“Oh my God, you’re pregnant! A baby! We’re having a baby!” Bridget explodes from her chair with a happy shriek and dashes over to hug her big sister. “Congratulations!”
We take turns offering our congrats to the happy couple before settling down to eat and watch the sky go sunset pink. Not long after the first stars come out, Cutter and I head for the door, pleading lingering exhaustion from the drama of the past week.
But, really, we’re just dying to be alone.
And naked.
Mere seconds after closing my door behind us, Cutter is ripping my T-shirt over my head. “You’re sleeping here tonight, yes?” I ask as I return the favor. I don’t want him to go home. He’s been by my side every second since the accident, and that’s where I’d like to keep him. I need to soak up as much of his company as possible before he leaves on tour.
“Yeah, but I’ll have to head out early tomorrow.” He kisses me between the words as he backs me toward the bedroom. “Dad and I are going fishing on my boat.”
“Aw, that’s great. I’m so glad you guys are working on your relationship and getting closer. That’s wonderful.”
“It is. But I don’t want to talk about my dad right now.”
“Oh? What do you want to talk about?” I ask in a husky voice as he pops the front clasp on my bra and cups my breasts in his hands.
“I don’t want to talk at all,” he says, bending to pull my nipple into his mouth.
My arms go around him with a sigh as electricity zips under my skin, and then I’m gone, lost and found, at home with him in a way I’ve never been with anyone else. With the lovers from my past, I was always a little shy, a little self-conscious, more worried about giving my partner what he wanted than taking what I needed.
But with Cutter, what he wants and what I need are exactly the same thing.
We are perfectly in sync. Perfectly perfect.
I cry out as he comes into me, sliding deep, filling me until he crowds out every thought but yes, oh yes, happy happy happy, so good, so good, so good…
So you.
You, the answer to every question.
You, the reason I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow and do this all over again.
You, the one I’m glad I waited for.
“This is way better than being enemies,” I murmur nearly an hour later as I lie boneless in Cutter’s arms. He hums a new song under his breath, one he’s been working on since the accident. One he says is just for me.
He hugs me closer. “So much better. If only you’d realized how amazing I was a few years earlier.”
“You weren’t ready for me a few years earlier,” I murmur, kissing his chest. “And I wasn’t ready for you. I needed to spend six months in that terrible job, realizing dreams don’t always come true the way I expect them to.” I sigh. “I’m looking forward to finding a better work-life balance.”
He skims his fingers down the hollow of my spine. “Work-life balance is good. Speaking of, I was thinking maybe you should take some more time off work and…come on tour with me.”
I lift my head to meet his gaze. “You’re serious?”
“I don’t want to be away from you, princess. Not even for a day. This tour is going to kill me.”
I smile, touched, but knowing him better than that. “It won’t. You’re going to have an amazing time. And I’m going to stay here and help fix up your building and open an amazing restaurant. And we’ll visit each other as often as we can. But we both love what we do. I think it would be a mistake to turn our backs on that, no matter how much fun it is to be disgustingly in love.”
He grins. “It is fun, isn’t it? Old Cutter would be horrified. We’re sickening.”
“Stomach turning,” I agree.
“And awesome,” he says as he angles his head, pressing his smiling lips to mine.
And then we do that thing we’re awesome at again, and it isn’t sickening at all.
Not even a little bit.
Epilogue
Cutter
Three months later…
They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but Paris absolutely holds its own.
You want to stay out until four in the morning listening to punk bands and eating steamed mussels with extra garlic? Done. You’d rather stroll through a midnight art opening, followed by espresso and fresh-baked chocolate croissants beside the Seine? Also easy, if you know the right artsy-fartsy people and have connections with the bakers who work the early shift at the bakery.
Buying jewelry at three a.m., though, proved a little trickier than I thought, but I eventually got in touch with the friend of a friend of a friend, a jeweler who sleeps above his shop in the 8th arrondissement. Thankfully, Jamal was willing to open his door for a customer with a fat wad of cash and only one more morning left in the City of Love.
Though, really, any city is the city of love, as long as Theo is there with me.
The thought would have made Old Cutter strangle himself with his scarf.
It just makes the new me smile.
Happiness humming inside me, I roll over in the crisp, lavender-scented sheets and draw my girl’s sleeping body closer to mine. After we took a midnight bike ride through Paris, I tucked Theo in around two a.m., waiting until she was out cold before sneaking out to meet my new jeweler friend.
She’s had at least three hours more sleep than I have, but I know she’ll sleep until noon if I don’t wake her up. After the summer she’s had, I can’t blame her.
Opening a restaurant in three months would have been a challenge on its own. Supervising the post-explosion repairs to my building while I was on tour, plus her own renovations to the restaurant space, then round after round of inspections from city officials determined to refuse her a liquor license—all that has put her through the wringer.
But Theo never complained; she just dug in and worked harder, overcoming each obstacle with the same determination she brings to everything she does, ensuring Supper Club opened two weeks ahead of schedule.
To rave reviews.
Of course.
