From Good Guy To Groom

They started the trek around the bend, but she kept her mouth shut against the remaining slew of rebuttals bopping to and fro in her brain. She was not his darling, that was number one. In fact, she wasn’t anyone’s darling. Number two? Ryan only knew what she’d let him see, which hadn’t been a hell of a lot. Because no matter what he thought and despite that way of his, he could not read her mind. He did not know her. And...and...she probably wouldn’t have tripped, even without his help.

Probably, she’d have caught herself in time. She did not need Ryan Bradshaw, or anyone for that matter, swooping in and lifting her backward in his arms as if she were a bird with a wounded wing. She was not. Oh, and why—

Her body and her thought processes came to an abrupt halt at the exact same instant. She blinked and stared at the view that had morphed into being. She closed her eyes, opened them and stared again. Certainly, she’d somehow crossed a mystical barrier and now stood in a completely different world, because she had never before seen anything quite so beautiful.

As she stood and stared, the hard, jagged edges of her nerves softened, the pain in her leg disappeared, and the weight—that damn, one-thousand-pound weight that had snuffed out all joy—became much more manageable. Simply by the sight in front of her.

Multicolored rocks and stones lined the edges of a small body of water—no more than twelve to fifteen feet in diameter—that sat beneath a glossy umbrella of leaves. Wildflowers in a variety of shades, from the purest white to the boldest blue to the deepest violet, grew in scattered bunches outside of and in between the so-smooth-they-gleamed rocky boundaries. The effect was a tranquil type of loveliness, straight from one of Andi’s childhood fairy tales, that brought a smile to her lips and peace to her heart.