After learning Rebecca was even more amazing in bed than I’d imagined she’d be, I continued learning new things about her every day.

Like, when the Fourth of July hit, the woman went crazy. She tricked out her house for Independence Day like my mom did for Christmas. I went to the feed store one day to pick up her order of mineral blocks and feed for the goats and chickens. In the two hours that trip took me, I came back and the house, inside and out, had exploded in patriotic decor the likes of which I’d never seen before.

Red, white, and blue towels and napkins and plates appeared in the kitchen. Red metal stars hung in sets of three above the fireplace, the front porch, and the side wall by the stairway. She’d set up a canopy of red, white, and blue twinkling lights outside, strung them around and above the fire pit and along the length of the back of her house from poles I had never seen. Lanterns had been popped into the edging of the landscaping around the back patio.

Everywhere I turned, stars were hung, flags waved from small poles along the front walk to the house and the gravel walkway to the guesthouse. There were pots of new flowers, all red and white spread along the wooden staircase leading to the front porch and door.

It wasn’t just the decorating that exploded. She jumped into a party planning frenzy, explaining to me two nights ago when she was quadruple-checking her shopping list for the upcoming barbecue party, that she hosted this event every year and she wasn’t missing it this year.

She had shoved the pencil eraser into her mouth and nibbled. That sent my mind straight to other things she could be nibbling and before she knew it, she was flung over my shoulder, plopped down onto the couch where I made love to her on top of a patriotic throw blanket.

God Bless the U.S.A.

Afterward, she flung it around her body and hauled her tight little ass upstairs to clean up and that memory of her, wrapped in stars and stripes, slapped me in the face as she came down the stairs this morning before we headed to the Carlton County 4^th of July parade.

She was again, practically draped in a knock-off of our country’s flag but this was hella sexier than the throw blanket. Strapless and cinched at the waist, it was a one-piece with shorts that ended mere inches beneath the swell of her ass. And on her feet, she wore red leather thong sandals that perfectly matched her red and white striped toenail polish.

She called it a romper.

I called it a tiny little slice of heaven. It clung to her curves, showed a hint of her cleavage from the straight line of the top across her breasts. It showed off her sexy as hell legs.

I was still laughing at her and her sudden burst of insane excitement when we pulled up to the grass parking lot she directed me to for the best parking on the parade route. We were two hours early for the parade and the lot was almost filled. I’d dodged child after child, parents, and families, repeatedly through the streets, inching along at two miles an hour in her Chevy Silverado while people hustled along carrying folding chairs and blankets that almost matched Rebecca’s outfit.

“You are not wearing those,” I said, looking at her like she’d gone absolutely crazy.

“Of course I am.” She grinned and pressed something at the sides of a pair of sunglasses that had made a sudden appearance. And yes, they were red and white striped with tiny blue stars along the frames. They were three times too large for her small, typically cute face, and whatever she pressed made the stars blink in a rapid, wild manner. “What’s wrong with them?”

I buried my face in my hands fighting back a roar of laughter. “You have been holding out on me,” I said, pointing at her once I grabbed control of my laughter. “Brooke and Kelly are not the crazy ones. You’re their ringleader, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her face, what I could see of it, was of picture-perfect innocence.

Like I could take her seriously with blinking glasses. “Sure you don’t.”

Despite my urge to flee from her sudden arrival of crazy, I grabbed her hand and reached into the bed of the truck to get the chairs. At some point during the week, it became an assumption we’d come to the parade. I hadn’t even been asked, and it’d been so long since I went to one, I hadn’t even thought about it, but once she started talking about the party later, mumbling her way through the planning of it and constantly recalculating the number of ribs and hot dogs I was sent to the store to purchase yesterday, I was drawn in to her excitement.

Apparently, so was everyone else in Carlton because the town had swelled to at least four times its typical size for a weekday morning. The streets were lined with chairs and blankets, a few small canopies had been opened to offer up shade. A slew of children of all ages ran around, some toddling by on chubby legs, while others raced up and down the now closed streets, tossing a football or Frisbees. Some sat on the curbs, sucking on popsicles, the red and blue juices dribbling off their chins. The mist of a poorly shot water gun dripped down on us and the streets were filled with joyful shrieks and happy squeals.

It was a scene I was certain had to be similar to the parades I’d attended in my childhood. But the last parade I went to was spent waving from a float on Thanksgiving Day in New York, and that parade, while wild and rambunctious and filled with kids was not anywhere similar to the scene in front of me. This was family and community and small town coming together, embracing one another freely, celebrating their love of their country and their excitement of a day off work, or a day off summer sports, where they’d most likely drink and eat a lot of hot dogs and brats, wave their flags, holler out the memorized words to a Toby Keith song or twelve, and they’d do it all with their friends and neighbors and families by their sides.

It was no longer any surprise why this day, above all other days in the year, sent Rebecca spinning like a lunatic.

We walked through the crowd, Rebecca next to me, and holding my hand. We were looking for Brooke and Andrew and their boys when reality smacked me across my face.

This was everything beautiful about small-town life.

