Ari grins and Victor looks confused. I fill him in.
“She feigned interest in the Zamboni. I totally fell for it.”
Victor’s gaze is warm as he holds my hand out to get a good look at the ring.
“Perfect,” he murmurs.
I smile up at him and we share one of those long, perfect moments where our happiness can’t be expressed with words. It’s in the warmth of his touch and the gleam in his eyes. It’s in the beat of my heart, which isn’t erratic like it was the first night I met him, but steady.
Steadiness is underrated when it comes to love. I’m not an actress or a model. I don’t turn heads as I walk down the street. But I’m quirky, loyal and loving. I’ll be Victor’s best friend and fiercest ally for the rest of our lives.
And as he takes me into his arms and lifts my feet from the ground, I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him, knowing he’ll be mine, too.
Epilogue
Five months later
Lindy
“I’m too pretty for manual labor,” Ari says, wiping a hand across her brow.
“Sit down and take a rest, babe,” Douglas says.
I roll my eyes at them. “You’ve only been working for like ten minutes, miss diva.”
“Yeah, but that garage is hot.”
“When we get all the boxes out, you can sit in the shade with me and help me go through all that stuff,” I offer.
Dad and Victor are following through with their plan to tear down the old garage and build a new one. It’s Victor’s offseason, so he plans to come over every day until the project is done.
Well, more like we plan to come over. I moved in with him two months after we got engaged. We’re getting married next month at Abby and Luca’s Hawaiian vacation home, and I can’t wait.
The hard part is over. Victor and I found each other and worked through my insecurities and his painful past. His past will never be fully behind us, but it doesn’t define him or us.
Bryan agreed to a plea deal that guarantees he’ll be in prison for at least the next twenty years. An investigation into his background revealed more victims. He’s a sick bastard. Victor will be speaking against him getting parole at every future hearing.
That’s a very long way off, though. For now, Victor is going to a support group for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. He doesn’t talk about it much, and I don’t ask him to. The sad bond he shares with those men is something I can’t truly understand.
He grins at me as he walks past, a big box in his arms. “Babe, you never told me you had braces.”
I grimace and look inside the box. It’s filled with photographic evidence of my incredibly awkward adolescent years—shiny silver braces, a bad perm and even worse bangs.
“No, don’t look at those.” I groan.
“Too late.”
Ari comes over and pulls a photo out. “You were cute!”
“Not even a little.”
She squints to get a closer look. “Aw, look at your little boobies. You were just a late bloomer, girl.”
I close the lid to the box. “Enough of that, there’s lots of work to do.”
Victor winks and kisses me before taking the box over to the pile of stuff we’ve unloaded from the garage. Fortunately, he already knows his future wife never completely outgrew her awkward phase.
“Found my old racing trophies,” Dad says, carrying an old, dilapidated box out of the garage.
“You used to race cars?” Victor asks him.
“Oh, yeah. Had the time of my life.”
They start talking racing, my dad reaching into the cooler for a couple beers as he tells Victor about the good old days. I knew going in that this would be a slow process. My dad says if he’s not on the clock, he’s not in a hurry.
Douglas and Ari are teasing each other about something, and I smile at them. Victor and I have gone on several double dates with them, and Douglas seems like a truly nice guy. He adores Ari. I think she feels the same way, though she doesn’t want to admit it.
I walk in the house to mix up a pitcher of lemonade and put up my hair. It’s a sunny, gorgeous Chicago day, but I’m sweating from moving boxes out of the garage and into the yard.
As soon as I come outside with the lemonade, I hear male laughter inside the garage. I pour some lemonade, set the pitcher down on the patio table and have a few quick sips from my cup before I get back to work.
Victor looks over at me, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “This may be the best day of my life.”
I narrow my eyes, very suspicious about what else he could have found in this garage. “Why?”
He grabs something out of a box and unrolls it, holding it up for me to see.
“Oh God. No!”
My face bursts into flame. It’s my old Victor Lane poster, his smiling mouth worn away to almost nothing from all the kisses I once gave it.
“Should we put this up in our bedroom?” he teases. “Maybe above our bed?”
I swipe my arm out, trying to grab the poster from him. He dodges me easily.
“Someone had a crush on me before we even met.” He arches his brows playfully.
“Is that…?” Ari laughs heartily. “I didn’t know you had a poster of him.”
“Oh my God. It was just a phase!” I look away. “Are any of you actually going to get any work done today?”
Victor rolls the poster back up, still smiling. “You want me to autograph that for you, babe?”
I give him the stink eye and try to act all disgruntled, but he comes up and tickles my side, making me laugh.
“Don’t…you’re so arrogant,” I say through my laughter.
He pulls me into his arms, saying, “Am not. And you know, you can kiss me anytime you want now.”
“It might be a while, if you keep teasing me.”
Feigning a frown, he looks down at me. “Really? My badass South Side girl can’t take a little teasing?”
“My badass hockey player can’t admit he’s completely full of himself?”
He gives me a sexy smirk, and leans down to whisper in my ear, “I like it better when you’re full of me.”
I snuggle close to him in agreement. “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got planned for tonight, poster boy.”
Author’s Note
Thanks for reading Victor! If you enjoyed it, I’d greatly appreciate a review. The next book in the Chicago Blaze series, Knox, will release in October 2019!
Preorder Knox
For the latest on my books, please sign up for my newsletter HERE
Victor Page 17
