Sarah was left speechless, something that seemed to happen quite a bit around the Anderson family.
“Thank you, Katherine,” she finally said. She was too choked up to say anything more than that. Katherine let go of her fingers, and Sarah stood up and moved over to the contract. She grabbed a pen and signed. Then she returned to the couch.
“Would you mind giving this to your husband?” she asked.
The smile Katherine gave her left Sarah knowing she’d made the right choice. They chatted for another hour, and Sarah was left feeling at peace—at least for a little while. She was going to live her dreams—she just wished she knew more of what they were.
CHAPTER THREE
Six months later
Travel!
Really, the word should be trvl so she could then call it a four-letter word, because anytime Sarah Jennings had to go somewhere, she found her normally pleasant demeanor shattered like a frail windowpane next to a pack of middle school boys with rocks in their grubby hands.
She despised everything to do with traveling, from the packing at the beginning and inevitably forgetting something, to the long lines at the airports and getting felt up like a teen in the back of some boy’s car at the TSA station, to the cramped airplane. Then when she arrived at her destination, something had to go wrong at least once, whether it was losing her reservation, her baggage, her purse, or her sanity.
But the moment she arrived back home and took a deep breath, she was fine once more. At least that’s how it normally went. Today wasn’t that day. She was struggling to hold on to her loaded bag, oversize purse, and apartment keys. She was so tired she felt as if she could fall asleep standing up, and her bladder was uncomfortably full.
After a long struggle she finally managed to get her key in the apartment lock and kicked the door open with her sore foot. She inhaled but didn’t find the relief she normally felt when stepping back inside her place after a long trip.
“The peace is coming,” she assured herself out loud, not at all worried to be talking like a crazy person to the walls. No one was around to hear her, anyway. She was perfectly fine.
She stepped forward, getting ready to toss her bag aside, when her foot caught on the entry area rug. She knew she was going down, but there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it. Not right now, not with her arms loaded with a bunch of stuff she hadn’t even really needed on her trip.
She hit her knees first before sprawling forward, landing very ungracefully on her chest. Thankfully her purse cushioned some of the fall. Maybe it was seconds or possibly even minutes. Sarah wasn’t fully sure. She just stayed exactly where she was, fighting the urge to cry.
Exhaustion and frustration were making her far more moody than she normally was. The weak, pathetic emotions were making her more and more angry with herself.
“Pull it together,” she said between clenched teeth. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”
Before she could continue lecturing herself, her phone began screaming at her from inside her purse. She really didn’t care who was calling. The last thing she needed to do was talk to another human being. So she let it go to voice mail.
When the phone immediately began ringing again, she let out a sigh as she flipped to her side and tugged open her purse. It took a few seconds of digging around before she found her huge iPhone and pulled it out, ready to bite the head off of whoever was calling her twice in a row this late on a Friday night.
Her anger immediately drained, though, when she saw one of her two best friends smiling at her from her screen. Of course it wasn’t the most flattering pic of her bestie, but that just made it even better. The evil woman had a picture of her lying in a hospital bed as her profile pic on her phone. Sarah vowed to take an even worse one of Brooke the second she had a chance.
“Hello, Brooke. What’s so urgent you’re calling me over and over?” Sarah asked.
“If you’d answer the phone the first time, I wouldn’t have to call over and over,” Brooke pointed out.
“You knew I was traveling all day. What if I was still in the plane?” Sarah asked. She pushed her purse behind her and rolled to her back, using the bag as a pillow. She might just fall asleep right where she was. It had been a long flight from London.
“I tracked your flight and knew you’d be home by now,” Brooke said, making Sarah laugh.
“Of course you did. You’ve only been a mom for a month now, and you’re already overprotective,” Sarah said with another chuckle.
“You’re my best friend. Of course I’m overprotective. Well, I worry equally about you and Chloe.”
“As I do the two of you,” Sarah said.
“I want to hear all about the trip,” Brooke said, as if she had all night.
“Don’t you need sleep? It’s nearly midnight,” Sarah pointed out.
“I need sleep, but your nieces are perfectly content to nurse for an hour and then take another hour burping, so I have all the time in the world,” Brooke said, sounding way too happy for a sleepless new mother of twins.
“Ah, they are totally worth giving up sleep for,” Sarah said, feeling her grumpiness vanish at the mention of her nieces. They really were the cutest little girls in the universe. Of course, they had parents who could grace the cover of Vogue magazine, so the chances of them not being adorable were zero to none.
“Yeah, I’m pretty in love with them,” Brooke said, sounding happier than she ever had in her life.
There had been a time Sarah had worried Brooke would never find happiness again, especially after the loss of her brother. But then her best friend had met Finn Anderson, and her world had been flipped upside down. Brooke had fought her feelings toward the man, but in the end love had won, and now it was like they’d been together forever; they were so in sync with one another. It gave Sarah the tiniest pang of jealousy.
Sarah didn’t stick with guys very long. She loved to flirt and loved to date, but she inevitably was disappointed in the opposite sex. They might hold her attention for a day or a week but never for a full month. Well, that was until she’d met Noah Anderson.
Her smile fell away as she thought about the man she was working on the huge Anderson veterans project with. He drove her absolutely crazy, and not in a good way, she told herself. He made her feel things she had no business feeling, and she wanted to get as far away from him as humanly possible. But since they were the architects for the veterans project, she’d had to work with the man nearly daily.
That’s why she hadn’t complained too much about jaunting off to London for another personal project she was working on. It was bad timing for work but much needed for her sanity.
“Hey!” Brooke’s voice came through loud and clear, making Sarah jump.
“Why are you yelling?” Sarah asked.
“I’ve been talking for at least two minutes, and you just disappeared. You went into your own head again, didn’t you?” Brooke said with a laugh.
There was no use denying it. “Yep. Sorry about that.”
“And what were you thinking about?”
“Nothing worth mentioning,” Sarah muttered.
“Ah, then probably Noah,” Brooke said, laughing hard enough this time that Sarah heard a whimper from whichever niece Brooke was nursing.