“I know,” Missy said, her attention already on her phone. “You don’t have to wait for me, Momma.” She smiled and hugged Emma, who held onto her for an extra beat of time. Long enough to commit the moment to memory and feel a wave of gratitude roll over her.
Missy went out the back door, and Emma turned toward the rest of the house. Out of the kitchen, she turned left, and froze at the sight of Ted Burrows standing next to her dining room table. “Ted,” left her mouth in a gasp.
“Oh, I thought you were calling me Teddy,” he said easily, both of his hands wrapped around the stems of a bouquet of wildflowers. A smile slipped across his mouth, but it didn’t stay long. “I’m…”
He swallowed, and he was so adorable when he was nervous. He called to her soul in a way no one ever had before, and while it scared Emma senseless, she also wanted to embrace the feeling. Give in to it.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “For pushing you to tell me stuff you didn’t want to. I said you could have time and you could tell me when you were ready, but I didn’t really honor that.”
“Don’t,” she said, her voice tight and harsh and pleading at the same time. “Please do not apologize to me. I’m the one who owes you an apology. I wanted to tell you.” She looked down the galley kitchen to see Missy had settled on the back steps, her phone to her ear. “She’s everything to me, and I was so used to keeping her to myself.” She looked back at Ted. “I realize now how wrong I was. She’s so wonderful, and everyone should know about her.”
“I know why you did,” Ted said quietly.
“I was scared.”
He nodded as if he really did understand.
“But you were right,” Emma said, finally able to take a step toward him and the table. Only a couple more and she arrived and set the cookies down. “Everything comes out in the end.” She looked up at him.
Hope emanated from his expression. “I brought you these flowers,” he said. “Because I did the same thing on our first date, and that went really well, and it’s a good memory for me.” He cleared his throat and laid them on the table.
“We made your favorite cookies, because Missy told me that she’d done that once when you were mad at her, and you forgave her.” He pressed his fingers to the table, his attention on them. “I was hoping for the same thing. That you’d forgive me for anything and everything, and that we could somehow try again.”
The brim of his cowboy hat kept most of his face concealed, and he finally lifted his chin enough for their eyes to meet. “I sure do like you, Emma. Nate thinks it’s because I’ve been in prison for a while and don’t know many women.” He shook his head. “I know one-hundred percent that it’s not that.” He reached up and touched his chest where his heart beat inside. “I feel things for you. I started to fall in love with you. I know I’m a bit of a bull sometimes, and I’m overprotective, and I’m not perfect.”
Emma’s eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head.
“I know I’m going to mess up again,” he said quietly, dropping that chin again. “Because I’ve never felt like this about anyone before, and it’s all uncharted territory for me. But I was kinda hoping you’d started to fall for me too, and that if you had, we could—I don’t know.” He shrugged and shifted his feet. “Try again.”
Emma wanted that with her whole heart and soul. Before she could contain her emotion enough to answer in a voice that wasn’t broken and cracked with tears, she heard a strange sound. A snuffling, rooting sound. A…piggish sound.
“Oh, no,” Ted said, taking a couple of steps into the living room. He bent and scooped something into his arms and came back. “And I got you that little pig you wanted.” He held the most perfect pink and brown piglet Emma had ever seen. “I didn’t name her,” he added. “I figured you could go with Petunia or change your mind.”
He looked at her fully now, everything laid out between them. “I honestly don’t care about what you did or didn’t do a decade ago. Missy is a pretty special kid, and I understand—”
“Okay, enough,” Emma said, because she couldn’t stand to listen to him tell her how right she was again. She wasn’t right, and she knew it.
She pressed her palms together, her nerves screaming through her. He’d said all the right things and delivered them perfectly too. She didn’t have a speech prepared, and she was messing everything up right now.
“I started to fall in love with you too,” she said, her emotion staining and seeping into every word. “Let’s try again, okay, Teddy? Please?”
Ted put the piglet down and stepped over to her, taking her into his arms effortlessly. “As many times as we need to, okay, sweetheart?”
She nodded as the tears spilled down her face. She pressed her eyes closed, and Ted’s gentle, warm hands brushed the tears away. “I like it when you call me Teddy,” he said, his voice a husky whisper. “I’m going to kiss you now, and then you’ll have to name your piglet.”
Emma half-laughed and half-cried, and she positively melted into Ted’s kiss the moment his mouth met hers.
She felt unworthy and in complete awe that everything she wanted in her life was happening. Her daughter home with her. Ted Burrows in her house, kissing her with such tenderness and such passion that even if he hadn’t said he was falling in love with her, she’d have known.
“Come on, Petunia,” she said to the little pig who’d wandered away
