Free Open Life (Open Skies #5) by Marysol James Page A

Houston and live in your own place? I’ll take you to dinner and meet you for coffee until you’re ready for more. You want to move in with me? I’ll make love to you every day and every night until you pass out in my arms. You want to marry me? I’ll be at the church with bells on, baby. I’m good with any and all of it.”
    She stared at him, shocked, stunned, moved.
    “That’s my side of this, but my side is only half of what’s going on here,” Eric said. “You need to decide what you want with me and you decide right. Next week, next month, next year… I’m ready when you are, angel, and there’s no rush and no pressure. You take your time and you think if you want to be with me. If you do, you let me know and we’ll figure it all out.”
    “And if I don’t?” she forced herself to ask. “If I can’t – can’t get over you having Cam’s heart?”
    “Then we go our separate ways and get on with our respective lives.”
    “You’ll be angry at me?”
    “No. Never.” He shook his head. “If you aren’t sure or it hurts you to be around me, then the last thing I want is for you to ignore those things. You need to be honest, Annabeth, with me and with yourself. I promise you – if you can’t do this for whatever reason, it’s OK.”
    She looked at him and she believed him. He may have misled her when they first met, but ever since he’d come clean, Eric had been honest to a fault. If she told him to let her go, he would. She knew that.
    “So what do we do?” she asked.
    “Well, right now we drink our coffee and eat those cinnamon buns. Then maybe we can go for a walk? Look at some wildflowers?”
    Her heart squeezed. “I’ve missed them.”
    “What? The mountain flowers?”
    “Yeah. Looking at them with you.”
    “I’ve missed doing everything with you,” he said quietly. “Everything.”
    Annabeth looked at him sitting there, so huge and handsome. It was unbelievable to her that this man wanted her as much as he did – but it was true. All she had to do was reach out and accept the love he was offering, the future he was promising, and then he was hers. She didn’t know what to do with any of that yet… if anything.
    “So.” She brushed her hair back, trying to sound normal. “We’ve got three weeks. Let’s do some of those things we’ve missed, huh?”
    “Agreed. Starting with coffee and cinnamon buns.”
    Annabeth felt pure happiness rising in her. “Yep. We’ll start with caffeine and icing sugar.”
    “Perfect.”
    And it really was.

Chapter Five
    Three days before Jake and Julie’s wedding, Maria was checking out the last non-wedding guest from Open Skies. Mrs. Felicia Kramer was a regular customer at the hotel and she was also a never-ending pain in Maria’s butt. More than once, Maria had longed for the courage to tell the woman to just shut the hell up – but fear for her job kept her mouth shut tight. The woman was the wife of an accountant that Julie worked with occasionally, so Maria felt that she was stuck taking whatever Mrs. Kramer dished out.
    And boy , was she ever dishing it out this morning. Despite the fact that she’d spoken to Maria approximately two hundred times in her life and the two women had communicated beautifully, she insisted on acting as though Maria couldn’t understand a word she said. It made Maria’s blood boil that this rich bitch took one look at her dark hair and eyes and non-lily-white skin and saw nothing but a Mexican. Forget that she was born right here in Colorado and had never been to Mexico in the whole of her life… women who looked like her were always ‘the help’ for people like Mrs. Kramer, and they never let you forget it for even one damn second.
    Knowing that she was now in the home stretch in terms of shifting this awful woman out the front door to her chauffeured car waiting outside, Maria glanced down at the bill. “And you took four private tennis lessons with Kieran, correct?”
    “No. Three.” Mrs.