I wasn’t the least bit surprised by the starred review in the Portland Press Herald, the glowing write-up in Coastal Living magazine, or the fact that the restaurant is booked solid for the next month with a waiting list as long as my forearm.
I am, however, surprised that Theo said yes to meeting me in Paris, the last stop on our European tour. Her staff is top-notch and more than capable of running the kitchen for a few days in her absence, but I’d assumed she would be too busy hovering over her newborn restaurant baby to run amok with me.
But we both learned something the day she almost died. She learned that life is too short not to play hooky now and then. And I learned that I never want to be in love with anyone but her.
She’ll say yes.
At least…I think she’ll say yes.
She loves me—I feel it even when we’re thousands of miles apart and haven’t been able to steal time to video chat in days—but being apart hasn’t been easy for either of us. I’ve flown back to visit as often as I could, but we’ve only spent twenty nights in the past four months together. They were magical, perfect, hot-as-hell nights I’ll never forget, but the fact remains that we’re high on quality right now, not quantity, and there’s not much I can do about that.
Yes, I intend to spend every second I’m not on tour with Theo, but she’s right—I’m not like Shep. I can’t give up the rock ’n’ roll life, not even for the person I love more than anything else in the world.
I would wither and die without the promise of the road in my future. I can live without hordes of screaming fans and the mad cash rolling in, but I need the adventure and the music, the thrill of a new town to explore and a fresh crowd to entertain.
Asking me to stop touring would be like asking Theo to stop cooking.
She knows that, and I know she would never ask me to choose between her and the music. But no matter how much she loves me, she might decide it
’s best to keep her options open and her eye out for a guy who’s going to come home to her every night.
“You don’t want that kind of guy,” I whisper to the top of Theo’s fuzzy curls, pleading my case to her subconscious while she sleeps. “You’d get bored, princess. You need a man who’s going to keep you on your toes.”
She hums low in her throat and curls into a tighter ball on her side.
Not a good sign, but not a bad one, either. Still, I curse myself for wearing her out last night. Probably should have skipped the bike ride and gone straight to fucking her on the balcony while the city lights glittered around us like stars ripped out of the sky.
Booking the entire top floor of the Claudette was the smartest thing I’ve done in a long time. Not only do we have a killer view of the Eiffel Tower, but there’s no one occupying the rooms, or the balconies, next to ours.
Despite the faint drone of traffic below, it’s peaceful up here, as though we’re the only people in the world—aside from the room service staff, who we’re always happy to see.
Pushing up on my forearms, I check the time on the clock beside Theo’s side of the bed. Room service should be here any second with coffee and breakfast.
Which means it’s time to put my plan in motion.
Sliding quietly out of bed, I pull on jeans and a T-shirt and pad barefoot across the thick carpet to fetch the ring from the drawer where I hid it last night. Plucking it from the case, I tilt the band until the stone catches the light filtering through the gauzy curtains, hoping Theo will love it as much as I do.
Jamal had dozens of fine-ass diamonds, but this was the ring that spoke to me. The polished piece of amber flanked by two black diamonds is the same color as the flecks of gold in Theo’s eyes, and it will look incredible against her sun-kissed brown skin.
Assuming she lets me slide it on her finger…
I bite my lip, suddenly tormented by doubt.
Should I have gone with something more traditional for the ring? Something less traditional for the proposal? Is slipping it under her favorite lemon sugar-dusted croissants romantic or cliché? Should I have skipped the champagne with the coffee? Does that make it look like I’m taking her “yes” for granted and jumping the celebration gun?
Fuck, when did I become this guy?
The guy who worries about shit like this and has feelings oozing out of his pores first thing in the morning?
It’s fucking awful.
And amazing.
And even though my heart is in my throat and my inner voice is still bitching about my lack of creativity, I’m smiling as I open the door to meet the room service cart.
“Thanks.” I press a twenty into the young man’s hand. “Wish me luck. I’m asking my girl to marry me this morning.”
“Bonne chance,” he says before adding in accented English, “She will say yes. They always say yes at the Claudette. This place was made for romance. The first owner built it for his true love, so they would have a place to be alone together when he visited the city.”
My heart lifts, and my next breath comes easier. “Is that right? And how long were they married?”
“Oh no,” the boy says with a soft laugh. “They were not married. She was his mistress, and he died of tuberculosis a few years after gifting her the home, but they had a beautiful love affair. That’s what matters most, yes? That the time you have is beautiful? No matter how long or short?”
I nod, mulling it over for a moment before I confess, “Yeah, but I’d really like a decade or two with that one in there. At least.”
He smiles. “They have cures for most types of tuberculosis these days. You will be all right.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Remember, nothing to fear but fear itself.”
I thank him again and roll the room service cart inside before quietly closing the door behind me, not wanting to wake Theo until I’m ready. I hadn’t thought so before, but maybe the room service guy is right. Maybe I am a little afraid.
If she says no, everything will change. There’s no going back to the easy, breezy, sexy thing we’ve got going now once I know we’re on borrowed time.
If she says no, I’m going to have to deal with the fact that I can only have one of the things I love—the girl or the music—and I honestly have no idea how to make that choice.