She was everything beautiful I’d ever wanted.

The woman I’d marry. The woman who would have my children.

The woman who, for the rest of my life, I’d never have to worry about whether or not I could trust her because we’d both been through hell, and knew to appreciate it when God handed us something good again.

I pulled to a sudden stop, almost yanking her off her feet.

I didn’t apologize.

“What is it?” Rebecca asked, looking back at me. She lifted the ridiculous glasses off her eyes and squinted. “This isn’t where Brooke sits.”

“I know.” I slid the glasses back down and settled them on her nose. If she didn’t like what I had to say, I didn’t want to see it reflected back at me. “I just realized something.”

A tiny line appeared above the bridge of her glasses. “What?”

I kissed her lips and pulled back, grinning. I accused her of being a lunatic. I was pretty sure that title belonged to me. “I love you,” I said. “I just wanted you to know.”

I grabbed her hand and continued walking. She stuttered and tugged on my hand. I pulled down the brim of my KU hat. Occasionally, when I was out, I received the stares and fluttering eyelashes I was so accustomed to. Mostly, I realized, here no one cared who I was. They might have been curious, or excited, but other than Kelly and Brooke, most had manners enough not to go crazy. Instead, everywhere I went, I was welcomed with open arms and wide smiles, treated no differently than someone like Peter Whitman who’d lived here his entire life.

“Hey!” Rebecca tugged on my hand. She dug her heels into the asphalt street and growled at me. “Cooper.”

“What?” I looked back at her and grinned. “Don’t you want to find Brooke?”

I wanted her to know I loved her. I didn’t need a discussion about it. Sometimes Rebecca needed time to process everything, especially when it came to us, and I didn’t need a reply. I just needed her to know.

“I do want to find Brooke, but I’m wondering if we should flag down an EMT and get you checked for heat stroke.”

“Because I love you?”

“No!” She smacked her hands on her hips. “Because you just keep saying it in the middle of the street like it’s something you say to me every day and I don’t know how to handle it!”

I shrugged. She was cute when she was flustered. “Don’t know what to tell you. But I suggest you get used to hearing it.”

“Cooper—”

Ridiculous. “I love you.” I leaned in and whispered it in her ear. Goose bumps popped down her arm despite it being almost ninety degrees. “I love you and I mean it and I don’t know why I just blurted it back there, but I felt it and I don’t want to hide what I’m feeling with you. So I’m going to say it, and you don’t have to say it back. You don’t even have to feel it yet. I didn’t say it to hear you love me, I said it because I want you to hear it from me. That’s it, Rebecca. That’s all it is.”

Also because if she didn’t, if she wouldn’t ever say it, I didn’t want to know yet. We hadn’t talked about me leaving since I returned, and Max was handling an issue on a set based in Germany, so it wasn’t a good time to talk to him.

Her lips formed a pout. “You could at least kiss me when you say it.”

That I could do. I slid my lips along her jaw. “I’ll kiss you later,” I said, “when I’m deep inside you, taking you on your knees like I did yesterday. That was fun, right?” I nipped at her earlobe and pulled back.

Her hot pink cheeks had nothing to do with the heat. Neither did the pink on her chest. That was all me.

If it made me a bastard for liking that she got so turned on when I talked to her, I didn’t care.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice dry and hoarse. “That was fun.”

“Come on. You don’t want to miss the parade.” I readjusted the carrying straps to the chairs on my shoulder and grabbed her hand.

“And you say I’m the crazy one,” she muttered.

We walked one more block down the street, Rebecca occasionally stopped by someone calling her name where she’d wave and say hello before moving on before we heard a little male voice shouting her name.

“Auntie Becky! Auntie Becky!” Oliver jumped up and down on the curb, his hands waving wildly in the air. “Over here! Over here!”

“Just so you know, Ollie’s the only one who can call me Becky. I hate it unless it’s coming out of his sweet little mouth.”

“Got it. You love the name Becky.”

I grinned at her. She growled at me. Then she dipped down, picked Oliver up into her arms and was practically tackle hugged by Nathan. I went over and hugged Brooke, shook Andrew’s hand and set up our chairs while the boys chattered non-stop to Rebecca about all the floats they wanted to see.

Then I settled my ass into the chair.

“Want one?” Andrew asked, holding out a beer from the cooler next to him. “You’re going to need it.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” I sat with Andrew. We chatted. We stood when the Honor Guard led the parade, the National Anthem blaring from speakers in a pick-up truck following them. Then we sat, and for three long hours, I watched Rebecca act almost as manic as Nathan and Oliver did whenever candy was flung in our direction from floats and pick-up trucks and fire engines.

She left the parade with a bag of candy that weighed twice as much as theirs. And I was pretty sure at one point, she shoved Nathan to his butt racing him into the street to get a beer bottle koozie, even though she adamantly denied it all the way home.

