Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?

She'd assumed she'd be married and have kids by this age, that she would be grooming her own daughter for this, as her friends were doing. She wanted it so much she would dream about it sometimes, and then she would wake up with the skin at her wrists and neck red from the scratchy lace of the wedding gown she'd dreamed of wearing. But she'd never felt anything for the men she'd dated, nothing beyond her own desperation. And her desire to marry wasn't strong enough, would never be strong enough, to allow her to marry a man she didn't love.

If a man has so much heat he burns your skin when he touches you, he's the devil. Run away

Everything had felt so precarious since her mother's death, like she was walking on a bridge made of paper.

Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?

I spent so much time telling myself that this wasn't home that I started to believe it," she said carefully. "Belonging has always been tough for me." I can be your home," he said quietly. "Belong to me.

But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted in this kind of situation was to look around and see all the people who could help her doing nothing.