Page 99 of One and Only

I’d never really even started looking because someone like this felt like a figment of my imagination.

The dream, Poppy said.

And somehow, with every odd stacked against us, I’d married someone who was all those things. And all I had to show for it was a useless piece of paper that I’d shoved into his jacket and a devastating, earth-shattering, staggering kind of want for something that I couldn’t have.

This was all black and white to him.

There was the right thing to do.

There was a wrong path to follow. Clearly delineated.

My brain buzzed ineffectually around what I was supposed to do with all this when the sound of a car door punctuated the silence.

I sagged, allowing my forehead to press back against his.

“Always something,” I said lightly.

“Hello!” Poppy called. “I saw you when I drove up.”

As she entered the barn, she grinned wide when she caught sight of our position, and Beckett stepped back with a loaded exhale.

I gave Poppy a long look. “Honestly, is there a bat signal going out to my sisters today?”

“Not that I know of. I was in the area, and since I keep telling you I might stop by …” She paused, studying the workout equipment. “I figured I might as well do it.”

“In the area,” I said dryly.

She smiled sunnily. “Imagine that.”

Beckett gave me a look. “I’m gonna go shower. Poppy, you’re welcome to stay for dinner if you’d like,” he said.

“Is she?” I muttered.

Poppy shoved at my shoulder. I shoved back.

“Come on,” I told her. “Let me show you around, you nosy little jerk.”

Chapter22

Beckett

The fact that I’d already seen her in the dress once was my saving grace because when she came down the stairs—lashes long and fully lined with something dark and smudged and unbearably sexy, her lips slicked with some sort of shiny gloss, and her hair hanging in a smooth, straight line behind her back—any restraint I had left when it came to Greer would have been brutally eviscerated.

But I was prepared.

I knew how dangerous she was, her body covered in that deceptively simple red dress.

And so I braced myself like she was an incoming blow to the chest when the door to the guest room opened, and she came down the stairs.

I managed a swallow and held her eyes as she approached. Her lips quirked while she studied the cut of my dark-gray suit. I’d ditched the tie and left the top button of my dress shirt undone.

It was a good thing, too, because it was hard enough to breathe when I saw her.

“You look nice,” she told me.

For a second, I didn’t say anything because I was terrified to tell her any of the things running through my head.

But there were so many things I couldn’t give her, that I didn’t feel capable of. So I managed to pull the words out and take the risk that I might say too much.

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