Page 56 of Never Forever

I swallowed the urge to warn her. To tell her to keep some part of herself safe. So that when the heart break came, she wouldn’t be destroyed. She wouldn’t be completely ruined and have to rebuild herself into someone different, just to survive.

Only I didn’t want to be the buzzkill that ruined love for her.

Love happened. I knew it was real. Calico Cove was full of people who made lives together. Shared dreams and worked and laughed and touched.

Hell, if Roy Barnes could find love, then my amazing sister could, too.

It just wasn’t going to happen for me. Ever. Love had been burned out of me at the root.

I had my work. My family. And hopefully within the year, a baby.

I didn’t need love. Didn’t even want it.

“Hey, Matt,” Annie said, and if there was ever a time for a velvet ottoman to turn into a portal to a different time and dimension and suck a woman with a dead animal on her head and seven layers of stage make-up sweating off – it was now.

But when it came to Matt Sullivan – my luck ran out years ago.

12

Carrie

There was a time when I used to dream about coming back to Calico Cove as a huge movie star just to throw it in Matt’s face. Looking my movie star best and running into him only when I was fully prepared with insults and quips.

Mostly only on the ferry back and forth to the island.

He’d see me and his jaw would drop and I would know he regretted saying all that shit to me.

But that was the plot of a movie and not real life.

Real life was just seeing him all around town.

At the coffee shop when I went at dawn. At the grocery store. The food trucks. The gas station.

Now he was here. At my sister’s bookshop, the one place I knew that cheapskate wouldn’t go because his entire library was built from books people left on the ferry.

And I was a mess!

This wasn’t fair.

“What do you need, Matt?” Annie asked, standing up and meeting him in the middle of the store. I didn’t look at him. Much.

“Someone left this book on the ferry,” he said, his deep dark voice sending ripples through the air, right to my nipples. I shifted a bit in my sweaty tee shirt. “I think there’s a sequel?”

“Are you actually going to buy a book?’ Annie asked, making it sound like a major event.

“Well, I don’t know if I can count on someone leaving the sequel and I have to know what happened.”

“Oh my God, you’re readingMidnight and Madness?” Alex asked.

Alex handled the YA section of the bookstore and was both an incredible book advocate and book snob. I liked that about him. He was also wearing cowboy boots and a pair of earrings I wanted to borrow. “Isn’t it the best?”

“It’s very good,” Matt said in his boring way. “I didn’t see the twist coming.”

“Right? Kirsch loving Avena the whole time?”

“Well, I was thinking more about the twist of him being dead.”

“I know, but that he was being awful to her all while taking care of her without her knowing. Making sure she got to Wisoria, killing the beasts of the forest. Even getting Pan to declare his love for her? He was the secret good guy.”