Just Beginning: A Prequel to Just Destiny (Destiny #1) by Theresa Rizzo
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Finding a soul mate doesn’t always come at a convenient time. As if he needed that warning. Steve got a beer and headed upstairs. Timing wasn’t exactly his specialty. In fact, he expected his love would find him at the most inopportune, inconvenient moment possible—that was if he was lucky enough to ever find what Gabe and Jenny had.
He and Annie probably didn’t have it. Wasn’t true love something that hit ya, and you knew it on a gut level?
Annie wasn’t the love of his life, and he suspected she felt the same. But they were compatible, and he really enjoyed her kids. Sophia and Josh had wormed a place deep in his heart, which was probably why he let the relationship with their mother coast on. He and Annie understood each other and were good in bed, but they didn’t have that magical mating of souls that Jenny and Gabe had.
He wanted it, but maybe magic wasn’t meant for everybody.
Steve stripped out of his suit and tossed it on the chair in his room. At first he’d been curious—and ungenerous, he admitted—about Jenny and Gabe, but that was before he got to know them.
Their relationship was clearly no sweet young thing looking for a sugar daddy or surrogate father, and he sincerely doubted that Gabe married Jenny in a deluded attempt to recapture his youth. He was only in his early forties and clearly cherished his wife.
What’s not to love? Kind and generous, Jenny possessed an innocent, charming quality about her—yet could be assertive when she needed to be. He found it hard to believe that anyone wouldn’t like Jenny. So she dressed in jeans, went around barefoot, and wore her long hair in a ponytail? Looking younger than her age wasn’t a crime.
Steve changed into jeans and a polo shirt.
He gave Jen credit for even trying to help her stepdaughter. If it’d been him, he probably would have avoided that minefield altogether and sent Alex to her parents for answers about sex. But Jenny cared. Being a good stepmother was important to her. Steve admired her for it, and he could certainly identify with her need to prove herself.
Convenient or inconvenient, he hoped to someday find a woman like Jenny Harrison. He wanted someone to look at him the way she looked at Gabe, like life was special because he was there to share it. But deep down, he doubted he’d ever experience that kind of love. For now, he had to concentrate on proving to everybody, himself included, that he could hack it as an attorney.
Steve remembered how Jenny’s small hand and quick, shy smile had sent a surprising warmth shooting through him earlier on the dock when he’d helped her to her feet. He wanted that kind of magic all the time. Some day.