And those freedom clothes I sent to the prison were pure Dave – a limited-edition Star Wars: The Phantom Menace t-shirt signed by Liam Neeson and Natalie Portman, Yoda sneakers with Doctor Who socks because screw consistency, worn jeans, and glow-in-the-dark Luke Skywalker boxers. Yes, my man is the total fashion package.
I waited fidgeting in the driver’s seat. I checked the time every other minute. I considered raiding the box of donuts I’d brought so he’d have immediate access to real junk food, and decided to wait. I got out and walked a few laps around the car every now and then. I checked the back seat occasionally for reasons that will become clear.
I climbed out and walked around my Honda yet again. I sat down on the hood, swinging my legs against the bumper while I stared at the prison’s front door and magically willed Dave to appear.
And then he did.
At 9:10 this morning that front door swung open, a tall somebody I knew so well shouldered through it with a box under one arm, and then he turned and spotted me.
I ran to him, he sprinted to me, the box got dropped in there somewhere, two years fell away, and I jumped into my Dave’s arms.
His wild hair swung around my face, I breathed him in and kissed him and put my hands everywhere on him – yes, ladies, everywhere, because two years is TWO YEARS – he drank me with his mouth and I wrapped my legs around him like a vise and we both cried.
When we stopped kissing to breathe for a second, I pulled back and looked into his face and I saw that same crooked grin I fell for in Kansas, almost three years and a lifetime ago.
“Dave?”
He hugged me until I thought my ribs would crack, and he sniffled against my face. “Yeah, baby?”
“I love you, Dave.”
“I love my Cassie.”
Our mouths sealed together again and we kissed like we were drowning. He grabbed a handful of my red hair, I clutched at his shoulders when I wasn’t busy touching his chest and handling his ass, I felt him hard and hungry against me, and I consider it one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of self-control that I didn’t strip off all of his clothes and ravish him right there on the asphalt of the prison’s parking lot.
We ended up leaning against the car, giddy and stunned and still kissing. Dave’s hips pressed me into the front door on the passenger side, he tongued my throat and growled, and he whispered into my ear.
“We’ve got a problem.”
“I’m not seeing that we have one single problem in this world, so –“
“Sure we do – the problem is, there isn’t nearly enough room in this parking lot for all the things I want to do to you.”
Another wet, probing kiss.
“In fact, I don’t think there’s enough room in the entire state of Minnesota for all the things I absolutely must do to you – I may need Wisconsin and Illinois too, just to take care of this.”
He settled his hand on my breast, squeezing gently, fingers teasing the nipple as his hips rocked against me, and we needed to get the hell out of there.
“So, um, I guess we should maybe drive to somewhere with more room and maybe privacy? I sort of had a plan for us to head south from here, and –”
“Anywhere, Cassie – absolutely anywhere where I can bury myself inside you for hours is fine.”
I leaned my head against his chest, looking back the way he’d come, and saw his box sitting abandoned on the curb. “Um, I think you dropped your box back there – so maybe you should go grab it and we can burn rubber getting out of here, okay?”
“Oh, yeah, you need to see that – hang on.”
Dave retrieved the box, brought it to the car, and lifted off the cover. He beamed like a little kid showing me his favorite toy.
“Check it out, it’s my building!”
I peered inside the box and saw stacks and stacks of writing pads, filled to bursting with hundreds of drawings, drawings made over two endless years as he recreated the destroyed blueprints of his dream. Grinning from ear to ear, he flipped through them and showed me – drawings of floor plans, medical facilities, electrical conduits, hydroponics farms, ventilation systems, elevators, and acres of solar panels.
It was a whole new world – and Dave had no idea how close it might be.
“Dave, not only are you the god of sex, but you’re also the second coming of architecture – and it’s super handy you happen to have all these drawings to prove it, because you’ll probably need them tomorrow.”
I loved the confusion on his face.
“I’ll need them tomorrow? For what? You do realize these aren’t actual blueprints yet, right? And that after everything that happened, I don’t even begin to have the resources to build a treehouse, much less this?”
“All will be explained once we’re on the road – so give me that, I’ll stow it in the back seat, and –”
And a whimper came out of the back of my car. Also scratching.
“Cassie, does your back seat usually whine like that?”
I took the box from him. “That’s your present.”
