Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

a smile spread over his face like daybreak on the horizon. "Except maybe for me."

"Trust me. You'll be feeling your age in your bones soon enough. You'll be running and jumping and swinging and climbing and sliding—"

"Okay, okay," he said with a laugh. He was going to be a father again. They were going to have another baby. It was a gift he'd never expected, and what a lucky man he was. "I'm aching already, if it makes you feel any better."

"I'll tell you what will make me feel better," she said, one of her brows going up and saying thousands of words she didn't need to say.

He understood her perfectly. With both his body and his heart. He undressed her slowly and laid her back, shucking out of his own clothes before covering her and kissing her and, several long minutes later, sliding into her.

And as had been the case for all of his life, loving her more today than he had yesterday, but not as much as he would tomorrow.

Epilogue

Two days later

Neva stood in the field behind her house, loving the sweeping sense of the wide open spaces, the beauty of the horizon and Guadalupe Peak, the feel of Mick's arms around her. She could breathe. She could think. She could lean back against the man to whom her heart belonged and draw on his strength.

He'd been gone for a week the second time, after finding her, putting an end to Ed's madness, bringing Jase and Liberty home. That day ... It was hard to believe it had happened, though not as hard as it was to have experienced those grisly moments. To have turned around there in the mouth of that cave and found that Holden Wagner, whom she'd so long despised, had given his life to save hers.

To have been an unwitting victim of Ed Hill's obsession, one to which three innocent girls would never know they had sacrificed their lives. To have witnessed Mick putting an end to it all with one shot. So much unnecessary bloodshed in order that she might go on living. She would never forget. She would carry the weight of that debt forever.

Yet the hardest thing she'd ever faced was waiting alone for Mick to return—strange, when she'd been on her own forever and had never been lonely before.

She'd known he had a job to finish that had nothing to do with her. Not with saving her life. Not with being with her. Not with loving her. It was about doing the things that made him who he was, the things he hadn't yet told her, the ones that he claimed defined him as not a very nice man.

She didn't think he could be any nicer. Especially after today. She'd been in the kitchen washing up from lunch— Candy having returned to work already—when she heard car wheels on the gravel road and looked up. Breathless, anxious, hopeful. The sight of his Range Rover pulling to a stop beside her pickup had done her in.

Sobbing, she'd slammed through the back door, knocking the screen off its hinges, and ran around the side of the house, launching herself into his arms just as FM had clambered over him and Mick had climbed from his seat. He'd whooshed out a breath and grunted; she'd apologized with kisses for knocking him senseless, then burst into tears.

She'd tried to stop and couldn't. He'd walked her out here and held her while she cried, as if knowing how much she had to tell him about who she was, how many things she had to say about where she'd come from before she would ever be able to ask him to stay.

She took a deep breath now and started. "The first time I saw this place, I fell in love. All this room to roam. No dark alleys or shadowed streets. I knew I'd never have to fear turning a corner. Or fight my way out of tight spots. If anyone wanted me, I could see them coming for miles."

A shudder ran through her when she paused, and Mick rocked her side to side, his voice low and gruff, his breath warm against her ear. "You can tell me about it, you know. I'm not going to leave because you've been through something ugly. And I'm sure as hell not going to judge you."

She knew that. Knew that she could trust him. With her present, her past. With her secrets, her life. "My mother died when I was a toddler. My father raised me. I was an only child and he never remarried."

Hissing out a sharp breath, Mick tightened his arms around her middle, drew her back into his body until it seemed their hearts beat with the same rhythm and they wore the same clothes. "He abused you."

"No." She shook her head, then turned her face into his cheek and closed her eyes. "He was the perfect father to raise a daughter alone. But we did live in an area that wasn't all sweetness and light. And I went to school with a lot of kids who weren't as lucky as I was. I also went to school with boys who'd grown up being taught by example that girls were no better than possessions."

Mick stopped her then. Brought his fingers to her lips and shook his head. "And treated them as such. Or worse."

"Worse is an understatement." She thought back to the abuse she'd seen inflicted on her friends. The bruises. The breaks. The tears. How even though she hadn't suffered she'd still been afraid of the dark, where she knew so much of the damage happened. "That was where it all started for me. Too many girls 1 knew thought they deserved what they got. That it was their lot in life. I knew better. It wasn't. My father taught me that."

"And you set out to save the world," he said, swaying with her from side to side, rock-a-bying his