Free Forever and a Day by Jill Shalvis

that fact.
    Grace understood the sentiment. She’d had boyfriends—some had lasted a night; some that had lasted much longer. She’d even fallen in love and gotten her heart broken. She’d learned a lot—such as how to keep her heart out of the equation.
    “The truth is,” Amy said, “I came to Lucky Harbor searching for myself. Even though deep down, I was afraid that whatever I found wouldn’t be enough. But actually, my real self kicks ass.”
    “Yeah, it does,” Mallory said softly, smiling at her.
    Grace stared at the two of them. “You’re a pair of saps.”
    “Look, forget us,” Mallory said. “We’re not the point. The point is that you’re not living up to what you said you’d do. You’re not having fun.”
    “I don’t know,” Amy said slowly, studying Grace. “Posing in the nude, walking McSexy’s dog…Sounds like fun to me.”
    “I didn’t pose nude,” Grace said. “ Sheesh! ”
    “Well maybe you should,” Mallory told her. “And maybe you should have fun with the sexy doctor while you’re at it. He’s just about perfect.”
    Grace understood the logic, convoluted as it was. But there was a flaw, a fatal one. Having grown up trying to live up to being damn near perfect, she refused to date it.
    The diner door opened, and a man strode in wearing paramedic gear with FLIGHT CARE in white across his chest.
    Ty Garrison.
    Mallory took one look at the man she was going to marry and grinned dopily. She brushed her hands off and headed straight for him, meeting him in the middle of the nearly empty diner. In her scrubs and sneakers, she seemed tiny compared to the tall, leanly muscled flight medic as she leaned into him. Tiny and cute.
    Ty must have thought so, too, because he bent and kissed her with lots of heat, easily boosting her into his arms, the muscles in his shoulders and back rippling as Mallory wrapped herself around him like a pretzel.
    “Aw,” Grace said in spite of herself.
    “Get a room,” Amy said.
    Behind Ty’s back, Mallory flipped Amy the bird and kept kissing her fiancé. They were holding on to each other, and even from the length of the diner, Grace could see how much Ty loved Mallory. It was in every touch, every look. She sighed and pulled out her phone, which was ringing. “Crap,” she said, looking at the caller ID.
    “Bill collector?” Amy asked.
    “Worse. It’s my mother.”
    “The rocket scientist?”
    The one and only. Grace sucked in a breath and looked down at what she was wearing before she got a hold of herself and remembered that her mother couldn’t actually see her. “Mom,” she said into the phone. “Hi, what’s wrong?”
    “What, a mother can’t call her only daughter?”
    Grace smiled at the imperious tone and could picture her mother in her lab, working in Dior and a white doctor’s coat to protect the elegance and sophistication that she couldn’t quite hide behind all the degrees and doctorates.
    Grace didn’t have elegance and sophistication emanating from her every pore because of one simple truth—she hadn’t been born into it. She’d done her damnedest to absorb what she could and fake what she couldn’t. “It’s not the first weekend of the month,” Grace said.
    “True, but I just finished up that three-week seminar on the design for NASA’s new deep-space exploration system, and I realized I missed our monthly check-in. How are you doing, darling?”
    This wasn’t a “tell me about the weather” sort of question. This was a request for a full, detailed report, and guilt flooded Grace. She quickly scanned through her options. She could tell her mom what she’d been up to—which was that she’d been using her fancy college education not at all—or continue to slightly mislead in order to keep her happy.
    Mallory disconnected her lips from Ty and led him back to the Chocoholics’ table. He took a cupcake, kissed Mallory, and left.
    “And how’s Seattle?” Grace’s mom asked. “How’s your new