Even as I wheel the cart onto the balcony and set the table, I’m seriously considering aborting the mission. I can hide the ring in my luggage, and Theo will be none the wiser. Then we can put this off until another day, after we’re home in Hidden Kill Bay and both of us will have friends to turn to for support if our love hits a patch of ice and spins out into oncoming traffic.
But in the end, I don’t shove the ring into my pocket. I set it on the doily on Theo’s plate and settle the still-warm croissant on top.
Standing in the pale morning sun, with the Eiffel Tower watching me from just a few blocks away and all the beautiful chaos of Paris spiraling out around me, I think of the couple who loved here nearly two centuries ago. They only had three years together. And yes, modern medicine has a cure for TB, but none of us know how long we have left. There are still accidents and natural disasters and diseases that come out of nowhere to take young, seemingly healthy people before their time.
Hell, the tour bus could slide off a bridge next spring, and that would be it, all the time I’ll ever have.
Whether I have six months or sixty years, I want to spend every moment possible with that fuzzy-haired, warmhearted, funny-as-hell, sweet-as-sugar sex goddess. The one who’s standing in the doorway to the balcony, smiling like she’s thrilled to see me even though we’ve only been parted by sleep for a handful of hours.
“Have I told you lately that you’re a prince among men?” she asks, her voice still husky from sleep.
I brace my hand on the back of one of the wrought iron chairs, trying to play it cool. “I don’t think you’ve ever called me a prince among men, but if croissants on the balcony is all it takes, I’ll ask the bakery how much they charge to ship to the East Coast.”
She smiles as she crosses to me, gliding into my arms, where she fits just right. “No, we can only have lemon sugar croissants in Paris. It wouldn’t be the same in Maine.” She presses a kiss to my neck with a soft sigh. “I wish we could stay longer. I had no idea I was going to love it here this much.”
I hug her close, my heart hammering. I hope she’ll soon have another reason to love Paris. “We’ll have to come back soon. It’s pretty fantastic at Christmas.”
“My parents would kill me.” She laughs as she moves away, taking her seat across the table and settling her napkin in her lap as she adds, “I promised I’d do the holidays with them in Florida this year.” Biting her bottom lip, she peeks up at me through her lashes. “Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, too,” I say, sounding as if I’ve swallowed my grapefruit whole.
I’m so fucking nervous. But thank God, Theo doesn’t seem to notice.
“My mom and dad are pretty conservative, so we’d have to sleep separately—you in their spare bedroom and me on the couch in Dad’s office or whatever—but I’d love it if you’d think about spending Christmas with us. They’re dying to get to know you better.”
“I’m excited to get to know them, too.” It isn’t even a lie. A part of me is dreading spending time with Theo’s parents because I hate parents, but I know it will make her happy, and that will make me happy. Her smile is all I need.
Well, and her pussy. And her ass. And I’m pretty fond of her tits, too…
Focus, asshole. You can think about her tits later. Don’t fuck this up.
“So yeah,” I say. “Let’s do it. But maybe we won’t have to sleep separately.”
Theo rolls her eyes as she plucks her croissant from her plate, sending me into mild cardiac arrest as she reveals the ring underneath, but doesn’t see it. “Yeah, I wish, but that’s never going to fly.
My mother is going to pretend I’m still a virgin until the day after my wedding. Assuming I ever get married.”
I blink. “You don’t want to get married?”
She shrugs, tearing off a piece of her croissant and popping it between her lips, still not seeing the fucking ring that I’m now afraid she might not even want. “I don’t know. I mean, I used to think I did, but Kirby and Colin are making it just fine without all the bells and whistles. And weddings are so expensive, and my mom would insist on going to India to do a second, traditional ceremony there with my extended family, the way my cousin did. And the thought of all that planning and travel and the insane amount of jewelry I would be expected to wear with my sari is kind of overwhelming.”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I say, breaking out into a sweat beneath my plain white T-shirt. Maybe, if I’m lucky, she’ll turn to look at the Eiffel Tower, and I can swipe the ring from her plate before she notices it.
I’m planning a diversion—I’ll say there’s a pigeon about to get run over on the street or a squirrel wearing a beret, something, anything to make her turn around for one fucking second—when she reaches for her coffee, her gaze drops to her plate, and she goes utterly still.
Fuck. It’s too late.
Isn’t it? Is it too late?
Her croissant falls from her fingers to land on the table with a soft thump, banishing any hope of escaping unscathed from my botched proposal.
And then she coos, an uncharacteristically girly sound, and plucks the ring from the plate like it’s a baby unicorn she’s discovered under a cabbage leaf, and my stalled heart jolts back into motion. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she says, holding the ring carefully between both thumbs and pointer fingers as she lifts teary eyes to mine. “Is this what I think it is?”
I reach across the table, cradling her hands in mine. “Yes, but there’s no pressure. If you’re not ready to think about marriage, that’s totally fucking fine. We can throw the ring off the balcony and never speak of it again.”
Bang on Loosely Page 20
