✔️ | 🎄 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖𝐍 𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓 (Second Chance Series)

| family

FOR MY LOVELY FRIEND. ❤️

With a light blue sweater covering his tattoos, Jim looks downright dashing. Shifting his weight on her doorstep, Jim is a bundle of nerves, moving his hands out of his pockets, then back in, then back out again as he waits.

Light spills across the porch as the door swings open, illuminating his face against the dark sky. "Hi, Linney."

She opens the door wider to invite him inside, immediately wrapping her arms around his shoulders. The devil-may-care look Jim usually sports is attractive, but this is sexy, too. "You look handsome! Casual Jim is rad, but this is nice, too."

First sweeping hair from her shoulder, Jim envelops her face with one hand, touching his thumb to her chin. "Beautiful, as always."

"Thank you!" She blushes as pink as her turtleneck but holds his gaze. She likes when they do that—look at each other with honesty.

Another young woman bounds into the room, breaking up their amorous eye contact. "This is the guy?"

Her eyes hold the same mischievous sparkle, but her hair is darker and straighter. She's a couple of inches taller than her vertically challenged sister.

"You must be Isabelle." Jim offers his hand, and she accepts it with vigorous glee, pumping it several times before clapping him on the shoulder.

"Well, come on!" she chirps, tugging on his wrist. "Dad, Mom! Jim's here!"

Isabelle was younger by one year and an amped-up version of her sister. Her parents are affable and lively, and he feels at ease within minutes.

And then there is her. He loves everything about Caroline Joy Crabtree. After days of late-night calls, occasionally finding time in person, and the months he privately obsessed over her, he is now smitten.

Only a bit over a week passed since they started officially seeing each other, and her parents noticed the visible change in her demeanor. Previously, she had been fatigued with work and school, but once Jim was involved, she was livelier and walked around singing to herself.

Mr. Crabtree insists Jim call him Matt, and Mrs. Crabtree explains she's gone by a silly nickname from birth. "Everybody calls me Birdie. My given name is Beatrice."

Jim charms everybody without issue; cultivated, polite, and well-spoken. Caroline loves him. Well, not loves him—but think he's terrific and likes him a whole heck of a lot.

After dinner, Matt grumbles in jest about all the heavy snow dumped from the skies out of nowhere earlier, and how shoveling the driveway will take all night.

"Do you have two shovels, sir?" Jim asks, carrying his checkered white plate to the sink, which Birdie graciously accepts.

"We do."

He turns to Caroline. "Let's go shovel. It will be fun together."

Thirty minutes later, they were laughing until their stomachs hurt while attempting to finish hurling the heavy, wet snow out of the driveway.

Hunched over, he scoops snow onto the plastic shovel when a smack of a snowball thuds his back. Whirling in astonishment, he finds her grinning devilishly. She loves his beaming smile as he cracks up before realizing she's in trouble.

Piles of snow in each hand, Jim hurtles toward Caroline while she shrieks. Catching her around the middle, she braces herself for the worst, squeezing her eyes shut. After a few seconds, she opens her eyes, finding a grin on his face and nothing in his hands.

Unsure if his cheeks are pink from the chill in the air or something else, Linney's stomach clenches while watching his deep brown eyes shine with luminosity. The tension between them hangs as heavy as the snow on their forgotten shovels, and their smiles dissolve with the tease of a first kiss.