Feverish (Bullet #3) Read Online Free Page B

husband, Em. No, you don’t need my blessing, but you
have it just the same.”
    Yes, Bryce was an excellent choice for a
husband…which was why she’d stuck by him long after the initial
spark had fizzled. Honestly, the only thing they had in common was
their degree—both were going into business. Aside from that, they
were night and day. He was from a well-to-do family and he had an
older brother and younger sister; Emily was from a down-to-earth
middle-class family that consisted of herself and her father. Her
dad’s brother also had a family, but they lived in Delaware and
Emily and her father didn’t have much opportunity to visit. They
were like an island unto themselves. Her father had always been
heavily involved in his church, though, and they were like a second
family to him, and Emily had gotten the idea that he might be
interested in a woman who’d started attending a few months ago. She
couldn’t get him to talk about it, though.
    That was fair, she guessed, because he
couldn’t get her to talk much about Bryce, either. She knew her dad
worried about her, rational or not, and she wanted to remove that
concern. She’d known from the first that her dad liked Bryce. Her
dad wasn’t much for airs or titles, but Bryce was a bit of a
charismatic smooth talker, and he’d wormed his way into her
father’s heart. In fact, he’d been the first guy to do so, and
Emily was convinced it was because her father saw what Bryce could
do for her.
    Over the years too, Emily had been an outside
observer with her friends’ families. Their parents seemed happy and
content, and one by one, over the years, those marriages crumbled.
The first was Sam, a girl she’d lost touch with once they entered
high school, but Sam’s parents split in the third grade. They were
young and Sam didn’t understand it much (nor did Em), but there was
a vague impression that there was another woman in the picture. Her
other elementary school friend Tracy’s mom had been single from the
get go. Then in middle school, her new friend Kim’s parents got a
divorce. In high school, one by one, she saw the rest of them
happen. If the original parents were still together, they split up
sometime during those four years. She knew two— two! —people
whose parents were still committed to each other and their family
was intact. There were others who’d remarried since splitting in
the younger years. Some of them had much more successful marriages
the second time around, but a few did not. Emily still believed she
would have rather weathered a divorce than lose her mom in a
tragedy, but she suspected, deep in her heart, that her parents’
marriage wouldn’t have lasted any better than those of her
friends.
    So when it came to her own relationships, she
was pragmatic. She learned at a young age that it was better to
extricate her heart from the matter and instead focus on how a
relationship would benefit her life. The first two boys broke her
heart when they called it quits, but Emily saw that as being
similar to marriage. One of the boys said he just wanted to explore
other relationships, and the other was nice enough about how he
said what he said, but Em surmised that he just didn’t like her
much after spending time with her.
    Emily never stopped to think that some of her
friends’ marriages ended because the woman wanted them to. She
imagined it all the man’s fault. And after dating a lot of guys
through high school and college and getting serious with several of
them, she realized she couldn’t have it all. The guys who really
made her heart beat, her blood rise to the boiling point? Those
were the men she couldn’t get along with. Ultimately, she knew,
being with them would spell disaster. The men who treated her well
and worshipped her on some level might not make her get all tingly,
but often they were reliable good guys who would take care of
her.
    Bryce fell in that category. He was a good
looking guy too, and she’d found him