Merrily Ever After--A Novella

by Jenny Holiday

  “You know, if you decide to go with adoption,” Jane said quickly. “Or, like, for wills and stuff.”

  They all knew what Jane had meant, though. They all knew how committed Jay was to never having kids.

  Which meant they all knew that when Jane referenced lawyers, she was talking about the divorce variety.

  Elise sighed. “It was easier when I was barren.”

  “Jesus Christ, Elise, barren?” Wendy snapped. “This isn’t the nineteenth century.”

  She’d been joking. More dark humor. But Wendy, usually easy with a laugh, had taken her seriously. Which somehow only made it funnier. She giggled. It must have been catching, because Jane joined in. Wendy just glared at both of them, which only made them laugh harder.

  Elise held her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. Not barren. Infertile. Do you like that better?”

  “Except you’re not. Clearly.” The pregnancy test was resting on a paper towel on the coffee table in front of them, its pronouncement a tiny but potent billboard. Wendy nodded meaningfully at it.

  Elise stopped laughing. Wendy was right. She wasn’t barren. She wasn’t infertile.

  She was three-plus weeks pregnant.

  And possibly in need of a divorce lawyer.

  Chapter Two

  As Jay moved some papers around in his office, getting ready to head out for the weekend, his eyes snagged on a picture of Elise on his desk. It was her with the girls at the firm’s Canada Day party last summer. Elise had attended with him and had been planning to meet up with her friends later. Which, when they’d gotten tired of waiting for her, had somehow morphed into said friends crashing Cohen & Smith’s Canada Day party wearing the world’s most ridiculous glittery red maple-leaf glasses.

  Which was pretty much par for the course with them.

  Which he pretty much loved.

  Damn, he was living a charmed life.

  And beyond that, a charmed day. It had been a freaking fantastic one.

  They had wrapped up a big project that had spanned more than a year. Jay had been the lead on it and had signed off on the last invoice today. It had gone well, and he suspected they’d get a lot of repeat business and referrals as a result.

  He had also been informed that he was on the short list for Accountant of the Year, which was an award given by a prestigious national professional association. He usually didn’t go in for that kind of stuff, but this was apparently an award where you were nominated by your peers. And even though Accountant of the Year was pretty much the dorkiest title he could imagine—and he loved accounting—it was gratifying to have made the list.

  His phone buzzed. It was his brother, who’d sent a selfie of himself next to the gates to the University of Toronto.

  Done with my last exam. I’m officially one-fourth of the way through.

  Cameron had gone back to school as an adult, and even though he was only going part-time, he had somehow managed to get a year’s worth of credits toward his engineering degree done in a year and a half. Jay was stupidly proud. Not that he was going to say it like that. He still had to play the big brother role.

  Assuming you *passed* those exams.

  Another photo arrived, this one of Cam’s middle finger raised.

  Jay cracked up.

  Seriously, great job.

  Jane and I are going out tonight to celebrate. You and Elise want to come?

  Cam was married to Jane, one of Elise’s crew. It was weird sometimes, being married to one of your brother’s wife’s best friends. Good-weird—he loved it, generally speaking—but sometimes he needed a break from all the togetherness.

  Which he was getting, starting right now. Merry Christmas to him.

  Thanks, but we can’t. We’re going up north.

  Ah, yes, the fancy-ass log cabin.

  Jay and Elise had gone away last December, for a week alone before the Christmas madness kicked in, and they had decided to make it an annual tradition. His brother was teasing him about the fancy cabin. It was a fancy cabin, but he had no shame about that. Roughing it wasn’t their thing. Getting away from it all, however, was.

  What are you going to do all weekend?

  Jay smiled. Cameron and Jane were thrill-seekers, and his brother probably could not imagine spending a weekend cooped up inside.

  There was going to be plenty to do. But Jay was a gentleman, so he didn’t elaborate. Nevertheless, Cam’s next text suggested he had interpreted Jay’s lack of an answer correctly.

