Read Online Chasing I Do (The Eastons #1) by Marina Adair - Free Book Online Page B

businesswoman would know when a contract that had the potential to put your company on the map said, Please discard the earlier letter, they wouldn’t go in search of the letter. They’d put their emotions aside, sign on the dotted line, and take their daughter to Disneyland to celebrate.
    But once Darcy knew there was a letter, she couldn’t sleep until she’d found it. And when she found it, buried among her bills, and saw that it was written in Gage’s writing, she cracked the seal. It didn’t take a genius to guess what she’d done next.
    So, yes, she was too emotional right then to be smart.
    Jillian took the cone out of her hand, that was cracked and dripping blueberries onto the grass, and tossed it in the trash bin. “You want to talk about it?”
    “No.”
    “You sure?” Jillian placed a cupcake on a napkin and sat on the park bench behind them. “You look like you want to talk about it.”
    “Maybe.”
    Jillian waved the cupcake in the air, then patted the bench next to her.
    “Fine, I want to talk about it.” Darcy took a seat next to her friend, took the cupcake, and took a big bite. “He ruined what should have been an easy yes.” She looked out at the herd of laughing kids, her eyes immediately zeroing in on Kylie. In her tutu and cheer shirt, she was chasing a group of boys around the bounce house. “He said he was sorry.”
    “That jerk,” she teased.
    “He made it personal. Took what was supposed to be a simple business decision and added all of these warm fuzzies to it.”
    “Warm fuzzies? That must have been some note.”
    “Rhett might be the songwriter, but Gage was always good with words.” Darcy opened the note she’d tucked in her dress pocket. Unfolding it, her hands shook as the faint scent of cologne and Gage escaped into the warm summer breeze. She ran her finger across its edge, then released a deep breath.
    “He wrote you notes a lot then?” Jillian questioned, sounding a little too suspicious.
    “In a notebook,” she defended. “Nothing big. I had this composition book in college.”
    “Like that?” Jillian pointed to a black notebook on the picnic table. It had a worn spine, tabs sticking out the top, and fabric swatches hanging from the bottom. It was how she put together an event, collected her ideas and designs.
    “Exactly like that, except this one was for taking notes in my calculus class. I hated calculus, and Gage was great with numbers.”
    “Great with words, great with numbers, and you chose the self-centered philanderer?”
    Darcy ignored this. “Every time he’d come to my dorm room, he’d write some silly note in the margins for me to find the next day. It was this thing we had.”
    “And you never dated?”
    “No,” Darcy said, smiling at the question they’d received a million times over the years. “He wasn’t looking to get married, and a guy would be insane not to marry me.” She looked up. “That’s what he used to tell people.”
    Jillian gave a disbelieving snort. “Did he have to tug your ponytail to make you wonder if there was more there?”
    “Oh, I had a thing for him when we first met, but he had a long-time girlfriend, then Kyle came for a visit and he charmed me into a date.” She shrugged. “Gage was all for it. Said I needed to get out and have some fun. Then Kyle and I started dating and people stopped asking, and well—”
    “Here you are all these years later, and he wrote you a note?”
    Darcy looked at the words once again and that strange humming, the one that had started when she unintentionally felt him up during their fall, came back. “It’s a good note.”
    Darcy handed it over to her friend. She didn’t need to read it again. She’d already memorized every curve and line.
    D ~
    I know I am a better man than my past actions have shown. It shames me to know that the one person who helped me through my father’s death didn’t benefit from the honorable man he raised me to be. A friend doesn’t walk