Free Seven Day Fiance: A Love and Games Novel (Entangled Bliss) by Rachel Harris Page A

was no big deal, she answered, “Eight years.”
    He cursed and swiveled to look at her. “Eight years ?” Angelle bit her lip and nodded, big green eyes saying he was failing to make her feel at ease… but damn . “And in all that time, he never tried to put a ring on your finger until this past year?”
    “Well, for seven and a half of those years, we were apart. Different schools, different states…different wants,” she added on a sigh. “After graduation, I hung around town, working at the library, helping my parents take care of the animals, waiting for Brady. He was so busy with med school it just didn’t make sense to get married any earlier. And I wasn’t ready to leave home. Bon Terre was all I knew. When Brady finally came home last Christmas to start his residency in Lafayette, it was the first time we’d lived in the same city since we were eighteen.”
    Anger churned inside and his fists clenched the wheel. “So basically, you put your life on hold for a part-time relationship with a man who put you second best. Is that what you’re telling me?”
    The guy held her on a string for years, and to hear her tell it, he came across as honorable, waiting until he finished school to give her a ring. In Cane’s opinion, any man who asked a woman like Angelle to wait around twiddling her thumbs for eight years wasn’t a man at all.
    He glanced at his ring sitting on her pretty little finger and grinned. Fake engagement or not, he’d succeeded where her ex hadn’t, and call him a jealous jackass, but Cane was eager for Brady to see that.
    “It wasn’t Brady’s fault,” Angelle said, twisting his mom’s ring and admiring the heart-shaped diamond. “He did eventually propose… I think it was just too late. We’d both changed—at least I had. I couldn’t spend another three years waiting for him to complete his residency, waiting for my own life to begin. But when I said no, Cane, I didn’t only break Brady’s heart. I broke the town’s heart. That’s what you have to know before we get there. Brady and I were Bon Terre’s golden couple, the mayor’s daughter and the high school quarterback turned ‘good doctor.’ That’s what everyone calls him, by the way.” She mumbled something under her breath he couldn’t hear. “That’s why I left. I couldn’t start over here with the entire town disappointed in me. I needed a fresh start.”
    “Bon Terre’s loss is Magnolia Springs’s gain,” Cane replied, turning onto a long two-lane road with fields on either side. “And I, for one, am glad you left.”
    He sensed her heavy gaze on him and turned to meet it. Her lips lifted in a smile. Not a timid or embarrassed one, not even a shy or inebriated one. Angelle smiled her first, full-fledged, authentic smile in his direction, and Cane’s chest tightened. “So am I,” she said.
    They drove again in silence, and after another mile, the paved road turned to gravel. Angelle told him to turn down Papa P. Blvd. “That’s my papere ,” she said, pride evident in her voice. “My grandfather,” she explained. “But everyone just calls him Papa. This is our family’s road.”
    Cane slowed to take in the sight. Acres of green land stretched before them, some with cows, others with horses, and many with what appeared to be large fields sectioned off in between. Just from the small strip Cane could see ahead, Angelle’s family road contained at least seven or eight homes, all similarly styled: comfortable, obviously Southern, with large sloped roofs and porch swings. Without tall buildings or even a ton of trees off the main road, the bright blue Louisiana sky seemed endless.
    “That’s my brother Troy’s house on the right,” Angelle said, pointing at a house with yellow siding. “My cousin Lacey lives on the left up there, next to my nanny and parrain .” She sent him a wink. “That means godfather, city boy. My grandparents are all the way at the end, and that’s Mama and Daddy