  Actually, don’t answer that.

  Nope, he wouldn’t. But he smiled just thinking of how not short of things to do they would be this weekend.

  The cabin belonged to a friend of his partner, Kent—Kent being the Cohen to Jay’s Smith in Cohen & Smith. It was the perfect mixture of rustic and swanky—luxury linens, a huge bathtub. But it was in the middle of nowhere, and it was tiny.

  And it had no Wi-Fi, and spotty cell coverage.

  In other words, it was perfect.

  He laughed, thinking about how, in other contexts, Elise would have grumbled about the lack of Wi-Fi. Elise was dedicated to her job and hated being unavailable to her clients, even on weekends. Jay was a bit of a workaholic, too, so he got it. Between the two of them, they worked a lot, and they made no apologies for it. But they’d had so much fun last year that they were both ready to abandon their phones in favor of…other things. Note to self: Remember to pack the new Scrabble tiles.

  * * *

  The thing about Jay was that he was perfect. People said that about their significant others all the time, but as Elise watched Jay pack the car for their drive north, the trueness of it in his case sliced through her gut.

  Or maybe that was just morning sickness?

  Regardless, watching him still kind of made her swoon like she was in the flush of new love. He was handsome, of course, with his imposing height and his piercing aqua eyes—Benjamin Moore Bahaman Sea Blue, she’d awkwardly blurted out when she’d met him a year and a half ago. And there was something about the contradiction that was Jay Smith—the juxtaposition between his reserved accountant persona and the sexy beast that lay beneath.

  But it wasn’t even that. It was the care he took. The attention he paid.

  For example, he had, unbeknownst to her, taken it upon himself to order all the food they would need for the weekend from a local catering company she loved. Neither of them liked to cook, so he had just…taken care of it.

  He was always doing that—taking obstacles out of her path. Noticing those obstacles in the first place. It could be anything from moving the shared printer in their house—which had originally been his—from his office to hers to getting all up in her doctors’ faces when he felt they weren’t taking her endometriosis pain seriously enough.

  The endometriosis that had resulted in the removal of one ovary and enough scarring on the other one, and on her uterus, that she wasn’t supposed to have been capable of getting pregnant. “Highly unlikely bordering on impossible,” they’d said. And years of no birth control—both in the Jay era and earlier—seemed to support that prognosis.

  “This was really nice of you to do,” she said from the porch, where she was watching him load the last of the coolers into the car. “I was thinking we’d be spending the weekend eating Kraft Dinner and Oreos. Which would have been fine, but, you know, I’ll take carbonara and charcuterie any day.”

  “Eh, I wouldn’t call it nice.”

  “You wouldn’t? Thoughtful?”

  “Nope.” He slammed the trunk, straightened, and shot her a wink.

  “So what is it, then?”

  He started toward her, all traces of teasing gone. In fact, there was a distinctly predatory edge to his approach. She shivered, and it wasn’t from the cold. He stopped at the base of the small flight of stairs that led to the porch and looked up at her. “It’s more like selfishness.”

  She knew where he was going with this, but she played her role. Her very delicious role. She sent
an eyebrow up. “Oh? How do you figure that?”

  “Because if we don’t have to cook, there’s more time for fucking.”

  Even though she’d known he was going to say something like that—even though she’d been actively trying to get him to say something like that—heat bloomed inside her. She didn’t respond, though, hoping he would go on.

  Her silence was rewarded. He ascended the steps and came to stand right beside her. He didn’t touch her, and they were both wrapped in puffy down parkas anyway, but he leaned over to speak in her ear, so closely she could feel the heat of his breath.

  “I want to maximize the time I spend with my dick inside you this weekend.” She felt more than heard him huff a laugh millimeters from her skin. “And my tongue. And so on.”

  See? He was perfect. The perfect gentleman and the perfect…not gentleman, as the situation required.

