The Worst Mistake She Ever Wanted

Everyone in Hollan had the same warning for Odette Wexley, and they all said it like they were doing her a kindness. He's too old for you. Twenty-one years is a canyon, not a gap. He'll get bored. He'll get tired. He'll leave you — or worse, you'll leave him, and then look what you'll have done. A patched-in Ironwake officer of forty-five and a girl of twenty-four: the whole town had already decided that was the mistake, and they were only waiting to be proven right. They were wrong about which part was the mistake. Because the age gap was never going to break them. Odette knew exactly what she wanted, and what she wanted was Conrad Straith — the low rumble of his voice in the dark, the half-restored vintage bike in his garage that he was rebuilding bolt by bolt, the way a hard man went soft and careful around her like she was the one thing in his life he was afraid to drop. For ten months, it was the truest thing she'd ever had. And then Conrad let the club's mockery get into his head — robbing the cradle, she'll wake up one day and see an old man — and did the one thing that could actually end it. One night. A woman his own age. A choice made out of pure cowardice, to prove to himself he still could, to blow it up before she could leave him first. Odette is not going to stand in the wreckage and be told the number between them was the problem. The number was never the problem. He was. She's done being warned about, done being the cautionary tale, done letting a whole town and a scared man decide her life for her. Now Conrad has to prove — not with a grand gesture, not by proving he's still got it, but over ordinary, un-sexy, patient time — that the age gap was the one true thing he ever got right, and the betrayal was the only real mistake. He has to own it in front of the club that goaded him. He has to stop performing and simply be steady. And he has to hand Odette the choice, all of it, with no guarantee she takes it.