Stay With Me, Contemporary Romance (Last Frontier Lodge Novels Book 5) Read Online Free

protective older brother. He’d sent a few potential customers her way over the years. Seeing as her income relied on people willing to pay pretty high prices for her individually designed and painted furniture, he’d helped her maintain her business. That thought sent a knot of fear and anxiety spiraling through her. What little of her artsy furniture she’d stocked up had been burned to ashes in the apartment fire. She’d used the second bedroom in her small two-bedroom apartment for storage and her living room to paint. Everything there was gone, gone, gone. Her thoughts must have shown on her face because Delia reached over and squeezed her hand.
    Jessa glanced over and took a breath. “I’m okay. It’s just been a long few weeks.” She lifted her injured hand. “This really isn’t much, but it hurt like hell at first. The doctor told me I need to keep putting the burn cream on and changing the bandage every day until the skin heals over. It’s almost there.”
    Delia nodded. “How are you though?”
    Jessa slumped against the couch cushions. “I don’t know. I lost everything in that fire. Everything. I didn’t have any money saved up, so I pretty much have to start all over. I didn’t know where to go, so here I am.” She lifted her good hand and let it fall against the armrest.
    Delia’s eyes coasted over her, and Jessa felt like she could see right through her. Delia couldn’t know this because it wasn’t something Jessa talked about to anyone, but she’d always felt like the bumbling sibling in her family. She was the youngest and had never quite felt as if she was put together as well as the rest. Gage was, well, Gage. He was a Navy SEAL with all of the qualities associated with being a SEAL naturally part of his personality. On top of that, he was warm, kind and the rock of their family. Then came Garrett and Becca, twins who were so different and so alike. Both were brilliant attorneys and fearless. The only time Jessa had seen Becca vulnerable was when she saw a look between her and Aidan. Aidan seemed to be the only person who got behind Becca’s guard. Next came Sawyer who’d followed Gage’s footsteps into the Navy SEAL’s and was now traveling the world on one classified mission after another.
    Then, there was Jessa. She’d always been a step out of tune. She’d done perfectly fine in school, but she’d chafed at the structure. Once she got to college, she found her calling in painting classes. Even though she loved designing and painting furniture, she always felt like she should have tried to make herself conform to something more traditional. A stint as a paralegal and then in banking had made her miserable. It didn’t help that she tended to barely scrape by even when she had good months. In the last few weeks, she’d spent hours and hours beating herself up for not having some kind of long term plan. An apartment fire started by the neighbor down the hall who fell asleep with a lit cigarette had burned up her life and illuminated just how flimsy its foundation was. Broke with nothing to fall back on, Jessa couldn’t bring herself to move back in with her parents, so she’d called her brothers and spent what little money she had left on the gas to get herself here. A knock on Delia’s office door broke through Jessa’s train of thought.
    “Yes?” Delia called out.
    The door opened and Garrett stepped through. Jessa forgot how depressed she was about the shambles of her life and leapt up. “Garrett!”
    He caught her in a swift hug before stepping back. “Hey sis. Gage told me you got in late yesterday afternoon. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it for dinner last night. We had to go to Nick’s school concert. I thought about asking if you wanted to come, but I figured after a drive like that, you probably weren’t up for a school concert. They’re a special kind of music and you never know what to expect,” Garrett said with a grin.
    “It might have been fun, but I