Summer of Love by Marie Ferrarella (easy to read books for adults list .TXT) 📕

better.” She smiled at him, fighting back tears again. “We really should have communicated more honestly with one another.”

Everett stepped closer, letting himself do what he’d wanted to since he’d walked into this office. He enfolded Lila in his arms. “You’re absolutely right. I should have talked with you, told you what I was feeling. But I just closed myself off, trying to deal with what was going on. I was blind and didn’t realize that you were going through the same thing, too, and could have used my support.” He’d been such a fool, Everett thought, regret riddling him. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?” he asked again.

Now that she knew that Everett had experienced the same doubts and emotions about their daughter that had haunted her, all of Lila’s old feelings of anger and resentment vanished as if they had never existed. All Everett ever had to do was tell her what he’d gone through.

Forgiveness flooded her. “Yes, of course I can,” she told him.

Relief mingled with love, all but overwhelming Everett. He kissed Lila, temporarily disregarding where they were and the fact that the people she worked with could easily look over and see what was happening.

And she kissed him back.

Everett forced himself to draw back. Still holding her in his arms, he looked down into her eyes. “From now on,” he promised, “I’m putting all my cards on the table.”

“Are you planning on playing solitaire or poker?” she asked Everett, a smile curving the corners of her mouth.

“Definitely not solitaire,” he answered. “But any other game that you want. Oh, Lila, we’ve wasted much too much time and we’ll never get any of that time back,” he told her. His arms tightened around her. It felt so good to hold her against him like this. He felt he’d never let her go. “But we can have the future.”

“And by that you mean...?” Her voice trailed off.

She wanted him to spell everything out so that there would be no more mix-ups, no more misunderstandings to haunt either one of them. She wanted to be absolutely certain that Everett was talking about what she thought he was talking about.

“I mean that I’m planning on being very clear about my intentions this time around. I know what I want,” he told her, looking deep into her eyes. “All you need to do is say yes.”

But she wasn’t the same person she’d been thirteen years ago. She knew how to stand up for herself, how not to allow herself to be swept away.

She surprised him by telling Everett, “I never say ‘yes’ unless I know exactly what it is that I’m saying yes to.”

“To this,” Everett told her, pulling something out of his pocket. When he opened his hand, there was a big, beautiful heart-shaped diamond ring mounted on a wishbone setting in the center of his palm. He’d brought it with him for luck—and just in case.

Lila stared at it, momentarily speechless. When she raised her eyes to his face, she could barely speak. “Is that—”

She couldn’t bring herself to ask the question, because the moment she did—and he said no—a little of the magic would be gone. And she really couldn’t believe that the ring she was looking at was the one she’d fallen in love with so many years ago.

But Lila discovered that she needn’t have anticipated disappointment, because Everett nodded.

“Yes,” he told her, pleased by her reaction, “it is. It’s the one you saw through the window in that little out-of-the-way shop that day when we were back in college. You made me stand there while you made a wish and just stared at it, like it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen.”

She smiled, remembering every detail. “I was being silly and frivolous,” she admitted.

“No, you were being honest about your reaction,” he corrected.

She continued looking at the sparkling diamond in his hand, completely mesmerized. “But how did you...?”

Everett anticipated her question and was way ahead of her. “After I dropped you off home, I doubled back to the store to buy the ring. The store was closed for the night by then, but I kept knocking on the door until the owner finally came down and opened it. Turns out that he lived above the store,” he told her. “Anyway, I made him sell me the ring right then and there. I hung onto it, confident that I would give it to you someday.” He smiled ruefully. “I just never thought it was going to take quite this long,” he confessed.

Taking a deep breath, he held the ring up to her and said in a voice filled with emotion, “Lila Clark, will you marry me? I promise if you say yes, I will never leave you again.”

Lila could feel her heart beating so hard in her chest, she was certain it was going to break right through her ribs. The wish she’d made that day in front of the shop window was finally coming true.

“I don’t plan to keep you on a leash,” she told him, so filled with love she thought she was going to burst. “But yes, I will marry you.”

Thrilled, dazed, relieved and experiencing a whole host of other emotions, Everett slipped the engagement ring on her finger.

The second he did, he swept her into his arms and kissed her again, longer this time even though he could see that they had attracted an audience. It didn’t matter to him.

Lila’s colleagues were watching them through the glass walls of her office and cheering them on, his sister and her cohort in front of the pack.

He looked down into Lila’s eyes. “We can have more kids,” he told her. “An entire army of kids if that’s what you want. And they’ll never want for anything. We can have that wonderful life that we used to just talk about having.”

“A better one,” she interjected.

“Absolutely,” he agreed, hugging her to him again. “The sky’s the limit,” he promised. “But