“I don’t need a present, or anything but you –”
“I agree – but I got this two months ago, I’ve been saving it for you and you’re getting it, so hush up.”
I swung open the back door and dropped the box on the floor behind the passenger seat. Then I picked up a squirming bundle of yellow fur, turned around, and thrust a half-grown Golden Retriever puppy into Dave’s arms.
“David Dallstrom, meet Carson Dallstrom, Jr. – or Carson 2.0, whatever.”
Dave clutched the wriggling puppy against his chest, he stared down at a mirror image of the friend he’d lost half a lifetime ago – and then he buried his face in the new Carson’s fur and he cried.
As for Carson – well, let’s be clear. That dog does like me. After I adopted him from a Duluth shelter, he wagged his tail politely every time I came home from work. He slept on the end of my bed, he curled up next to me on the couch and helped me watch movies, and he chased balls when I threw them. He thinks I’m pretty okay.
But I am convinced he is the true reincarnation of the original Carson, because when he saw Dave?
Dear God, that dog freaked.
He scrabbled at Dave’s shoulders with his front paws, he dug in with his back paws to climb higher up on him, he barked, he howled, he wagged every part of his body, and he licked Dave’s face until it was covered with about a gallon of dog spit. I think he peed on him on a little.
“Dave?”
His voice was muffled by tears and Carson’s fur and also Carson’s frantic slobbering tongue. “Yeah, baby?”
“Dave, you do know you’re crying like a sissy little bitch, right?”
“Guilty as charged, boss.”
He grinned through the tears, he worked Carson back under one arm and pulled me close with the other, and we kissed again, long and deep and so happy – and Carson helped by slurping both of our faces at once, which should have been gross but totally wasn’t.
Then I ran around to the driver’s door, climbed behind the wheel, and fired up that old Honda, while Dave and Carson squirmed into the shotgun seat together. My dad’s watch dangled from the rearview mirror, six of Dave’s rebel alliance pals stood on the dashboard watching for traffic as we pulled out of the prison’s parking lot, and two minutes later we were flying down US-53 into freedom.
Dave couldn’t get enough of it, starting with the donuts.
He gobbled glazed donuts, he hand-fed me donuts with sprinkles at stoplights, and he fed Carson donuts with strawberry filling, even though I pointed out that he’d be cleaning Golden Retriever puke off his jeans soon if he kept that up.
Between donuts, he stared at every last ordinary thing he saw, because he hadn’t seen any of it for two long years.
“Holy shit, a McDonald’s!”
“Look, a Jiffy Lube right over there!”
“God in heaven, a MALL!”
We spun through Duluth and he gawked at gas stat
ions and grocery stores and post offices. He marveled at the sight of all those people who could go wherever they wanted and could kiss each other every minute of the day if they felt like it.
He leaned most of his upper body out of the window as we sped away from a green light. “Carson, buddy, look! Open blue sky! No walls, no guards! No 10 a.m. count checks, no grungy communal showers, no oatmeal that tastes like glue!”
Carson stuck his head out of the window and agreed this was all pretty amazing. His golden fur and Dave’s blond Viking mane both blew back in the wind, and it was glorious.
“Oh, and Cassie?”
“Talk to me, Dave.” We crossed the Blatnik Bridge into Wisconsin, and I waited for him to ask why we were heading south instead of to my apartment back in Duluth.
He sank back into his seat and turned to look at me. “Cassie, I love you – have I told you that yet?”
“Yes, but be aware that you are required to keep telling me that, all day and every day, for at least the next sixty to seventy years.”
His gorgeous relaxed grin lit up the whole world, and he tossed me a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
Thirty minutes later, he finally got around to wondering where we were going.
“Cassie, just checking in to remind you that I love you – also, I’m kind of hazy on the geography around here, but isn’t this Wisconsin?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry – it turns into Illinois in another three hundred miles or so, and that’s convenient because you happen to have a job interview in Chicago tomorrow. And hey, remember to take your box, you’ll need those drawings.”
Dave somehow manages to look twice as adorable when I’ve got him all puzzled and confused. “A job? Where, working for who? Do they know I’m not really qualified to do anything except design buildings and make poisonous nachos and lose forty billion dollars?”
“Devon Killane wants to hire you to build your dream.”
