfield, Texas, when Pike Sherman kissed her, and put her permanently under his spell. No matter how hard the coming years proved to be, or how lonely she often felt, Tulsi never stopped loving him. Even as she lied to him, pushed him away, and learned to hate him, love was there, pulsing beneath the stormier emotions, refusing to be snuffed out.

Loving Pike was a habit she couldn’t break, as much a part of her as her passion for horses, her devotion to her daughter, and her belief that there is beauty in almost everything, if you just take the time to stop and look for it.

But on the hot July night when she locked eyes with Pike for the first time in seven long years, Tulsi wasn’t looking for beauty. She was looking for strength, and the will to cut her heart free of the man who had ripped it out of her chest once and for all.

DIAMONDS AND DUST is out now!