Page 55 of Falling for a Grumpy Hero

FORD

One Year Later

I came home from a weekend trip to Florida to music so loud, it was rattling the windows. Rook bounded over when I opened the door, greeting me with what I could only describe as a healthy dose of disappointment to be seeing his other, not as important, human.

Considering the music, I knew the more important human was around here somewhere, though. I smiled as I walked into the house, leaving my carry-on next to the front door. My visit to Luke’s parents had gone well, but I was happy to be home.

Over the course of the last twelve months, I’d visited them a handful of times, and every time I went, I felt like another part of my hurt scabbed over.

Being with them was soothing in a way I wouldn’t have expected, but seeing how they were carrying on while also carrying him with them every day had taught me how to do it myself.

He’d been my friend, but he’d also been their son, and sure, I had additional trauma stemming from the accident itself and my own recovery, but it still couldn’t hold a candle to theirs.

All things considered, I’d learned that there was such a thing as healthy coping mechanisms and I’d started employing them.

“Lila?” I called as I walked deeper into the house, my footsteps muted not only by the deafening music but also the rugs she’d put down.

In fact, the whole house looked very different from what it used to be.

Not only had Lila brought all her stuff here after I’d asked her to move in with me, but she was constantly working on the place.

We now had art on the walls and framed photographs of us and our lives together mounted between the paintings.

There were overflowing bookshelves in the living room, populated by her after I’d let it slip that I had a secret love of reading.

Especially fantasy and adventure books. It wasn’t a hobby I’d indulged in much after I’d gotten back from Afghanistan, but I’d rediscovered it after Lila had started buying the books.

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t seem to hear me calling her name. The music kept playing and she didn’t respond, but Rook trotted out ahead of me, heading to the den that, until now, I’d been using for storage.

That was where I found Lila—and the room definitely wasn’t a spot for storage anymore. She’d moved all the old, dusty boxes out and had cleaned up the odds and ends. Plastic sheeting covered the floor and she was rolling butter-yellow paint all over the walls and ceiling.

Dressed in overalls splattered with all different colors of paint, her hair was thrown into a messy ponytail right on top of her head and her feet were bare. She was singing along to the Taylor Swift song that was blaring from the speakers and she hadn’t noticed me yet.

Leaning against the door frame, I smiled as I watched her shake her ass, using the roller as a microphone every so often. As she bent over to swipe it through some more paint, she must’ve spotted me in her periphery because her spine suddenly snapped straight and she screamed.

“Ford!” Her hand flew to her chest, her eyes wide as she spun to face me. Reaching for the remote, she hit pause on the song and then laughed, racing over to me with joy lighting up her beautiful face. “You’re home!”

My heart tripped over itself. It’d been a whole year and I still couldn’t believe that I’d gotten so lucky. I caught her before she could smear her paint-covered body all over my clean clothes, then laid a searing kiss on her that burned through my entire body.

“I missed you,” I murmured against her hair, closing my eyes and breathing her in. “What are you doing, exactly?”

She laughed again and planted one more hard kiss on my mouth before she stepped back. “Just brightening the place up a little. It’s such a beautiful room and I couldn’t bear to have it just standing here, literally gathering dust.”

I chuckled, taking a quick look around and finding that she wasn’t wrong. It was a pretty nice room and it’d been a massive waste of space, just using it for boxes. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”

“Do you?” She wrung her hands in front of her, her gaze darting this way and that and her cheeks blushing a beautiful, rosy pink.

“I know you don’t like yellow because it reminds you of sunshine and all that, but the room is south facing.

It just needed color and I tried a few before I settled on this, but I figured you’d prefer yellow to red, which was the other option in the end. ”

“I actually love the color yellow.” I smiled and reached for her hands, squeezing them and tugging her into me. Fuck the paint.

She laughed as she crashed into my chest, her eyes flying up to mine and her paint-streaked arms wrapping around my neck. “Hi.”

I planted a kiss on her forehead before I rested mine against it. “Hi.”

“Do you really like yellow?” she asked, her fingers toying with the hair at my nape. “I thought you hated it. When you first asked if I’d take on your house as a project?—”

“Our house,” I corrected, then I grinned. “And I know what I said back then, but I wasn’t in a place where I could appreciate the color at the time.”

“What about now?” she asked quietly. “What’s changed?”

“It reminds me of you,” I replied, and it wasn’t even just a line. It was the complete and total truth. “Dan told me once that he and his wife painted their entire first house yellow because it reminded him of the sun. You do that for me. The color just reminds me of your warmth and your light.”

She melted into me, properly smearing paint all over my chest as she lifted up on her toes and wrapped her arms around my waist. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” I smiled against her lips before I kissed her, finally really feeling like I was home.

There had been a time I’d have shut down completely, arriving home to find something had changed. Something this big would’ve probably sent me into a freaking institution back then, but without even talking to me about it, Lila had somehow known.

Last year, after I’d asked her to be my designer, she’d started really small.

With just a rug in the foyer and a single bookshelf in the living room.

Once I’d had some time to adjust to that, she’d started adding other little touches, a sculpture from a friend of hers in New York and some decorative cushions on our bed.

As I’d gotten used to those changes, she’d spoken to me about color schemes, and before I’d answered, I’d asked her to move in with me. If we were going to be choosing colors, I wanted to be doing it together.

And so, we had.

This wasn’t the first time I’d arrived home to her having picked up a paintbrush, or hung wallpaper, or even hired a team of contractors right under my nose to redo the bathrooms and the kitchen.

Those changes had been the biggest. They’d only happened a few months ago, and honestly, they hadn’t bugged me at all.

