Ella started to shake her head, but Edith continued.
“Levi has known Kasi her whole life, but she’s considerably younger than him. One day, she became overheated in her family’s fruit stand and passed out. Levi caught her. He said that touch struck him like lightning, said it felt as if he’d been a blind man until that moment, at which point his future was revealed to him crystal clear, twenty-twenty vision.”
Ella had seen Levi and Kasi together at Sunday dinner, and she’d never seen a couple more in love, but she still couldn’t attribute a single touch to them finally finding each other. Obviously, Kasi had reached an age where Levi suddenly noticed she was a woman, rather than just Remi’s young friend.
“I can see you’re not convinced,” Edith said, after taking a sip of her tea. “The same thing happened to Theo. He met Gretchen, shook her hand, and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was his.”
“Did Gretchen feel the same?”
Edith walked to the counter and poured them both another cup of tea, since the water was still hot. “As you know, Gretchen came to Gracemont after escaping an abusive boyfriend. While she admitted to feeling an instant attraction to Theo, she was slower to act on it because she wasn’t looking for love. She was looking for freedom and safety. In the end, with Theo, she found all three.”
Ella smiled, because Edith was right about these being wonderful love stories.
“For a time, we thought that legend was only true of the men in the Storm family, but Mila felt the same thing the day she fell off a ladder and Boone caught her,” Edith added.
Ella considered each of the couples Edith listed. She’d heard bits and pieces of their whirlwind relationships at various times,so she knew none of the couples—with the exception of Rex and Claire—had been together more than a year. And yet, they seemed just as Edith described—like soul mates, lovers who’d known each other their entire lives.
Regardless, Ella, despite writing romance for a living, was too much of a realist to put much stock in the concept. One of the reasons she was so drawn to romance to begin with was because they were beautiful fantasies, fairy tales that provided an escape from real life…where love was a hell of a lot harder and never quite as magical.
Perhaps the truth wasn’t the legend, as much as the Storms were just lucky in love. The evidence seemed to suggest that, and obviously, Ella’s disbelieving smirk told Edith she still wasn’t a believer.
“You’re a tough nut to crack,” Edith joked. “But there’s one other Storm who’s succumbed to the legend as well.”
Ella mentally worked her way through Maverick’s remaining brothers and cousins and came up empty. As far as she knew, they were all still single.
“Who?”
“Maverick,” Edith replied. “It struck him down when he was just seventeen years old.”
Ella was shaking her head before Edith finished speaking.
“No,” she said. “No. We were just kids. First love. What we had was…”
Ella trailed off…because she began replaying her entire relationship with Maverick through the lens of this new information.
She recalled the way his hand had brushed against hers that day in the hallway, the way she’d felt shaken to the core, in the best possible way. She always chalked up that reaction to the fact that Maverick was the first boy to ever show her any attention or interest.
But now…
From that very moment, Maverick had been wholly devoted to her, accepting all the limitations placed on her by her father with good grace. She couldn’t imagine any other teenage boy being okay with a girlfriend who couldn’t text, date, drive, or even hang out with him after school.
Then she thought about all those dreams of his, the future he saw so very clearly. One where they were married with kids and a house. It had terrified her at the time, because her only example of what it meant to be a wife was her mother, and she knew she didn’t want that. Ella refused to give up her own dreams in an attempt to conform to what would please a man.
“I’m not Maverick’s one,” Ella insisted, even though the words cost her, because how amazing would it be if she were.
Now, Edith was the one who looked completely unconvinced. “That man hasn’t truly looked at another woman his entire adult life.”
Ella scoffed. “From what I’ve heard, he’s looked at plenty of them.”
“No.” Edith didn’t laugh at Ella’s jest. “He hasn’t, Ella. I saw the two of you at the fair, and that day we went wine tasting, then again at Sunday dinner. When you’re in the room, you are theonlything Maverick Storm sees.” Edith sniffled, and it occurred to Ella the woman’s eyes were damp. “I’ll admit, I’ve been worried about his tenaciousness when it comes to holding on to that bachelor status of his. Now, I can see he was just waiting for you to make your way back to him.”
Ella wanted to assure Edith that wasn’t the case, but the older woman was drawing such a beautiful picture in Ella’s mind, she didn’t want to discount it. More than that, she wanted it to be true.
She cleared the lump forming in her throat, fighting back a few of her own tears. “You missed your calling,” she managed to croak out. “Youshould have been the romance writer.”
One of Edith’s brows rose. “Joke if you want, but you’ll see soon enough that I’m right.” She stood. “And with that, I should probably head back to bed and try to get some more sleep before my four-a.m. potty break.”
Ella laughed and helped Edith clear away the dishes, hiding all evidence of the cookies. They bid each other a quiet good night, and Ella tiptoed back upstairs to her room.