ABOUT JILL SHALVIS
Connect with Jill
Website: http://jillshalvis.com/
Facebook: @JillShalvis
Twitter: @JillShalvis
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/
Tumblr: http://jillshalvis.tumblr.com/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/
ABOUT THE FOREVER GIRL (a standalone Wildstone novel)
Now as adults together again in the lake house, there are secrets and resentments mixed up in all the amazing childhood memories. Unexpectedly, they instantly fall back into their roles: Maze their reckless leader, Cat the den mother, Heather the beloved baby sister, and Walker, a man of mystery.
Life has changed all four of them in immeasurable ways. Maze and Cat must decide if they can rebuild their friendship, and Maze discovers her long-held attraction to Walker hasn’t faded with the years but has only grown stronger.
CHAPTER 1
Now you’ve got this, Cat told herself. But note to self: she so did not in fact have this. Her nerves had taken over—her own fault, of course. She’d done a thing. A big thing. And though her heart had been in the right place when she’d done that thing, butterflies were revolting in her gut, telling her she’d be the only one who’d see it that way. It was times like this that she missed Michael the most, because he would’ve been her ally in this, she was sure. Back then, even at half her height and weight, he’d been her shadow. The cutest shadow on the planet. Over time, she’d gotten used to being without him, but it’d never
gotten
easier.
Twin piglet-like snorts distracted her, and she looked down at
her fiancé’s “babies.” The pug brothers had huge buggy black eyes and little
round bodies and vibrated like they needed their batter- ies changed. Roly was
black and Poly tan, both with black faces, black curly tails, and little black
feet.
They snorted at her until she gave in and scooped them up, one
in each arm, having to smile at their smushed-in faces. “Okay, guys, listen up.
We’ve got a lot to do today.” She took a good, hard look around the old cabin
that had been in her family’s possession since the early 1900s. It sat right on
Rainbow Lake, about twenty minutes outside of Wildstone, a small ranching
community on California’s central coast. She had a lot of good memories here:
visiting her grandparents, learning to swim . . . she’d even run away here a
few times in her dramatic teens.
Her grandparents were gone, and her parents now lived in South
Carolina, where both of them were college professors. They were thinking of
selling this place, but had agreed to let her live here until her wedding. At
least that was the official reason. The unofficial one was that she was losing
her collective shit and had needed the safety net.
The problem was that there were still a few vital pieces missing
from the puzzle of Caitlin’s life: the most important pieces, the corner
pieces, the ones you couldn’t do without. And since Michael was an angel
now—and damn, her heart still squeezed painfully every time she thought about
him, which was a lot— she was really
counting on the wedding to bring the other vital pieces back to her. Those
pieces named Heather, Walker, and Maze.
The estrangement between them all felt like a huge, gaping hole.
It’d started at Michael’s grave three years ago and had only gotten worse.
Hence the thing she’d done.
No one was going to thank her. And it was entirely possible it
would all blow up in her face. But she’d had to try. Just thinking about it had
the butterflies in her belly escaping and taking flight in her nervous system,
giving her the shakes. But that might
have been the five cups of coffee
she’d consumed. She set down the pugs, much to their snorting,
squealing dis- pleasure,
and got to it. Running
around like a madwoman for the next few hours, she changed the sheets on the beds in the spare bedrooms, swept the wood floors, washed
the towels so they’d smell fresh . . . all while fielding call after call from her boss, Sara.
Cat managed the Wildstone deli that Sara owned. Cat also made all the hot food, which was actually the
only part of her job she enjoyed, because the deli itself was a nightmare.
She’d taken three weeks off for the wedding, but Sara, who’d missed her calling as the passive-aggressive queen of
the universe, had been in contact almost every day in the guise of needing
something, while really just wanting Caitlin to
know of her every little mistake or misstep.
So when her phone buzzed in her pocket yet again while Cat was
folding clothes in the laundry room, she ignored it.
“Caitlin?” came Dillon’s voice. “Can you bring me my laptop?”
