He leaned right over so he could whisper in her ear. “I mean the minute we can credibly get away from here, we’re going to go do our own thing.”
“And by ‘do our own thing,’ you mean ‘eat lunch’?” She batted her eyelashes with false innocence.
“Among other things,” he said, and bit down on her ladybug earring before he pulled away.
Chapter Twenty
I know how you hate to waste food.” Gia hobbled into the elevator after they’d put in enough time at the postwedding picnic. She jammed her hand down on the button for her floor and turned. The doors shut, and by some stroke of luck, no one else had gotten on the elevator.
He swooped right in, aiming for her lips, but she twisted out of his reach so his mouth landed on her neck.
“So I’m thinking we should probably eat first,” she teased. “While everything is fresh. I would hate to have to throw something away because it spoiled because our sex marathon took too long.”
“Whatever you want,” he said, and the small picnic basket he’d been holding hit the floor with a thunk, as did her bag, which he’d slung over a shoulder. He grabbed her ass and carefully scooted her backward, lifting her up enough that she didn’t have to put any pressure on her bad leg as she went. Once she was pinned against the wall, he moved his hands to her head, using them to keep her in place as he crashed his mouth down on hers.
God. He just lit her up. Every single time. And the idea that he was hers. That she was never going to have to give him up. That they could do this as often as they wanted. It was—
Ding.
The doors opened on the second floor. With a whispered curse, he pulled away, settled an arm over her shoulder, and tucked her against his side.
An older woman in a caftan and flip-flops got on. She moved to press a button, and Gia’s gaze followed, only for her to discover that every single floor was lit up. Ha! The “wall” that Bennett had pushed her against had actually been the bank of buttons, and her back had hit all of them.
Bennett made a strangled noise as the elevator stopped at three.
Gia giggled.
The woman glanced at them as the doors opened for what felt like an eternity.
Four.
“Oh my God,” Bennett muttered.
When five finally rolled around, he stuck his hand out to hold the door. He was on five, but she wanted to go to her room. “Let’s go to my room. I want to take my dress off.”
As soon as the sentence was out of her mouth, she realized how it sounded. She’d meant she wanted to swap the bridesmaid’s dress for something more comfy, but judging by his raised eyebrows and flaring nostrils, he hadn’t taken it that way. And he must have decided he didn’t care about propriety in front of their audience, because he said, “I’m pretty sure that dress is coming off no matter which room we’re headed to, but okay.”
Caftan Lady gasped.
Bennett punched the door close button to speed things up. When it stopped again at Gia’s floor, he grabbed Gia’s crutches—and Gia. He bent down, hoisted her over his shoulder firefighter-style, and hoofed it down the hall.
Laughing, Gia waved at Caftan Lady, whose mouth had fallen open.
Inside her room he lowered her to the bed. A look of extreme tenderness crossed his face—followed by a look of extreme irritation.
“Goddammit.”
“What?”
“I left the picnic basket on the elevator.”
“Oh no.” She mock-pouted as she slipped the straps of her dress off her shoulders and tried not to laugh. “You’d better go try to find it. We can’t let all that food go to waste.”
He glared at her. In another context, that look would have unsettled her. Well, it did unsettle her, but not in the way he intended. She finished wiggling out of her dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she knew how that tortured him. And sure enough, he let out a strangled groan as his eyes raked over her. She kept her eyes on him, like they were playing another game of truth or dare—a silent one—and when his gaze rose again to meet hers, she raised her eyebrows.
“Truth or dare?” she said.
“Truth.”
She hadn’t been expecting that. She’d expected him to choose dare, and then of course she’d been planning to dare him to take his clothes off.
He was off script.
“Oh, um…” She didn’t have anything ready.
“Here’s a truth,” he said. “I love you so fucking much.”
Her face heated. She was still unused to allowing that kind of declaration.
