“I love this place. W-we don’t come out here often enough,” Shane said.
“Never been here before right now,” Jancy said.
“Ahhh, come on! Surely you w-went swimmin’ wh-when you lived in Pick, didn’t you?”
She shook her head. “Not one time, but I love it. It can be our special place from now on. I’ve always pictured a little white house with a weeping willow in the backyard. In my mind I can see the wind blowing the limbs and kids playing chase in and out around it.”
“I’ll plant one tomorrow,” Shane said. “You said you had something to tell m-me and then the girls interrupted us.”
“When my car first caught on fire, I thought I was the unluckiest person alive. Then I got to feelin’ like maybe I was the luckiest, since I met you because of that fire and I’ve got these friends who are like family.” She hesitated.
He moved over close enough to draw her to his side with an arm around her shoulders. “I like that you turned things around,” he whispered next to her ear, his warm breath on her neck creating a quiver deep in her heart.
“Luck don’t last.” She sighed.
“We m-make our own luck, and love lasts when luck plays plumb out,” he answered. “Look at all those beautiful colors reflected in the w-water. It’s almost as gorgeous as you are.”
“Okay.” She inhaled deeply and told him everything about the probation, including why she’d been leaving Texas at the time she did.
“Is that all?” Shane asked when she’d finished.
“Every bit of it,” she said.
“I have a confession to make,” he said.
Her stomach tightened into a knot, and she held her hands so tightly in her lap that they began to tingle.
“I knew that three days after you got here and, Jancy, I don’t care about any of it,” he said.
Her eyes felt as if they might pop right out of her head and roll around on the grass until they reached the water. “How? What? How did you . . .”
“Now you are about to stutter.” He planted a kiss on her cheek. “I had to get the papers in order to sell any usable parts of your car, and I’d let the rest go in the junk m-metal pile. Got a flag on your name and looked it up.”
She pushed away from him and cocked her head to one side. “And you didn’t mention it?”
He shrugged. “I told you. I don’t care about the past. I just w-want a future with you, darlin’. I w-wish you could’ve stayed in Pick and w-we w-would have gotten together right out of high school. But that’s not wh-what happened, so w-we’ll have to m-make up for lost time.”
“I love you, Shane Adams.”
He grabbed her and rolled backward so that they were both lying down, facing each other. “Those are the sweetest words I’ve ever heard in my whole life. I’m the luckiest man in the state.”
Vicky was sitting on her bed when Nettie knocked and pushed open the door. “Need some company?”
“In the worst kind of way.” Vicky scooted to the middle to make room. “This is really happening, isn’t it, Nettie? Next week there is going to be a wedding. And I think I’m going to be all right with it.”
Nettie fluffed up two pillows against the headboard and propped her back against it. “Yes, and you can be thankful that she is coming home at night rather than moving in with him before the wedding.”
“I am grateful for that, and Ryder has been so sweet that it’d be tough to stay mad at him. But what if he can’t change? What if . . .”
Nettie laid a hand on her knee. “I heard Thelma say the same things about Creed, and you were seventeen and still in high school. Emily’s twenty-two and has promised to finish her schoolin’ with them online courses.”
“And what did you tell Mama?” Vicky toyed with the tufts of chenille on her snowy-white bedspread.
“To be careful, because she didn’t want to lose you. Hearts can be mended and problems fixed, but only if the lines of communication are open between the mother and daughter,” Nettie answered.
“I’d rather it had been Shane.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Shane is a sweetheart, but he’s not for Emily. She has to have someone who’s on her mental level, who can talk her language. She and Ryder can do that. When the lust settles and the love is stretched, they’ll still be able to talk. She and Shane would have grown apart fast.”
Vicky sighed. “He was always such a bad boy.”
“Like mama, like daughter.” Nettie giggled. “And like grandma, too. And I thought you said you were okay with it. Where are these doubts coming from?”