She was his.
And she couldn’t imagine anything better.
Chapter Three
Maverick kicked back in his chair, nursing the beer he’d ordered. It had been nearly two months since Levi’s wedding and his worst hangover ever. The damn thing had been bad enough that he still couldn’t bring himself to drink much at all. This beer was his first since the reception.
It was Wednesday—ladies’ night at Whiskey Abbey, which was usually his chance to howl, but he wasn’t feeling it this evening. Just like he had the past seven Wednesdays, either…something his brothers had all noticed and commented on.
“Bro,” Jace said, when he returned from the dance floor. “You gotta snap out of whatever this is.”
Maverick gave his brother a half-hearted shrug.
“You’re usually bumping and grinding your ass off by this time of the night,” Jace added. “If you just wanted to scowl at a beer, you could have done that at home.”
“We’re all starting to worry,” Everett added.
Maverick wasn’t sure why he’d let his younger brothers convince him to join them. He’d turned them down for weeks, using a variety of excuses. At the beginning, he’d simply claimed he was cutting back on drinking for a while, and giventhat his entire family had witnessed his hangover, they hadn’t questioned the decision.
When Jace had invited him to join him and Everett tonight, it had been on the tip of his tongue to say no again, but for some strange reason, the word “okay” slipped out instead. He was tired of hanging around the house, watching baseball on TV, and waiting to get out of this funk he’d slipped into, so he thought maybe a night out would do him some good.
He’d been wrong.
He was just as pissy and out of sorts here, glowering at the world in general as he ate wings and drank his seven-dollar beer. Jace was right. At least at home, he could sit in his recliner with his feet up and be grumpy for free.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Maverick lied to his brothers. “I’ve just been in a foul mood lately.” He looked at Jace, using his brother’s words as he tried to reassure them. “I’ll snap out of it eventually.”
Maverick hated that he was worrying his brothers. Typically, they were his sounding boards, the ones he turned to whenever he had a problem, but he couldn’t do that this time.
At the beginning, he blamed his bad mood on the fact he’d gotten totally shit-faced and made out with Roni after Levi’s wedding. Because that had been the mother of all fuckups as far as he was concerned.
But now…now, he knew it was something else. Something more.
Given the way memories of Ella had been flooding his brain lately, he was forced to admit that old hurt hadn’t completely healed.
After Ella’s sudden disappearance from his life, he’d gone through what could only be described as the five stages of grief. Initially, he couldn’t believe she’d truly dumped him, expectingher to change her mind and tell him that Dear John letter had been a mistake.
But when her family moved away, leaving him with no way to contact her, his disbelief eventually morphed to an anger that lasted straight through the holidays. When the weather turned gray and cold in January of that year, so did his mood. He stopped caring about basically everything, and he’d spent his days simply going through the motions—school, work in the winery, home, repeat.
Shortly before graduation, he’d started to come out of his depression, started flirting with girls and moving on. Time had worked its magic, making the pain feel less sharp, less brutal.
He no longer equated sex with emotions, such as love or commitment, but instead as a quick fix of pleasure, the good feeling lasting until the climax. At which point, he got out of bed, got dressed, and got the hell out.
He’d followed that pattern right into his mid-twenties, when he’d decided enough was enough. He hadn’t been the only guy in the world to get his heart drop-kicked, so he made the leap from denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, forcing himself into acceptance.
Maverick had woken up the morning of his twenty-fifth birthday with a smile on his face and a bright, sunny new outlook on life. He put Ella in the rearview mirror and took a serious look around town, because his birthday wish that year was to find love again.
So, he’d asked Karla Chapin out on a real date. The plan was dinner and the movies, and zero intention of ending the evening with a meaningless hookup. In his mind, one-night stands were a thing of the past.
He hadn’t made it through thirty minutes at dinner with Karla before he’d decided she wasn’t the one, so after the movie,he dropped her off at home and never called back for a second date.
Not that he let that initial failure deter him from his goals. He continued his prowl for the one, but sadly, the pattern created with Karla continued as his search proved fruitless, and he continued to rack up a long list of doomed first dates.
On his twenty-seventh birthday, his optimism ran out. That was when he accepted that his dream woman didn’t live in Gracemont, and he decided to embrace his bachelor lifestyle instead.
While Maverick wouldn’t say he’d been the happiest guy in town the last five years, he’d been satisfied with his life. He loved his job, his home, his family. Maverick was grateful for everything he had, because he knew just how blessed he was.
Then Levi got married and ripped Maverick’s blinders off. The one thing he’d refused to acknowledge for fifteen long years was suddenly obvious.