“Here’s another one. I want you like crazy. Sometimes I’m worried about how this restaurant thing is going to work, because I want to fuck you all the damn time.”
She smiled. “So what are you waiting for, then? Why are you still dressed?”
That lit a fire under his ass. Within seconds he was naked, kneeling on the bed next to her. “How do we work around this?” he said, indicating the cast.
“Right.” She wanted to climb him like a mountain, to claim him in a crazed session of lovemaking, but the damn cast was cramping her style. “I don’t think I can be on top. I think I just need to lie on my back and try to keep the leg out of the way.”
He nodded, assessing her like she was a plate he couldn’t decide how to garnish. Then, seemingly settled on a course of action, he stuffed some pillows behind her back and moved one more over from the other bed to prop up her leg.
Then he sat back on his haunches and nodded, a master pleased with his work. “Do you have condoms here? Are there still some in that makeup bag of yours, or should I eat you out?”
The directness of the question shot a bolt of lust through her. “Condoms in my makeup bag in the bathroom,” she managed.
There was some rustling from the bathroom, then him shouting from it. “Of course, you can always elect for both option A and option B.”
“I think I vote for option A. Or whatever the option is that involves the condom.”
God. She needed him so badly. Her body was vibrating. Moisture was pooling between her legs. She cursed her damn leg again. She wanted to launch herself at him, but all she could do was wait.
At first she thought he’d decided to ignore her vote for option A, because he started at her ankles. He kissed up along her good leg, lingering a bit at her knee before kissing and nipping up her thigh.
When he got close enough to grab, she twined her fingers in his hair and tugged. “Kiss me,” she ordered, and he obeyed, but only sort of. He sped up his progress, kissing his way up her belly and breasts and neck. When he got to her mouth, he stretched himself out along her, rolling them so she was half on her back, half on her good side. Then, seemingly satisfied that he’d found a good, safe angle, he pulled back enough to sheathe himself in the condom he’d brought. Pausing between her legs, he said, “Okay?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing at the inadequacy of the word.
And then he proceeded to make love to her.
He went slow and steady, kissing her and moving inside her and touching her all over. She’d been disappointed before, because she’d been imagining an athletic romp, a claiming of sorts, with lots of effort and shouting. But this was more intense, somehow. Its deliberateness, the utter care he was taking with her. It…undid her. The fire he was painstakingly stoking in her lapped at the edges of her being, slowly but surely consuming her.
“Gia,” he breathed at one point, and it made her realize that whatever was happening to her was happening to him, too. That was the thing about Bennett. He was always right there with her.
His gaze was locked on hers.
“Do you think you can come?” he asked, grinding his hips even harder into hers, adding to the almost unbearably delicious pressure on her center. “Can you come for me?” Even as he ground against her so wonderfully filthily, he rested a hand lightly on the back of her bad knee—not with any pressure, just with a…presence.
She nodded. Yes. Because it was already hap
pening. Tears gathered in her eyes, and she came on a big, shuddering sob.
* * *
The picnic basket wasn’t in the elevator, so Bennett feared that the woman who’d been on the elevator with them had nicked it. And why shouldn’t she have? They’d scandalized her sufficiently that she’d probably earned the amazing lunch he’d put together.
But that was Gia’s lunch, goddammit.
But then, on a whim, he went down to the concierge to ask after it, and amazingly, it had been turned in.
When he got back to his room, Gia was wearing his leather jacket. And nothing else.
He sucked in a breath.
She must have thought it was lust—and it was, but it was also…something else. That shitty mixture of shame and guilt and regret that always overtook him when he looked at the jacket he’d worn the night of the accident.
“Can I have this jacket?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said unhesitatingly. But then he realized that since they apparently, and against the odds, were going to move to Toronto together to open a restaurant, he was going to be seeing that jacket a lot.
And hell, they’d dealt with his family shit and her career shit. So why not this, too?