  He had called her perfect, too, back when they were having their big “are we really going to do this?” moment. Before her, he had only, as a rule, dated women older than him—that’s how committed he had been to a child-free life. He had purposefully sought out women older than forty-five. He’d blown that rule out of the water when he’d hooked up with her, though—and then when he found out she couldn’t have kids, they’d joked about her being his dream woman.

  But no. She wasn’t going to go there now. She’d decided with Jane and Wendy that she wouldn’t tell him this weekend. She’d made an appointment with her doctor for Monday. The test had said three-plus weeks, but “three-plus” was as high as it went. Her periods were a bit unpredictable to begin with, so she had no idea how pregnant she actually was. Once she had the relevant information, and once she’d had a chance to digest the news a little better herself, she would tell him.

  For now, she’d try to enjoy her fun, sexy weekend. With her perfect husband. She was going to ignore everything else—Jay’s office holiday party, which she was kind of fretting over because it had to be perfect, a big pitch she was making to a prospective client just after the holidays that also needed to be perfect and was a long way from it.

  And of course the fact that she was with child.

  Unto us a child is born.

  She shook her head to physically jolt herself out of her thoughts and forced herself back to the conversation at hand—which wasn’t actually that difficult, because it was a very…invigorating conversation. “Not too much fucking this weekend, though,” she teased, “because I also want to play in the snow.”

  She was, honestly, almost as excited about that aspect of things as she was about getting down and dirty. Almost.

  “I even packed some coal and carrots and buttons for snowpeople.” She had pre-sliced the carrots into the optimal shape for snowpeople noses, in fact.

  He shook his head, and she was pretty sure he was going for a stern effect, but the goofy grin he couldn’t quite suppress wasn’t doing him any favors on that front.

  “We also have to work on the favors for your party,” she said. She was baiting him. She did need to work on the favors for the party—it was part of why she was fretting about it—but she wasn’t planning on doing it this weekend.

  “No, we don’t. Patricia is planning the party.”

  While it was true, officially, that Jay’s assistant was planning Cohen & Smith’s holiday party, Elise had no qualms about “helping.” By which she meant taking over. And she made no apologies for it. Honestly, she was a designer. She was his wife. He knew she was incapable of resisting anything that would involve decorating and Christmas—her two favorite things. But again, she wasn’t planning on thinking about the party at all this weekend.

  That didn’t mean she was above baiting him. Trying to get Bossy Jay to come out and play. “You will die when you see these amazing cookies I commissioned,” she said breezily. “They won’t be ready until Tuesday—I want them to be fresh, of course—but they’re little calculators! I have gift bags and ribbons, and I thought we could make some up this weekend, without the cookies, of course, just to see what—”

  He held up a hand. “I will allow a limited amount of snow-related cavorting. But the rest of the weekend is going to be all fucking, all the time.”

  There. She sucked in a breath and scraped her teeth across her lower lip. He was just so…hot when he was bossy. He lunged toward her like they were playing tag and he was “it.” She twisted away from him, put on the mock-innocent face that drove him wild, and said, “Okay, okay. But what about games, though? If we fuck all weekend, we won’t have time for Monopoly.”

  He caught up with her and swatted her butt. “I didn’t pack Monopoly, actually. Should I go back inside and get it?”

  “What did you bring?” She had dropped the playful sexiness, as had he, because board games were serious business with them.

  “I’ve got checkers, Battleship, Boggle, Patchwork, and Scrabble. I was thinking that we just played Monopoly a couple nights ago, but I’ll go get it.”

  “No, you’re right. And FYI, I have travel Yahtzee in my purse.”

  He chuckled. “You carry travel Yahtzee around?”

  “I do indeed. And the only reason I don’t also have travel cribbage in there is I switched from my big bag to my smaller purse a few days ago when I went out with Wendy and Jane, and I just never switched back.”

  “But going out with Wendy and Jane required travel Yahtzee.”