She transferred another load into the dryer, turned it on, blew
a stray hair off her sweaty face, and poked her head out of the laundry room to
find Dillon sitting on the couch in the living room, feet up on the coffee
table, Roly and Poly curled up on his lap.
“Are you kidding me?”
He flashed her the charming smile that had caught both her
attention and her heart a year ago. “Sorry,” he said. “But my ankle’s bothering
me again. Do you mind?”
Hard to, when his twisted ankle was actually her fault. She’d
seen a Cosmo post online titled “The Top Ten Ways to
Spruce Up Your Sex Life.” Feeling ambitious, she’d gone with number one:
“Seduce Your Man in the Shower.” What could she say? The illustrations had
looked intriguing.
Turned out attempting intriguing things in the shower was
dangerous.
Feeling guilty, she ran up the stairs and got his laptop,
stopping to straighten out the mess he’d left on the desk. When she got back
downstairs, he was standing at the front door with his golf bag slung over his
shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
she asked.
“Just got a call from Mom. Her golf date bailed and she needs me
to do the back nine with her.”
“But your ankle.”
“We’ve got a cart.”
He handed her the pugs.
Juggling the soft sausage loaves while trying to avoid the
inevitable face kisses—a big no-thank-you, since they had a fondness for
licking each other’s butts—she stared at Dillon. “You said that you’d be here
to meet my family and have dinner with us.”
“Babe.” His face softened.
“I’m your family. Me and my mom, and your parents.”
“You know that’s only technically true,” she protested. She and
Heather and Walker and Maze might not be blood, but they were something even
deeper. A self-made family, and yeah, okay, maybe it was a very dysfunctional
one, but it felt more real than anything else in her life.
“Come on,” Dillon said, putting his hands on her hips and giving
her a frustrated smile. “When’s the last time you heard from Maze or
Heather”—he set a finger against her lips when she tried to speak—“where you
didn’t contact them first. I mean, have they offered to help you with the
wedding? They’re in it—you insisted on them over your local friends—so . . .
where have they been?”
She could admit that he had a point. They hadn’t been together
since their fight in front of Michael’s grave. Heather had vanished, just gone
dark for a whole year before suddenly responding to Caitlin’s texts again as if
nothing had happened. But she still hadn’t been back to Wildstone and wouldn’t
give Caitlin much in- formation other than that she was okay and “working on
things.” Whatever that meant.
Caitlin hadn’t seen Maze either, and not for a lack of trying.
But they’d texted and had a few strained calls. And to give Maze credit, she
always responded when Caitlin reached out, even with her busy life that was now
in Santa Barbara, two hours south of Wildstone.
But Caitlin had,
however, seen Walker. Sparingly, but he’d been gone on the job nearly nonstop
the past three years. She missed him. She missed all of them and wanted them
back together.
And as the self-appointed bossy older sister
of the fam, she was determined—and, okay, also slightly desperate—to make it
hap- pen. And yeah, maybe, maybe, she’d rushed her
wedding along, knowing it was the one thing that could bring her siblings of
the heart back together. She couldn’t help herself. For whatever rea- son, the
four of them had synced and melded into a core family that long-ago year, but
they were losing each other, and that scared her. She’d already lost Michael;
hell if she’d lose the others too. She needed this so badly she couldn’t even
explain it to Dillon. But the truth was the last time she’d felt vibrantly
alive had
been when they’d all
been in her life, and she was just desperate enough to play with fate to make
it happen.
“Please stay, Dillon.”
He studied her face and sighed, his eyes lit with affection as
he cupped her jaw. “I promised Mom, but I’ll get back asap. Take care of my
babies?”
It was the best she was going to get, so she nodded. He brushed
a nice, warm kiss across
her lips, and then he was gone.
From THE FOREVER GIRL by Jill Shalvis, published by
William Morrow. Copyright © 2021 by Jill Shalvis. Reprinted courtesy of
HarperCollinsPublishers https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-forever-girl-jill-shalvis?variant=32218755694626
BUY LINKS for THE FOREVER GIRL:
No comments:
Post a Comment