She heard someone behind them gasp.

“No, I just want…”

“You’ve got another itch you want me to scratch? You wanna go bungee jumping, or swim with sharks, and you need a partner who won’t tattle on you after?”

“I quit my job.”

His head snapped back slightly. Aha. That got him. “Quit, like another month of playtime, or quit for good?”

“For good,” she said, feeling oddly proud of something so wildly irresponsible.

“Why?”

“It wasn’t making me happy.”

He faked an appalled expression. “What about your list? However will you be mentioned in ten premiere medical journals before the age of thirty-five if you quit now?”

Brynn’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been reading my list.”

“Lists. Plural. I’ve been reading those notebooks since you started stashing them under your mattress. Makes for great shitter read.”

She didn’t let herself get riled. “You know, it really wasn’t fair to give me a time limit if you were going to hog all of the talking time.”

For a second she thought he might smile. Or at least relax. Instead his jaw tensed. “Fine, twenty-second extension. Go.”

Twenty seconds. It was enough.

Brynn took a deep breath. “I want to do this. For real.”

“What’s this?”

“Us. You and me. Out in public.”

He started to move past her. “Pass.”

She grabbed his sleeve, panic clutching at her throat at his quick dismissal. “You can’t pass! I came all the way to Chicago to tell you that!”

“So it was a couple hundred bucks out of your savings account. Maybe you can go shopping while you’re here or something so it’s not a total waste. Find something classy and boring for your next hotshot job and statue boyfriend.”

“Please,” she said hoarsely. “Don’t tell me I’m too late. You didn’t give me any time to think before you told me…you know.”

“That I’d loved you? Please. You had plenty of time. You had more than fifteen Goddamn years to figure it out.”

“You’re talking in past tense.” Her voice broke.

“Well, what did you expect, Brynn? That I could keep it up indefinitely? That I’d keep loving someone who saw me as a boy toy she couldn’t stand outside of the bedroom?”

“You’re being unfair—you never once even hinted that it was anything else. I thought we were on the same page.”

He pulled his sleeve away from her grasping fingers. “You’re right, it’s not fair, Brynn. It’s not fair that I had to watch you throw your heart at countless other men while I had to make do with a string of vapid women who would never be you. And now that I’m finally ready to move on…finally ready to get on with my life, you want to drag me back in?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“For what?”

She was crying for real now, and she folded her hands loosely in front of her before shrugging and saying the only thing there was left to say.

“I love you, Will.”

She saw that it rocked through him. He shuddered and closed his eyes briefly, and her heart nearly broke at the searing emotion on his strong, familiar features.

He turned on his heel and walked away from her.

“Wait!”

He didn’t.

“William Thatcher, you can’t walk away from this! You didn’t stick this out for half of your life to chicken out now.”

He kept walking.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit!”

Tyler gave her a reproving look from the front desk, but she barely noticed as she went tearing back out into the humid Chicago air.

She saw him start to get into the driver’s seat of a car and sprinted full speed toward him, not stopping until she slammed into his side.

He glanced down. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“I don’t care,” she said, wiping at her cheeks as she dug through her purse. “I came prepared for you to be a stubborn ass, so I brought something.”

“I can hardly wait to see.”

She shoved a large cylindrical Tupperware at his chest. “Here.”

He stared down at the container in confusion. “You brought a plastic tub full of shredded paper to prove your love.”

Brynn nodded in earnest, shoving it closer to him so he couldn’t give it back. “Not just any paper. My lists.”

His lips parted for a second as his grip tightened on the container. “Your book? It’s all in here?”

“Well, not the cover…it was too thick to shred. But the contents. The thirty before thirty, forty before forty, the ten characteristics of a respectable husband, the ninety-nine rules of leading an exemplary life…all in there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t need them anymore,” she said simply. “I thought they were helping me live my life, but they were actually keeping me from it. I thought that by planning everything, that by doing everything just right, that I could stop being Dumpy Dalton. And I guess I succeeded, but I also turned into…”

“A bitch?” he supplied.

She swallowed and pressed on. “You’re my life, Will.”

Brynn heard an awkward clearing of a throat, and belatedly realized that Dana was in the passenger seat. She didn’t care. She only cared that Will would hear her. Want her. Love her.

Will slowly, deliberately unscrewed the plastic top from the container and turned it upside down. Tiny shreds of paper fell to the ground, not even bothering to flutter in the breezeless air.

Brynn closed her eyes and let the tears fall.

He didn’t want her. She’d offered him everything. Been as bare as she’d ever been before, but it had been too little too late.

Incoherent with pain, she started to drop to her knees to pick up the paper. Needing something, anything to ground herself.

She’d lost him.

Rough hands gripped her shoulders and yanked her forward. Will’s hands slid up to cup her cheeks as he rested his forehead on hers. “Goddamn you, Brynn Dalton.”

She choked out a laugh, hardly daring to hope as her fingers clenched his shirt. “Give me a chance, Will. Let me try to be the woman for you.”

“You idiot.” His fingers clenched in her hair. “You’ve always been the only woman for me.”

“I love you,” she said. “I love you so much. I think somehow I always have.”

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited to hear you say that?” His voice sounded suspiciously choked up, and she wiggled closer to him.

“You might have heard it a lot sooner if you hadn’t tried to woo me by running my bra up the flagpole my freshman year.”

“Foreplay, baby. Fifteen really long years of foreplay.”

And then he kissed her, long and hard. It was the first kiss they’d shared in front of other people, and it was all the sweeter because of it.

And when a sudden gust of hot summer air dragged up the scraps of paper at their feet before scattering them in a mess of confetti, that was okay too.

The new Brynn—the real Brynn—had all she needed.

EPILOGUE

It’s a lovely housewarming party, Brynn, honey.”

Brynn smiled in satisfaction. It really was a perfect party. The night was unseasonably warm for fall in Seattle, but there were a couple of those fancy heat lamps scattered around for when the sun went down. She’d even put out a couple of warm blankets for anyone who wanted to stay late and cuddle up under the stars.

Emphasis on the cuddle.

On second thought, she hoped nobody else would stay around for that part.

Brynn set out the last of the condiments on the table. “I’ve lived here a year and a half, Mom. I don’t think you can call it a ‘housewarming’ anymore.”

Marnie Dalton linked arms with her eldest daughter and gave her a secret smile. “Yes, but I suspect it’s just now starting to feel like a home, yes?”

Brynn’s eyes involuntarily went across the deck to where Will was manning the grill and drinking a beer with her dad. It was a scene she’d envisioned a dozen times before—outdoor barbecues, friends and family, and a partner that helped her do it all.