Fate's Surrender (Eternal Sorrows Book 3) by Sarra Cannon (android based ebook reader txt) 📕

so many of us spent our lives thinking about the perfect outfit to wear for an Instagram photo.”

“Yeah. I really wish I hadn’t wasted so much time on my modeling career,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean,” she said. “A year ago, the person who lived here might have been stressed out for weeks trying to pick the perfect thousand-dollar lamp for that corner.”

She waved at some lamp he hadn’t even noticed the whole time they’d been here.

Now that she mentioned it, though, it was exactly the kind of lamp he imagined rich people spent their time stressing over. It was weird enough to be cool.

“What a waste of a perfectly good life,” she said, closing the book with a thump.

“Not a waste,” he said, trying his best to concentrate on the satellite work but finding himself much more interested in the fact that he was alone with the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in a mansion on the beach.

Not someplace he’d ever expected to be, but definitely not a waste of a life. Not for him, anyway.

She stood and motioned to the windows and view outside where the moonlight reflected on the water.

“I mean, how much time do you think the people who owned this house even spent here?” she asked. “It doesn’t really look lived in, does it? More like a vacation home, if I had to guess. Or something they rented out.”

He shrugged. He’d never had the money to even dream of buying or renting a place like this, so he had no idea.

“And yet, how many hours did they have to work to afford this place? How much time did they spend worrying over keeping it perfect.”

“Who?” he asked. She was talking like she knew these people.

“I don’t know,” she said. She grabbed a picture frame off a side table near the door and shoved it at him. “These people. They don’t even look happy.”

Crash studied the couple in the photo, immediately recognizing the woman from the corpse now face-down in the bedroom just a few steps away.

Karmen was right.

They were both smiling in the picture, but neither of them looked happy. They looked like a typical couple going through the motions, living their lives the way everyone expected them to.

“All of this, and they look like they were bored with each other,” she said. “If I could, I’d go back in time and tell them they were wasting the one thing that should have mattered more than money.”

“What’s that?” he asked, curious to hear what she would say.

She shrugged and met his eyes. “Time. Life. I don’t know. But whatever it was, they were wasting it.”

“I guess we all were,” Crash said. “What’s that saying? You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

She smiled, and her eyes lit up from the inside.

“See, you get me,” she said. “I’ve never had anyone get me before.”

“Me either,” he said. “Not really.”

His work with the satellites was completely forgotten now, and even though it was important, so was this. He could look at the river and the maps in the morning, but he might never have another chance to be with her like this again.

“Do you want to sit out by the pool for a little while?” he asked, his voice catching a little with nerves.

He’d really only ever dated a handful of girls before, and those were mostly girls he’d met online and hung out with a few times. None of them had ever gotten serious, and for the most part, he’d lost interest pretty quickly.

Karmen was different, and it wasn’t just because he’d known her before in some other lifetime. He liked her in this lifetime.

“Sure,” she said. “Do you think it’s safe?”

“Should be,” he said. “There’s a fence around this whole house, and I haven’t seen any rotters around since we got here.”

He focused his attention on the lights inside the pool, and they blinked on. It was a beautiful effect, like a greenish-blue lagoon. If the people who’d lived here wasted part of their lives trying to make their pool look perfect, at least someone was left to enjoy it.

Before they walked outside, Crash grabbed his gun, just in case, but he had a feeling they were going to be okay out there.

Karmen was barefoot as she walked outside. She dipped her toes in the water and shivered. There was a light breeze out here tonight, and the temperature had dropped some since the sun went down.

It wasn’t cold, exactly, but it was perfect snuggle weather.

“Damn,” she said, pulling her arms tightly around her middle. “I was hoping to put my feet in for a while.”

“Hold on a second,” he said, connecting with the tech inside the pool to see if there was a heating unit.

He would have bet money on there being one, since it would have been dumb to spend millions on a house like this in New Jersey without springing for a heated pool.

It was there, of course, so he switched it on.

“Heated pool. Give it a few minutes, and it’ll warm right up,” he said. “Hang on.”

He ran back into the house and grabbed a blanket off the couch. He put it around Karmen’s shoulders, and for a moment, as she lifted her hand to secure it around her body, their fingers touched.

She hadn’t pulled away, either, and the way her eyes met his for a long moment made his stomach flip and his heart race.

While they waited for the water to heat up, they sat down on the L-shaped couch by the pool.

“I bet you spent a lot of time in places like this,” he said.

She laughed and shook her head. “Never. I mean, my family went on vacation to the beach a few times, but we never could have gotten a place like this, are you crazy?”

“I see you in places like this,” he said. “Like you belong here.”

She looked around. “I dreamed of this all my life. Of being the woman