Free Perfectly Charming (A Morning Glory Novel Book 2) by Liz Talley

ballooned, so she tied the shirttails together at her waist. Ryan looked suitably like a beach bum.
    Ryan Reyes.
    She still reeled at the thought that the skinny kid with the runny nose and strange comic book obsession had evolved into the hunk ambling beside her. Now that she knew, she could see traces of the boy he’d been. Same brown hair, even when burnished caramel by the sun. His eyes were the same golden green that had stared unblinkingly at her from behind the microscope. He’d been such an odd duck, smarter than his teachers, always sharing strange facts. And he’d watched her. Like, all the time. And he’d followed her around school, peeking out behind lockers. She’d known he had a crush on her and tried to be nice about it. Benton? Not so much.
    Her ex-husband hadn’t been the most tolerant of Ryan’s public adoration of his girlfriend. Cocky, smart-aleck, and a bit wild, Benton took exception to the kid her friends had dubbed her puppy. Jess hated when Benton got jealous and resorted to bad behavior. They’d broken up several times over his possessiveness, but then Benton would do something endearing and beg her forgiveness, and she couldn’t resist. Perhaps her desire to fix people had led her into nursing. She’d always thought she could patch the holes Benton had inside him and use the balm of love to help him be the man she knew he could be. And she’d loved him. He’d crack a smile at her, nose her shoulder with a little whimper. Then his warm brown eyes would fill with an apology, and she’d take him back. She’d never been able to resist Benton’s charm, his dashing good looks, and the way he could play her. And when it came to playing her, Benton had been the genius.
    Love was a funny thing. But after the pain, the heartache, the refusal to believe she and Benton were over, her love had finally withered. Love didn’t last if it wasn’t watered, given sun, or tended. Love didn’t last when one of the people stopped giving a damn and walked away. Now her love for Benton was a brittle tree waiting for a strong wind to blow it over.
    “So why fishing?” she asked, kicking at a wave and drawing her thoughts from Benton and the tearing in her heart every time she thought about what they used to be.
    Ryan shrugged his broad shoulders. “I never went fishing as a kid. Always wanted to.”
    She didn’t know what to make of that answer. This guy, a veritable genius who’d scored perfectly on the ACT, blown the SATs out of the water, and skipped three grade levels, ran a fishing-charter service. Of course, there was nothing wrong with that, but everyone had always thought the Brain would do great things in the scientific community. His parents had always pushed him to excel. Her mother took yoga with Ryan’s mother at the Calvary Church of Christ community center, and she’d occasionally mention Ryan’s accomplishments at Stanford and Caltech. Every now and then, when Jess caught an episode of The Big Bang Theory , she’d think about skinny Ryan in a lab coat writing formulas on a whiteboard, hanging out with other geeky friends. That vision made her happy, like Ryan was doing what he was meant to do. Not shivering in some locker somewhere, deemed a loser because he didn’t play football or crush beer cans with his forehead.
    But this Ryan—the one who lived in Florida, did Jell-O shots, and passed out naked (splendidly so) on the beach—was something she never expected. Things didn’t compute.
    “But what about your other work,” she persisted.
    “What other work?” he asked, turning to her, his eyes crinkling as he faced the sun. Sliding on the sunglasses hanging around his neck, he hid his gaze from her.
    “Don’t you have a doctorate, and you discovered something to do with stem cell research or something like that?”
    “Yeah, I have an MD and a PhD. The scaffolding for stem cells was a side project I got lucky on. I sold the procedure to a biomedical company and retired