“Jesus, I – are you serious? How? Why? Does he know it’s not practical yet? Where did he get the idea that –”
“He got the idea from me, because I went down to Chicago and talked to him about it last month. And yes, he knows it’s not practical yet – but he knows it can be, with you in charge of figuring it out. He wants to see your designs, he wants to know what sort of facilities and staff you’ll need, how much funding for the initial research – Dave, this can happen. Talk to Killane, make him see this future the way you’ve helped me to see it, and our kids really will live in it, just like you said.”
Dave turned away from me. He went quiet for a few minutes. He scratched Carson’s ears, he watched the forests and fields of Wisconsin roll by outside, and then he turned to look out the windshield at the endless grey ribbon of highway unspooling in front of us.
Hello, future.
When he spoke, he didn’t look at me, not at first – but he couldn’t hide that crooked and silly and heartbreaking grin. “Cassie, before we make those kids, I see two things in our immediate future.”
Then he looked right at me, his green eyes alive and dancing. “One, I’m going to insist on having a full-time veterinary student on my staff.”
“I don’t think that – “
“Trust me, a fully qualified and licensed doctor of veterinary medicine is essential to this building’s design – and say, what is the best veterinary school in the country?”
“The one at UC Davis, I guess, but I could never get in, their admissions are super-competitive –”
“Once I persuade Killane to wave his wallet in their direction, they’ll beg you to sign up – and besides, they’re in Northern California, right? Where there also happen to be tons of tech companies with the knowledge we’ll need? Sweet, that settles it – California, here we come.”
I rubbed at my eyes, because suddenly they were full of tears. I can’t imagine why. “So, um, Dave? What’s the second thing?”
“Oh, that.” He leaned his face out the window into the wind for a second, smiled wider still, and then turned back to me.
“You see, Cassie, here’s the deal – I’m broke, I’m unemployed, I have a prison record, and I’m a terrible cook. So, will you marry me?”
Yes, I bawled and blubbered like a baby.
I cried, I sniffed, I cried some more, and I finally got the words out, while Dave grinned wide as the sky and Carson howled.
“YES, you moron! Yes, I will, I love you!”
My nose ran, I coughed and sniffled, I know I looked awful, and I added, “If you even had to ask, you really are an idiot child – and it needs to happen right away, understand? As soon as possible, cook, and that’s an order.”
“I live to obey my wild Kansas woman – but don’t we need a license or something first?”
“Probably, and your first job as my almost-husband is to check on that, so catch.”
I pulled out my phone and tossed it to him, and Dave looked down at the first smartphone he’d seen in a very long time.
“You know that I haven’t been on the internet in two years, right?”
“Google still knows everything, Dave. Look it up – the license thing, the nearest justice of the peace, the works.”
“I’m on it, boss.”
So this is our situation.
I’m driving with my left hand and using my right hand to mop tears off my face with a wad of Kleenex. Dave’s sorting through Google search results and giving Carson a belly rub. Carson is sound asleep on his back in Dave’s lap and has not yet hurled half-digested donuts all over my car.
I have no idea what it takes to get married in Wisconsin, or if it might be faster in Illinois. I don’t know what we’ll do for a ring. Our only witness will be Carson and that could be a problem, seeing as how he’s under age and also a dog – but Dave and I will figure it all out, because we’re done waiting.
Our dream begins now.
Thank you for reading No Dreams Allowed!
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And check out Sonora’s funny and passionate billionaire romance Five Minutes Late if you want to know more about why Devon and Ashley were in that sushi restaurant:
When curvy receptionist Ashley Daniels and eccentric billionaire Devon Killane get into a very public shouting match, sparks fly – sparks that ignite a romance between two people with nothing in common but heartbreak.
Can Ashley learn to trust Devon? Can Devon escape his nightmare past and forge a future with Ashley?
Or will the deadly secret he’s hiding destroy them both?
Click here to find out!
Sonora Seldon writes under an assumed name and a borrowed face in an imaginary location. She is the sole support of three dogs, a cat, and hundreds of books; she also holds a dozen jade plants prisoner in her kitchen, but some of them are still alive. When she is not reading, writing, or being distracted by something shiny, she creates abstract paintings, sleeps late, and eats enough pizza to sink a battleship.
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: A Billionaire Romance
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 33