---

My arm was slung over her shoulder and her head rested on mine. In my other hand, I held a beer bottle. Night had fallen, dinner had been eaten along with a half-dozen pies and cakes and cookie-type bars and more cookies. At least forty people still hung around, though many more had been around earlier. Apparently, most of the locals in town and those Rebecca grew up with came to this party every year and had been doing it since they were teenagers. She hadn’t mentioned it was such a long-standing tradition.

When we’d come back from the parade, Rebecca on a sugar high from all the flavored Tootsie Roll type candies, she’d put me to work pulling out a half-dozen large Rubbermaid bins from a storage area in one of the barns. The contents of those bins…hula hoops and jump ropes, at least a dozen sports balls and mitts and bases and tons of other children’s toys were now scattered all over the lawn.

Kids were still squealing, running and chasing each other while most of the adults had broken off into smaller groups. We’d pulled out some of the square hay bales and placed them around the patio and the front, grouping them like benches, but most who came showed with arms full of food and desserts and drinks and their own folding chairs slung over their shoulders.

I’d been standing around with Ryan and some other men he knew, all of whom volunteered with the fire department, but when Rebecca had disappeared into the house for a few minutes, I grabbed her for a private moment on her return.

“You should have told me this gathering was such a big deal around here, I wouldn’t have teased you so much about you freaking out about it.”

“I sort of wanted you to experience it as it happened.” She tilted her chin up to me. “It’s my favorite day the year.”

“I sort of got that.”

“Today was one of the best.” The glimmer in her eyes softened and I twisted so I could kiss her. She said with her eyes what I knew she couldn’t say with her words. It was more than enough. My chest swelled, heat kicked up and spread through my limbs.

“Mine too.” I pulled back and aimed my beer at the mess of kids running around. Dirt kicked up to their ankles, hair that had once been in sweet little pigtails or braids now a disheveled mess. “Not to make shit serious when it’s been a great day, but did you and Joseph ever talk about kids?”

Her hand wrapped around my back tightened. She gave me the dark parts of their history the other night, but like a clam, she snapped shut afterward. I didn’t ask where that picture frame went, but I hadn’t seen it since. And at some point, she’d painted over the dented wall. Erasing all the evidence of him.

I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her to move on, to find something new again, and hopefully, that’d be me, but I didn’t want to pretend like he hadn’t existed either. At some point, she’d either find a way to forgive him and let him go, or she’d release what she couldn’t control and would never know, into the abyss.

But I wasn’t going to pretend like he hadn’t shared a decade of her life with her, either.

“Yeah, we’d planned on it. Then my parents died and things went skewed and got difficult. We kept saying later, or soon, and then…” She shrugged and her voice trailed off. “I wanted them though.”

Wanted. Like she thought she couldn’t have any anymore. Didn’t exactly bode well for me, but I’d already put myself in danger of drowning earlier, what was one more leap. “I want them.”

“Yeah?” I hoped like hell it was hopefulness in her tone and not surprise. Couldn’t exactly tell.

“Camilla always said later because she didn’t want her body changing. I understood because of her modeling and there’s only a small age range where you can hit it as big as she did, but still. Not wanting a family because you might get a stretch mark or a bigger ass? Should have known then she was a selfish, cold-hearted bitch.”

So my anger with her hadn’t exactly dissipated. It was shit like this that brought up old demons.

Rebecca quietly laughed. “While I wouldn’t agree with the name-calling, I see your point.”

I wasn’t laughing. “Six,” I stated.

Her brow furrowed. “Six?”

“Yup.” I nodded. “Six. I always wanted six kids.”

“Wow.” She looked out toward the barn, quiet with that bottom lip in between her teeth. “Why six?”

“I don’t know. I have a sister and we’ve never really been close even though we are in age. I wanted brothers, a homemade basketball team where we could throw the ball around or shoot hoops when Dad was always traveling. Had a friend in school who was in the middle of the pack of ten kids and his home was always crazy wild. I could show up there and I swear sometimes, they just thought I was theirs, they were used to so many mouths to feed.”

“Ten? That’s a lot.”

“Yeah, that’s why I settled on six.” She laughed and sipped her lemonade.

“And you say I’m crazy.”

“You are, in good ways. But, I wanted more than two or three, wanted an even number, six was the best thing I could figure. How many did you want?” She licked her lips. Sipped her drink. What she didn’t do was answer me. I bumped her hip. “Rebecca?”

When she turned to me, her eyes shined. “Six,” she whispered. “I always wanted six.”

She rolled to her toes and pressed her lips to mine before I could do the exact same thing to her. This woman. She did it for me. She gave me life and made me think. She taught me things I never realized I wanted to know. She opened her arms and pushed through her grief and she did it all with the sweetest damn smile I wanted smiling at me every morning I woke up.

“Think anyone would notice if we disappeared for awhile and snuck upstairs to your room?”

“Probably. Especially since I’ve heard from a half-dozen people who already saw Andrew and Brooke sneak off to the guesthouse.”

I scanned the yard and didn’t see either of them. “Seriously?”

“Yup.”

“Damn. That man has moves.”

She bumped her hip into mine. “He’s not the only one.”

I took a long pull from my beer. “I knew I liked him for a reason.”