Pace looked at me gratefully.
“Yes. A hundred times yes.”
After Pace had been released from the hospital, I’d started to really push him on doing what he wanted to do—which was run. And now he was about to run his first half-marathon while he was here.
I was going to be running the 10K and would be waiting for him at the finish line when he was done—hopefully. Pace was fast. Way faster than he’d ever thought he would be. There was a distinct possibility that he’d be meeting me at the finish line.
I may not be the fastest ever, but I was getting there.
After the third time that Pace had lapped me on the small two-mile track that wound around the hotel, we called it quits.
That was, of course, when I met his aunt for the first time.
It didn’t take me long to notice her.
She looked exactly like Rana, Pace’s mother.
I shook Pace’s hand to get his attention, and he followed the direction of my gaze to see his aunt standing there looking ecstatic.
She didn’t complain once when Pace threw his sweaty arms around her and hugged the hell out of her, either.
When Pace pulled back, Diana, Pace’s aunt, looked at his chest with a scowl on her face.
“If that woman wasn’t facing twenty-five years to life in prison right now, I’d find her and shoot her in the same exact spot,” Diana hissed.
Pace laughed.
“You’ll have to get in line. Oakley said that if she ever gets out, Mom’s hers,” he said, letting her go.
Diana looked at me. “You’ll have to fight me for her.”
I grinned. “Chances are I’ll find out before you…and with you living out in the Alaskan Wilderness, I don’t see you getting there before me.”
Diana threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, Pace. You picked a good one. I love her.”
Pace threw his arm around me. “I love her, too.”
Two days later, we were married.
Two days after that Pace won his half-marathon and his face was splashed across almost every newspaper in Alaska.
I managed to finish before him, but only fast enough that I could turn around and watch him eating up the last one hundred meters between us.
***
Two years later
“Daddy, Daddy!”
I grinned at my girl’s reaction to seeing her father’s picture.
Diana Vidalia Vineyard was exactly one year old today, and we were celebrating by watching her daddy run the Boston Marathon.
“Did you hear back from the doctors?” my mother asked from my side.
She had Diana in her arms and she was holding the phone out so my daughter could look at it. My father had spotted Pace at mile number twenty-two and had sent a picture.
He’d looked really good. Not too worn out.
And definitely hot as hell in his tight ass shorts that showed off a wonderful package.
My running had suffered when I’d found out that I was pregnant with Diana. Not because I’d stopped, but because Pace had practically wrapped me in cotton wool and treated me with the utmost care.
I was nowhere near his caliber anymore, but I’d run my first half-marathon, and he’d been there at the finish line to catch me the moment I’d crossed.
That was the day that we’d found out that we were having a baby girl.
That was also the day that he’d told me I wasn’t running that far again until after I was no longer pregnant.
I’d decided to appease him, but mostly because that had been the worst run ever. When I’d picked it back up after Diana’s birth, it just wasn’t the same. I could run…but I just didn’t have the same passion for it any longer. My passion had switched to a certain little blue-eyed blonde that looked so much like her daddy that it hurt.
“Clean bill of health,” I said. “I also got a call about Jackson. They moved him to a new prison because he was getting beat up every other day there.”
My mother snickered. “That sucks. Your daddy’ll have to find another contact at the new prison.”
I didn’t comment on that.
Couldn’t.
Mostly because I could see my husband sprinting his heart out toward the finish line.
“He’s there!” I cried, pulling Diana from my mother’s arms and moving toward the finish line.
I was practically bouncing on my toes as we waited.
This was something that Diana and I did at every single race that he competed in, and Pace loved it.
He loved seeing us the second he finished.
He loved us.
We loved him.
God, I loved him.
The love that I felt was so all-encompassing that sometimes I feared I’d get lost in it.
Pace looked up then, his eyes finding mine, and a blinding smile lit his face.
“Daddy!” Diana screamed.