The team she’d hired had done an excellent job and it’d been way past time for an update.

I kissed her deeply now, really not sure how I’d even survived before she’d come into my life.

Everything she did made the house feel more like a home in all the best ways possible.

Lila had saved me and I’d never be able to thank her for that, but whenever I mentioned it, she’d insisted that I’d saved her right back.

We’d come to an agreement to stop mentioning it and simply accept that we’d been meant to find each other. I cupped her cheek in my hand, letting the gratitude for having her in my life warm me after the profound sense of loss I’d felt this weekend, being back in Luke’s parents’ house.

“Are you okay?” she asked as if she’d heard the thought, murmuring against my lips. She pulled her head back to look into my eyes. “You just got all soft and squishy. That means something.”

“It means I was relaxing because I’m back home.

With you.” I pumped my eyebrows at her, but in return, she tilted her head and gave me a look that said she was waiting for the truth.

I sighed. “It was a good weekend, but it’s always sad to visit there.

I’m learning so much about who he was before I met him.

The Luke who signed up to go to war but hadn’t been there. ”

She raked her fingers through my hair and smiled. “That’s good. I know it’s not easy to learn about the parts of him you didn’t know, but it’s important a person be remembered for everything they were and not just one thing.”

“I like that.” I gave her one last squeeze and took a step back, running my gaze over the half-painted walls once more. “What can I do to help? This is looking really good so far, but I’m an extra pair of hands if you’d like them.”

“Nah, let’s take a break. I’ve got some plans I want to tell you about for the front garden. I think we’ve got a real shot of winning best yard on the block this year, but we’ll have to get started soon if we’re going to be ready in time.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” I winked and took her hand, leading her over to the kitchen and making us each a latte with the coffee machine she’d brought over from her place when she’d moved in.

The first time I’d encountered this thing, it’d nearly beat me, but in the year it’d been since, I’d fully mastered it.

While I made the drinks, she chatted about her plans for the yard, talking about hydrangeas and reseeding the grass. I listened, but as I did, my gaze settled on the spot near the kitchen table where she’d checked my injury that day.

I remembered her hand brushing against the inside of my thigh and how, in that moment, I’d decided to say fuck it and to just kiss her like I meant it for the first time.

When she’d redone the kitchen, she’d kept that table and, with cheeks the color of a plum, had admitted that she’d kept it because of that memory.

As I looked at it now, I decided that enough was enough. Enough waiting. Enough lingering in the past. Enough wondering if we were ever going to be readier than we were right now.

Our drinks were ready, but instead of reaching for her mug to hand it over, I reached into the cabinet above the microwave. For the last few months, this cabinet had been guarding a box I knew she would never find because the cabinet was too high for her to look into or use at all.

My fingers closed around the velvet-wrapped box and I smiled when I noticed Lila frowning at me. She’d stopped talking about grass mid-sentence and watched as I pulled the box out. “What are you doing? What is that?”

I kept the box hidden in my hand, my heart thrumming in a way it never had before as I walked over to that spot. She’d knelt in front of me in it once, taking care of me like no one ever had and now I was about to promise her that I would do the same for her for the rest of our natural lives.

I lowered myself down on one knee and finally opened my hand to show her what was hidden inside. Looking up into those cornflower blue eyes, a thousand memories of her bringing me out of the dark flashed through my mind and I grinned through the strange pressure building behind my eyes.

“Lila Winslow, you know it’s not easy for me to lay out everything that’s in my heart, but I love you with all of it and this last year we’ve spent together has been, hands down, the best of my life.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that you are the sun I revolve around and you have given me a reason to keep going. Will you marry me?”

Silent tears streamed down her face as she nodded over and over again, finally laughing and holding her left hand out toward me. “Of course, I’ll marry you. How did I not see this coming?”

I chuckled as I pulled the ring out of the box and fitted it on her finger. “In your defense, I am a pretty mysterious guy.”

“Not so much anymore, Ford Callahan.” She looped her arms around my neck when I stood up and I lifted her against me. “You’re the guy who’s going to be my husband and I cannot freaking wait.”

“Neither can I,” I murmured against her lips as I carried her to our bedroom. “So let’s not. Let’s fly your parents out here and do it next week.”

She laughed, but when she saw the look in my eyes, she brushed her fingers through my hair and kissed me. “Next week, huh? You know what, I might just be able to make that work.”

***

What did you think about Ford and Lila?

Do you wish you had more of their story? Grab your copy of the extended epilogue RIGHT. HERE.

***

If you loved this book, don’t miss out…

Check out book 1 in A Wedding Bells Alpha Novel called Say You Do .

My brother is an idiot—he’s getting married.

And I’m in charge of getting things together since our folks are gone.

Lucky me. The guy who thinks love is for the birds and worn-out 80s songs.

I honestly don’t have time for this drama. I run a billion-dollar company, have women to entertain, and am working on my plans to rule the world.

No, seriously.

And yet, when you least expect it, life kicks you in the balls.

The beautiful, snarky woman that runs the flower shop is perfect to help me pull off this wedding.

Just seeing her sends my head spinning with possibilities.

She’s perfect. To play my fake wife for an event I have coming up as a side deal.

My ex-wife will be at the event, and I sure could use someone to show her how well I’ve done since she ripped out my soul.

So my curvy new friend gets my ring and a chunk of my wallet before agreeing to the deal.

Funny thing is, I’m not so interested in taking it back by the end of the adventure.

I’m willing to go all in on what might be the best decision of my life.

And I’m demanding the same of her. No maybes. No I-don’t-knows.

No fear of what might be or might not be.

Open your pretty pink lips and utter the words.

Say you do.

I gotta have THIS