Read Online The One That Got Away by Jamie Sobrato - Free Book Online Page B

dorm window didn’t really count as a garden.”
    “You grew basil.”
    She laughed. “Yeah, I still do. Anything I can eat, I grow. I’m just not good with flowers, but I’m going to get there.”
    They rounded the side of the house, and Marcus spotted a couple of raised beds filled with healthy-looking plants. “Ah, see? I know you better than you think I do.”
    She beamed as she knelt next to one box and lovingly propped a vine back against its supporting stick.
    “Are those tomatoes?”
    “Sugar snap peas. The heirloom tomatoes are over there.”
    “Wow.” In truth, he didn’t know much about growing vegetables.
    He just knew that the sort of constancy and stability required to garden had never been his thing. Those very qualities had been part of what had attracted him to Ginger—and at the same time made him wary. That constancy also made her a great friend, but now that he was seeing her in her new confident and curvaceous glory, he realized that she was just the kind of loyal, reliable woman he was terrified of.
    She was supposed to be the one woman he could be friends with without ever having to worry about sex coming between them.
    But here she was now, a whole new woman. The same, but irresistibly different.
    Give him emotionally unavailable women on different continents any day. He knew how to handle them. They were safe.
    “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “how are you doing since the shooting?”
    “I’m healed up fine,” he answered.
    “No, I mean, how are you doing? ” she asked as they continued along the path toward the woods.
    “It’s weird—ever since getting on the plane to come back here, I feel like the shooting didn’t even happen to me. It’s like it happened to someone else.”
    “Because you feel safer here?”
    “I guess so. And maybe it’s partly that I’ve been so preoccupied thinking about Izzy, I don’t have time to worry about anything else.”
    “Now you have to keep yourself alive not just for yourself, but for her, too.”
    He winced. “Gee, thanks for reminding me.”
    “Anytime,” she joked, but he knew she was right.
    He had a huge responsibility now. He was a father. Impossible, but true.
    “I guess it’s the classic near-death-experience reaction,” he said, knowing Ginger wouldn’t laugh at him, “but I’ve had this sense that I’m supposed to drastically change my life somehow, ever since I first woke up in the hospital.”
    “You’re supposed to make right all your wrongs?”
    “Yeah, me and Ebenezer Scrooge. Actually, it’s more like I want to experience things I haven’t experienced before. I’m thirty-six years old, you know, and there’s a lot I haven’t done yet.”
    “Like what?”
    They paused at a bench that looked out on the lake. Sitting up on a bluff, beneath some trees, it provided an expansive view. Ginger sat down, and Marcus followed suit.
    “Like…I don’t know. Be a father?”
    “Box number one, check.”
    He chuckled. “Yeah, didn’t even have to work at that one. It just fell into my lap.”
    “What else?”
    “Um, you know, maybe settle down a bit?”
    Ginger cast a shocked look at him. “Get out.”
    “No, really.”
    “I guess that sort of goes hand in hand with being a dad,” she suggested.
    “Well, I could do it the nomadic way, like my parents did, but I want Izzy to have a better life than I did.”
    “You sound as if you’ve given this some thought.”
    “Not really,” he joked. “It’s just that the wine is going to my head.”
    But that was only half-true.
    He was having thoughts he’d never had before. He’d taken one look at Ginger’s beautiful, decrepit cottage and felt for the first time that he wanted a home of his own. Not a place where he lived for a short time, but a real home, where he could put down roots and grow a life for himself and Izzy, and maybe someone else, too. Izzy would need a woman in her life someday, and so did he. Hell, he wanted to do the family thing