“That was the jacket I was wearing the night of the accident. It’s the only thing I have left from that time in my life. I pretty much hate it, but I could never make myself throw it away.”
She sat bolt upright and started to shrug out of it, but he sat on the bed next to her and said, “No, it’s okay. I’m glad you like it. It might as well get a new, happier life.”
“Bennett, do you know what happened to her? Is she okay today?”
He didn’t have to ask who “her” was. “Yes. I google her a couple times a year. She doesn’t have her Facebook privacy settings set very stringently, so I can see that she’s a teacher. She has a couple grandkids now.” He paused, feeling like a stalker. “Is that creepy?
She shook her head. “No. I’d be doing the same thing.”
“She was in the hospital for a long time after the accident—that I know from the lawyers my parents hired—but she recovered. I’m still not sure why she didn’t bring a civil suit. I wrote her a letter to apologize, but she never replied. I sometimes wonder if I should try to do more. But then I think it’s not up to me to control how or whether she speaks to me.”
“I guess all you can do is try to keep facing it. You did something bad. You can’t change that. You can’t undo it by controlling everything else in your life, but you can—and you did—let it change who you are.”
He cleared his throat. “You are an amazing woman.”
She smiled at him, and there was so much love in her eyes that he thought he might actually lose the battle with the tears that were threatening.
But then she said, “True, but I am also a hungry woman.”
So he laid a towel out on the mattress and unpacked his carefully prepared meal. He’d made a simple egg salad—she liked eggs, right? Had selected two perfectly ripe mangoes and a small wedge of Comté. And he’d added a bottle of champagne, which he reached for now and uncorked.
“This is…perfect,” she pronounced.
He sagged a little in relief. He hadn’t realized how on edge he’d been about making their first meal together—really together—special.
She grabbed a fork and contemplated the spread. “I want you to know, though, that I don’t know if I’m suddenly going to be fine now that I’m not going to be modeling anymore.”
“I wouldn’t expect that. I don’t know that much about it, but I doubt that’s how it works.”
“I’m not sure I have an eating disorder eating disorder, if that makes any sense. I do think it was pretty circumstantial, but I…I have deeply ingrained habits.”
“And I don’t ever want you to think that I’m monitoring you.”
She shot him a look. “Oh, come on. You are monitoring me.”
“Okay, busted. I can’t help it.”
“But I appreciate that you don’t make a big deal out of it. You just…make it easy for me to eat.”
That was exactly what he’d been trying to do, all this time.
“But you can’t save me. You can’t be Mr. White Knight here. I have to save myself.” She grinned. “With maybe a little help from you, Elise, Wendy, and Jane.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
She brought a forkful of egg salad to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
He chuckled. If he could get an “Oh my God” from humble egg salad, then damn. The woman had to legitimately be into him. He sighed happily.
“Partly,” she said, talking with her mouth full, “by making such ridiculously delicious food. It’s like it’s not just food; it’s…an elevated experience.”
And that right there was the best compliment he’d ever received.
Their little egg-salad-and-happy-hormone-fueled cocoon was suddenly burst by the beeping sound of someone keying their way into the room.
What the hell?
Gia, who hadn’t bothered to get dressed, grabbed a pillow and covered herself with it. “Wendy still has a key!” she whispered.
They heard the unmistakable sound of the door creaking open.
Also the unmistakable sound of feminine giggling.
“She’s totally in there,” said a voice he recognized as Elise’s.
“Even if she’s not, she’ll get it later.” Jane.
“Shhh.” For some reason he’d become so embedded with Gia’s friends that he could recognize Wendy just from her “Shhh.”
And then, a bouquet of daisies came sailing into the room.
Wendy must have a pitching arm to rival Carl Mays’s, because those flowers hit the TV so hard, they knocked it over. A freestanding flat screen, it fell back against the wall.
“Subtle!” Gia shouted, cracking up.
“We love you!” Elise called.
“I love you all, too, you nut bars!”
