Last Second Chance

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was the middle of the night, but pulling up at the Second Chance Ranch felt a lot more like going home than actually going home had.

Stella’s feelings had run the gamut on her drive home. Angry, betrayed, hurt, pissed, sad, shocked. Her music preferences had provided the soundtrack to her emotional journey. Heavy metal, alternative rock, country. She wasn’t a genre-specific girl. She liked all kinds of music, the movement of it, the various beat and the passion behind it, but it was always the words that got to her. The lyrics. If a song had even one line that touched her in a place she’d thought was hidden, a place she’d once believed only she possessed, it stayed on.

She finally plugged her phone into the auxiliary outlet and just listened to the Hostage for Ransom album she’d downloaded. His voice comforted her, sang her the rest of the way home.

When the tear-filled drive from her parents’ house to Dallas ended, her heart landed in limbo. Wrecked and ravaged, it remained listlessly between a state of perpetual sadness for the mother she never knew—the one who’d ultimately lost her life because she’d felt she had nowhere to go—and hopefulness. Because she’d decided to ask her parents not to sell the ranch. She had plans for it.

As much as the unveiled truths had stung in sensitive spots she’d never known existed, they had also shown her something she would’ve struggled to believe otherwise.

Van loved her. And she loved him. What they had was more than lust and more than sexual gratification. It was deeper and sturdier than she’d realized, and at the moment, he was all she could think about.

She practically flew on two legs to his door, unable to wait for him to do the wonderfully exhilarating things he did to her. She had pain and anguish and heartbreak to work out, and she wanted to work it out with him inside her, giving her immeasurable pleasure. Giving her him.