Lovely Pink, Raine Miller [highly recommended books txt] 📗

time I had left to get her to the altar, and my ring on her finger.

I met Reese Pinkarver when she was ten years old, at a party held in the rose garden at Mount Laurel. My family’s historic plantation just outside of Charleston was the perfect setting for our introduction, because the significance of the place helped drive home the importance of precisely what was expected of me. Mount Laurel is the birthplace of Grayson Thaddeus Lash I, former President of the United States of America, and my esteemed grandfather.

I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman—so technically an adult while definitely still very much a kid in the head—when my father, Grayson Thaddeus Lash II, pointed her out to me in the rose garden, and told me the wide-eyed little girl with the blond curls holding onto her mother’s hand in a death-grip, was the person I would marry.

It wasn’t even a suggestion by any means, but a requirement. She had been chosen specifically for me, he said. It only made sense that the direct descendants of presidential bloodlines running as blue as ours, were strengthened by making more little Pinkarver-Lash’s to add to the ever-expanding family tree.

To be fair, I believe my father was feeling the nostalgic urge to ensure our family’s history was carried on because my grandfather had passed just the year before. Something I didn’t appreciate until I was faced with the same scenario many years later.

At the time, I let my father’s—You’ll marry that girl someday, Gray—nonsense go through one of my eighteen-year-old ears and right on out the other. I did not care what he or anyone else required of me. I was young, dumb, and full-of-cum, just like every other male in their first year of college. I was all up my own ass perfecting my skills with women who were my own goddamn age for one thing. Being matched up with a child was downright disturbing. Having my life laid out for me without my input or consent was fucking infuriating. Marrying any person was a foreign concept I couldn’t even entertain. Having children?

I was not hearing any part of what he had to say.

Dad could go after one of my sisters in forging his political dynasty with some other sap-bastard, Son-of-America. My own parents had shown me just how painful marriage could be during the course of my whole life. There was no shining example of a loving relationship for me to draw an experience from, so his words meant very little to me.

As the years passed, Reese and I met at more garden parties, charity balls, and even an event or two at the White House. We forged a friendship over time, as I made more of an effort to get to know her while she grew up before my eyes. I found her delightful, and she seemed to look up to me almost like the big brother she never had. The two of us were connected family acquaintances with an easy friendship, and nothing more than that. There were no awkward moments, nothing weird between us whenever we did happen to run into each other somewhere in Charleston or the DC area. The edict my father had given me so long ago in the rose garden at Mount Laurel was pretty much forgotten in the past where it stayed buried.

Until two years ago when Reese and her family showed up to my father’s funeral.

No longer a shy little girl clinging to her mother for security, but a confident beauty who’d grown into a lovely young woman. My whole opinion of her, and how she might fit into my life, changed dramatically with the event of my father’s death.

I found a great deal had changed for Reese, and for me, in the thirteen years since the garden party down at Mount Laurel when my dad told me she would be my wife and the mother of my children someday.

That’s about the time “it got weird” between us—and I can honestly say the blame was one hundred percent on me. It wasn’t Reese’s fault I’d been raised with certain expectations from birth. A law degree from Harvard was one of those expectations. A career in the family business of politics was another. I’d accomplished the Harvard Law degree and was working my way up the political food chain with my new term as Attorney General for South Carolina solidly in place. It was also assumed that my crowning political achievement would be the governor’s mansion someday, and it very well could be if all the pieces fell into place as they were supposed to.

The most important piece of that puzzle was in the back of an ambulance being administered a breathing-treatment for an asthma attack, brought on by me being the demanding asshole I was pretty much most of the time.

I’d have to work on that with her, because Reese certainly didn’t deserve an asshole for a husband.

And I would be her husband. That wedding shit I’d said no to before? It was happening.

My lovely Pink deserved the best husband in the world. She deserved the best of everything life had to offer. Hell, she deserved to be First Lady of South Carolina, and maybe even more, someday.

And she was getting me in the process, even if she wasn’t sure she wanted me yet.

She might not be sure, but I was certain she felt the attraction between us. It was definitely there that night two months ago when I came to see her…and we ended up in my suite at The Jefferson for the night.

Reese felt something for me, or she wouldn’t have reacted so strongly when I showed up tonight. She wouldn’t be gripping my hand so tightly right now, or let me hold her while waiting for the ambulance to show up at Oakley’s house.

“How are we doing, baby?” I leaned down to ask against her ear so she could hear me.

Her eyes flickered open, and she