Loves Second Chance

Thank you @Authors_Notexox  for making the beautiful cover for Love's Second Chance'! 

Prologue:

Parker sat alone in his truck with only his thoughts and his regrets for company. If someone had told him four years ago that he would be sitting in a suit and tie across from the church that his mother had drug him to every Sunday for years, while Emily Thompson married someone that wasn't him, he would have laughed at them.

But here he was, in a suit and tie that he had borrowed from his father, watching the closed church doors, waiting for them to burst open and for the only woman he had ever loved to come running out with her new handsome, successful husband.

He had come with every intention of walking into that church and watching her move on with her life. Watching her claim her new happiness, but when he had pulled up he had not been able to force himself from his truck.

Parker looked over at the chauffeur, that her new man had no doubt paid a fortune for, as he leaned against a long black limo and took long slow puffs of the cigarette in his hand.

Parker closed his eyes and his mind drifted back to the past as he wondered how things had turned out this way...

4 years earlier

"I can't believe this is happening!" Emily exclaimed happily as she looked down at the marriage license in her hand. Parker smiled and lifted her hand to his lips kissing her tiny diamond engagement ring. He had had to save every dime he'd earned at that garage for the last two months but he had finally made enough to buy it for her.

"I'm glad you're happy." he said as he drove down the tiny back roads toward the house of the preacher who had agreed to wed them.

"My birthday and my wedding day all at the same time.. This is really the best day of my life." she said. Parker reached his hand out and laid it over her slightly rounded belly.

"I can think of another great day that's going to come in about five months." he said matter-of-factly. Emily smiled but he had known her since they had both been in diapers and could see the sadness in her green eyes.

"What's wrong?" he asked gently. Though he already knew. She had wanted a big wedding but her parents, and his, had refused to help with it. They thought that the two eighteen year olds were making an even bigger mistake by getting married so young than they had made when Emily had gotten pregnant.

He wished he could make them see how much he loved Emily and that he would have married her with or without the tiny life growing inside her.

"Nothing's wrong, Parker. I really am happy. I promise." Emily said her voice full of the love that he knew she felt for him. Most people doubted the feelings they felt for each other since they were so young but they had both been inseparable since they had been in preschool and had known they were going to get married since they'd been eight years old and Parker had proposed to her with a ring pop sucker.

"If you want a big wedding then we can wait. I can keep saving up from the garage and...." Emily cut him off by laying a gentle hand on his arm.

"No." she said. "All I want is to be your wife. I don't need a big wedding. Besides that house you're renting takes most of your payday already and we need the rest to take care of the baby." Parker nodded, knowing that she was right.

Suddenly without warning the sky opened up in the hardest rain Parker had ever seen. He quickly turned the beat up trucks wipers on high but still could barely see a thing. These tiny mountain roads made driving in these conditions dangerous, but Parker wasn't worried. He'd been driving these roads since long before he'd had a drivers license.