The door clicked closed, and she turned to Bennett. “And you. I love you, too.”
Then she got out her camera and turned it around, snuggled up against him, ordered him to say cheese, and shot a selfie of them.
Epilogue
TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER
To: Elise Maxwell, Jane Denning, Wendy Liu
From: Gia Gallo
Subject: What are you doing today at four?
Whatever you’re doing, cancel it, because it’s not as important as coming to my wedding. SURPRISE! City Hall elopement. Four p.m. sharp. Wedding chapel is on the third floor of the east tower of city hall. Bring men and kids. Dinner to follow at the restaurant.
xo G
Wendy arrived first. “Gia! What the—”
Noah, holding a little girl in his arms, elbowed Wendy.
“Fudge!” Wendy said pointedly. “I was going to say fudge!”
She turned so Noah couldn’t see her and rolled her eyes at Gia. “He says I have to stop swearing now so that by the time the spawn is in school, only sunshine and rainbows will come out of my mouth. But honestly, Gia. What? The? Fudge?”
Gia hugged Wendy. “Oh, you know, I decided to try to one-up you on the whole low-key front.”
Then she pecked Noah’s cheek and held out her hands for squirmy eighteen-month-old Jasmine—yes, Wendy had named her daughter after her favorite Disney princess. “But I would like to inform you that even though I’m getting married, I’m still the cool aunt.”
As if to ratify her declaration, Jasmine, who had been fussing, reached for Gia and laughed as Gia lifted her so they were eye to eye and made funny faces at her. It was still kind of weird—awesome, but weird—to contemplate Wendy’s having a kid. Gia had always sort of imagined Elise as a mother, even though Elise was the one for whom it was supposed to have been biologically impossible. But Wendy and Noah had surprised everyone by getting pregnant immediately after their wedding. (“Hey,” Wendy had said, “I just thought, if I’m going to get knocked up, it might as well
be at the Pink Palace.”)
“Jasmine,” said Gia. “We were wondering if you would like to be our flower girl.”
Instead of answering, Jasmine grabbed a hunk of Gia’s hair and pulled. “Pink!” she wailed, letting loose a sob of betrayal. Gia had recently dyed her hair bright pink. She hadn’t kept it for long, but Jasmine had loved it, and was still angry it had been covered with something close to Gia’s natural honey brown. Gia still loved dyeing her hair—and though it had never been about disguising herself, as Bennett had once accused her of doing, even she could see the wisdom of getting married in her natural color.
“And that is my cue.” Gia held the little one out at arm’s length for one of her parents to take. “One of the benefits of being the cool aunt is you get to give them back.”
Wendy was closer, but she nodded at her husband, so Gia aimed the now-wailing Jasmine at Noah, who made an exaggerated smiley face at the girl as he took her and said, “Does someone need a treat?” in full-on cooing baby talk.
Gia cracked up. There was something so incongruous about the juxtaposition of the hotshot lawyer Noah, who had always bristled at the idea of taking on additional family responsibility beyond his mom and sister, and the gooey, besotted dad Noah.
“Yeah, good luck with that flower girl thing.” Wendy linked her arm through Gia’s. “If you can get her to walk in a straight line for more than three steps, I’ll give you a hundred bucks. But she’ll love the flowers. Especially if she gets to throw them.”
Before Gia could answer, the elevator opened and Elise came running out ahead of Jay and their daughter.
“Oh my God!” She yanked Gia from Wendy, placed a hand on each of her upper arms, and looked her up and down. Gia felt like she was a missing person returned to her mom, and her mom was assessing her for damages.
On one of her passes of eyeing Gia from head to toe, Elise grabbed her hand and brought it up to eye level. Gia was wearing a ring with a ruby surrounded by smaller, black stones. It was unusual and pretty, and she loved it. Her face still heated when she thought about the night last week Bennett had given it to her and asked her to marry him.
Three Little Words Page 29
