Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
I pressed my lips together. “Thank you,” I said softly. “I love you, Grandma.”
“I know.” She smiled, gripping onto her walking stick. “I love you, too, kiddo. Please remember this for me.”
“I promise.”
“This isn’t your father’s legacy anymore, Max. This is yours.”
Fucking wow.
She was right.
His legacy was me, but now it was my turn to shape our family’s history.
And I could do that.
This really was my legacy now.
Slowly, I nodded.
“And do check in with Ellie. She’s going to be terribly worried about you, and if she’s upset, I’m going to be upset.”
Then she left.
Leaving me alone with my feelings… just like I’d said I wanted.
I didn’t.
I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to feel this all alone. I didn’t want to have to process this without anyone here.
I’d never felt as weak as I did right now.
I sank back into the sofa and covered my face with my hands again. I hadn’t anticipated any of this happening when Ellie walked into my life.
Ellie.
It was all Ellie.
With her gorgeous red hair and her dark blue eyes and her smile that could light up an entire country in a mere second. With her goofy grins and conversations with her cat and her tendency to mutter to herself when she thought nobody could hear her.
Ellie.
The love of my fucking life.
I had to deal with too many emotions, and it was because of her. She’d walked into my life in an explosion of sunshine and laughter. Her very presence had flipped me upside down and shaken and stirred me until I’d reached this point.
Where I had to confront the last fourteen years of my life and my emotions.
I knew one thing to be true: I really had never grieved my father.
Any healing I’d done as a young boy had been erased when I was sixteen and I’d found out he was responsible for their deaths. Any grief I’d felt was replaced with anger, and I’d held onto that ever since.
It was easier to blame him.
Easier to hate him.
Easier to make him the biggest villain in my life and blame him for all the things that went wrong and all the decisions I made.
Grandma was right.
I did want a family.
I wanted to get married. I wanted to have children. I wanted to have true happiness.
I wanted to do it all with Ellie.
There was nobody else I could imagine doing those things with. Imagining Greygarth and Windermere without her seemed almost impossible now, and if I didn’t address the issues I had, she wasn’t going to be here.
She was going to go home to London. She was going to leave, she was going to move on, and she was going to be happy.
I dropped my hands to my lap and stared at the ceiling.
Fuck.
I had to fix this.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ELLIE
Not So Smooth Operator
I knocked on the back door of Esme’s cottage and switched the carrier bag of things she’d asked for to the other hand. I wasn’t sure how I’d been roped into running errands for her, but she’d called this morning and said her hip was playing up, and would I mind awfully getting a few things for her from the store?
Of course I didn’t mind.
I’d never heard her moaning about her hip before, granted, but you know. She was getting on a bit, and Lord only knew I woke up sometimes with a stiff back that didn’t want to loosen up, so who was I to judge?
Nobody.
I was also procrastinating heavily this morning, so despite last night’s insistence to Megan that I needed to finish my book, I was doing everything but making progress towards that goal.
I was calling it self-care.
It sounded better than laziness.
You had to take your wins where you could get them.
The door of the little cottage swung open, and Esme appeared behind it with a black and white cat in her arms. “Ah, good. You’re here. Come in before it slices your fingers off. Why did you put it all in one bag?”
I should have known she’d ask that.
“They only had one bag at the shop,” I replied, shuffling past her and the cat. “I didn’t know you had a cat.”
“I don’t. This is Hamish. He’s a barn cat, but he just had his balls snipped off yesterday, so I’ve taken him in until he recovers. Don’t tell Max or he’ll accuse me of spoiling the little sod.”
It was hard to argue with that.
She kind of was spoiling him.
I wasn’t going to be the one to point that out, though.
“I couldn’t tell Max if I wanted to,” I replied, taking the bag through to her gorgeous little kitchen.
It was cosy and cluttered, and the rustic lemon-yellow cupboards were topped with pine wood that were covered with knickknacks and jars, two knife blocks, more chopping boards than anyone needed, and a fresh vase of flowers that I knew had come from her garden.