Ready for You (Ready #3)(9)

“I don’t want to wait, Mia. I’m ready now, and I don’t care what everyone will say. I know you’re the one, so why wait? We’ve already started our lives together. Now, we just have to make it official.”

“He was perfect,” I blurted out, staring at the picture of him still lighting up my screen. “He asked me to marry him.”

“What? When?”

“The day before graduation.”

“And you said…no?” she asked hesitantly.

I put down my phone, shutting off the screen and severing my view of Garrett and his many lickable features. “I said yes.”

“Oh. So, why did you—”

“Leave?”

She just nodded. It was one of those things I wasn’t ready to share yet.

“Mia—I mean, Amelia…f*ck. I’m calling you Mia, okay? I can’t look at you and call you anything else. You’re just going to have to deal.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? That’s it? I figured you’d put up more of a fight than that, but okay. You know, if you’d changed your mind, you could have just told him. You were eighteen. Getting married is a huge deal at that age. Hell, it still is at our age. The idea scares the shit out of me. That’s why I’m planning on never going down that road. I’ll never let a guy get that close.”

I remembered the night Garrett had asked me.

We’d parked at the edge of the river, and we were lying on an old blanket that he always stored in his trunk. For hours, we’d been staring at the stars while talking about our new life. We were scared and excited. Everything was changing, but we were together, and we knew we could do anything if we had each other. We were so young and innocent, yet we were full of grown-up emotions we hadn’t been prepared for.

Right in the middle of our conversation about apartments, he said, “Stand up.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Just do it!” He grinned.

He bent down on one knee, and I giggled, thinking that was something men only did in movies. I knelt with him on the blanket. The frogs croaked, and the water rushed by as I held his hands. We both laughed and cried as he proposed.

He curled his fingers into my hair and kissed me softly until I said, “Yes.”

Then, he completely surprised me by pulling out a ring. I had thought the entire thing was spur-of-the-moment, but he had planned it, every single minute. He placed the ring on my finger. It was a delicate white gold band with a small diamond placed in the center.

“It’s not much, but you already own my heart, so this is just a placeholder for that.”

“It’s perfect.”

And it had been.

I briefly touched the spot on my left hand, now ringless and empty. “I didn’t change my mind about him.”

“Then, what made you run?”

“I didn’t deserve him.”

I still didn’t.

~Garrett~

Dropping Leah and the kids off, I briefly stopped inside to say hi to Leah’s husband, Declan.

Then, I headed into the office. I didn’t have to since it was Saturday, but this was what workaholics did. It was what anyone with an addiction did. I had to feed it constantly. Otherwise, the pain would start to surface again, and I’d be forced to deal with it. So, when everyone else was as far away from the office as possible, hanging out with friends or playing with their kids, I was scanning my corporate key card and taking the elevator up to the floor holding the Richmond office of the pharmaceutical company I’d been working for since college.

There were two types of workaholics in my opinion. There could be more. I hadn’t done an official study. Psychology was always Mia’s thing—or at least, it used to be until she’d apparently decided to become an accountant instead. But as far as I could see, people either worked themselves ragged to get to the top or they did so to avoid their own pathetic lives. I was the latter pretending to be the former. I played the part well. As the young team leader, I was known as a rise-to-the-top, do-anything-to-succeed corporate star. Honestly though, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this place.

I hated my job—like, really f**king hated it.

No one would ever know it by the way I acted. I would take on every project and account I could get my hands on. Someone couldn’t work late? I’d take it. Michelle needed to cancel her trip to Dallas because her kid was sick? Sure, I’d go for her. To my coworkers, I was their saving grace and a team player to the end, and all my hard work had paid off. I had been promoted faster than any other sales executive my age. I’d made more deals and earned more bonuses, raking in more cash than anyone else in the company. Within a few years, I would be running the entire Richmond office, if not somewhere larger.

Did I want to? Hell no.

So, why was I still here? It kept my mind occupied.

It was the workaholic logic. As long as I was working, as long as I was immersed in something, I could keep my mind off her, and I would be fine.

When I’d been about to graduate from college, I had hoped to get a position at an architecture firm, but everywhere I had looked, I had been turned down. It had been my major and my dream in college. Unfortunately, the country had been in an economic shithole, and building and construction had hit an all-time low.

I had been forced to look outside my field. I’d taken the first job I could find—pharmaceutical sales. I had the face for it, doctors loved me, and it paid well. I had become addicted—addicted to the hours, addicted to the mind-numbing nothingness it gave me. So, my design work had become nothing more than a pastime, and I’d become Garrett Finnegan, pharmaceutical salesman extraordinaire.