  She shrugged. “Hey, you never know when you’re going to get stuck in line or something. I like to be ready. And actually, there was one point where Wendy and Jane both went to the bathroom and I pulled it out and played against myself for five minutes.”

  “God damn, I love you.” He pressed a swift, firm kiss on her lips. It wasn’t a sexy kiss per se, more like a possessive one, but it weakened her knees just the same. “But I’m going to go inside and get Monopoly, just in case.”

  Yep. He was perfect.

  Chapter Three

  By the time they’d pulled up to the cabin three hours later, Jay was a little worried about Elise. She’d been fine for the first couple of hours, but then she’d gotten kind of pale. Gone quiet. And about half an hour ago, she’d shouted at him to pull over and she’d bolted out of the car and thrown up on the side of the road.

  She’d claimed it was just a freak thing. Blamed it on some questionable tuna she had for lunch.

  But he worried about her. He couldn’t help it. Sometimes her endometriosis pain was so bad, she threw up from it. But that hadn’t happened for a while—not for a couple months at least, now that he thought about it.

  “You sure you’re okay?” He killed the engine and turned in his seat to really look at her. They’d tried to time their getaway around her menstrual cycle, the first few days of which she was usually out of commission, but it wasn’t always that predictable, so maybe she was about to be plunged into her monthly battle with pain. In which case they would check in to a Wi-Fi- and TV-equipped hotel and hole up for a weekend of mindless entertainment.

  “Yeah, yeah. I was just feeling a little under the weather, but I’m fine now.”

  She looked like her usual self—the paleness from before was gone. But it would be just like her to be downplaying a serious bout of pain so as not to derail their weekend. He wasn’t going to let that happen. “Are you sure? Because I’m not going to be disappointed if we need to change our plans.” Which was a lie, but her comfort was vastly more important than his dick.

  “Jay.” She unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face him. “I’m fine. I promise. It was just a little random nausea.”

  He grinned. Yes, he would have cheerfully embarked on Plan B if that had been necessary, but he was very glad it was not. Damn, they were going to have such a great time.

  She must have been reading his mind, because she flashed him one of her signature tiny smiles. He called it that, in his mind—the tiny smile. It was like she was trying not to smile, but not very hard. The result was a sort of coy-sexy thing that drove him bana
nas. He had also learned, in his time with Elise, that the tiny smile could be manipulated so that it morphed into something else that drove him bananas—the lip scrape.

  The tool of manipulation that achieved this aim was dirty talk. His dick stirred. He got off on being able to call forth specific physical reactions from her with only his words.

  “We’re going to play a game, okay, sweetheart?” She nodded, her eyes going a little bit wide. Her mouth fell open slightly like it did before she did the teeth scraping thing, but no actual teeth scraping occurred. “I’ll unload the car. You go inside, get in the bed, and get naked.”

  Her top teeth landed on her lower lip but remained stationary. She needed a little more.

  “While I’m getting stuff put away and organized, I want you to make yourself come—and I want to hear it happening.”

  And there it was—the lip scrape. She blushed, too, his Elise. His everything.

  * * *

  She did what he said. Because that was how they did things, generally, when it came to matters of the bedroom. It wasn’t a Fifty Shades thing—neither of them was into bondage or props or stuff like that. It was more about the way following instructions, surrendering, made her feel so good. Doing what Jay told her to would pay off in spades.

  And by spades she meant orgasms.

  “I’m not hearing much,” he called from the kitchen. The cabin was basically one room, though the bed, which was tucked into one corner, was shielded from his view by a privacy screen.

  “I’m getting undressed!” she called, laughing. “But it’s freezing in here!” It was much, much colder up north than it had been in Toronto. Elise was one of those people who was always cold, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t just her in this case.

  “I know.” She could hear him banging around in the kitchen. “I’ve turned up the heat, but I should make a fire as soon as I get the food unpacked.”