Proposal

by Meg Cabot

  “What are you doing here?” I asked a little breathlessly. There were parts of him I could feel pressing against me that I definitely wanted to feel more closely, but both of us were fully clothed, making the kind of closeness I was hoping for impossible without some disassembly. “I thought you had rotations or interviews or a lobotomy to perform or something.”

  “So you do pay attention when I tell you what I do on a daily basis,” he said drily. “How sweet. Actually, I wanted to surprise you. I’ve been waiting here for you for hours.” He held up his cell phone. “Do you ever actually check your messages?”

  “Sorry, my phone was off. Then it got soaked, and wouldn’t turn on. I was—­”

  “Don’t even try to tell me you were at the library.” Amusement danced in his night dark eyes. “You might have fooled your friends with that one, querida, but you’ll never fool me. Where were you, really? And could you put down that drink? I think you’ve christened us both enough for now.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I set my V and C on the floor, then peeled off my messenger bag and coat, and dropped them beside it. I didn’t want to kill the mood by telling him the truth about how I’d been off nearly being murdered by an NCDP. He had a tendency to get cranky when he heard that kind of thing. He was even more overprotective than my stepfather. But in a boyfriend, that kind of thing is actually attractive. “I was helping out a friend who’s flunking Statistics. But you know what? That’s boring, let’s get back to you. What are you doing here, for real? I thought we agreed that Valentine’s Day has become a gross commercial holiday and we don’t believe in it.”

  “We don’t,” he said. I didn’t miss the appreciative way his dark-­eyed gaze flicked over my form-­fitting tee, which had gotten damp despite my leather jacket. Yeah, I’ve still got it. “But this morning a few ­people at the hospital were discussing what they were doing tonight for Valentine’s Day with their significant others, and when I mentioned that we don’t believe in the holiday, they—­”

  “Properly shamed you?” I threw myself on top of him again. “Oh, my God, give me their addresses so I can send them all fruit baskets.”

  He held me close. The bulge was still there. I could feel it, hard as a rock, against my stomach. I snuggled my face to his neck, inhaling. I didn’t think I’ll ever get enough of the smell of him, though it’s changed over the years, from a combination of smoke and old, leather-­bound books to the clean, sharp odor of antiseptic soap, thanks to the many times a day he has to wash his hands due to the patients he sees on rotations.

  I never knew the smell of antiseptic soap could be so sexy.

  “Some of the doctors said I might need to reorganize my priorities, yes.” He grinned up at me. “So I did. I got in the car and started driving.”

  “But how did you get in here?” I asked, pretending I had no idea what was going on below his waist. “Men aren’t allowed in the Virgin Vault.”

  “Apparently exceptions can be made for dashing young med students who come bearing restaurant reservations.” He glanced at his watch. “Which we’ve now missed.”

  “Oh, Jesse, I’m sorry. If you’d called me sooner I could have changed my schedule.” Which would have been immensely preferable to the mess I’d created in the cemetery. “Where were we going to go?”

  “It was too late to get a reservation anywhere decent,” he said. “And besides, I couldn’t afford it on my impoverished student budget. So I was going to take you on a picnic at the beach, to watch the sunset.”

  I felt even worse. “Oh, my God. Were we going to snuggle under a blanket next to a bonfire?”

  “Yes. Although considering this storm, which seems to have come out of nowhere, I suppose it’s just as well my plans fell through.”

  I refrained from mentioning that I’d caused the storm, the torrential rain from which I could still hear pelting my window. Well, not me, but my client, who’d gone from being merely non-­compliant to murderous.

  Was it wrong of me suddenly not to care? From what Mark had said, it sounded like Zack Farhat deserved what he had coming.

  Okay, yeah, this was wrong of me.

  “It was going to be very romantic,” Jesse was saying. “I even brought champagne. Well, not real champagne, since I can’t afford that. It’s sparkling wine, from California—­”

  “I prefer sparkling wine from California,” I interrupted. “California is the state of your birth.”

  “But now,” he went on, lifting a bottle from the far side of my bed, “it’s warm. It wouldn’t fit in your miniature refrigerator. You have too many energy drinks in there. Susannah, you should stay away from those things. You know they’re full of—­”

  “Minifridge,” I corrected him. “It’s called a minifridge, not a miniature refrigerator. And I like warm champagne.”

  “No one likes warm champagne, Susannah, even when it’s from the state of my birth. Now, why don’t you change out of those wet things, and—­”

  “Climb into bed with you?” I asked. “That sounds like a really, really good idea.”

  “—­and stop lying to me about where you were tonight.”

  Cinco

  I FROZE, MY shirt halfway over my head.

  “Wait. How could you tell I was lying?”

  “You can’t even balance your checkbook. Who would ask for your help with Statistics?”

  I tossed my shirt to the floor. It was slightly disconcerting that he hadn’t even noticed I was wearing only a bra (and jeans), but that’s one of the downsides of dating someone who’d lived with you for years, even if he’d been in spirit form at the time and chivalrously only materialized when you were fully clothed. I’d always imagined he’d been too irritatingly faithful to his Roman Catholic upbringing—­and his Victorian-­era roots—­ever to have considered spying on me, but now I wasn’t too sure.

  Except of course that since I’d managed to reunite his soul with his body a few years ago—­another skill of mine that, sadly, cannot be measured by the SATs—­he refused to go further than second base (third on the rare occasions he drank more than three glasses of wine) with me out of “respect” for what he thinks he owes to me—­and my family and Father Dominic and the church—­for all we’ve done for him, giving him a second chance at life, blah blah blah blah.

  Sometimes I get so sick of hearing about it. All I want to do is bone, like a normal ­couple.

  But we can’t, because we aren’t normal (although normal isn’t considered a therapeutically beneficial term), and my boyfriend has post-­traumatic stress from being dead. And is also Catholic and a century and a half years old, of course, even though he doesn’t look a day over twenty-­six.

  “I happen to be making a B in Statistics, Jesse,” I said. “That’s above average. And no one balances their checkbook. No one even has a checkbook anymore, except for you and Father Dominic.”

  “Stop avoiding the subject, querida.” He regarded me impassively from the bed. “And stop thinking you’ll distract me from it, too, by undressing in front of me.”

  Damn.

  “Fine.” I snatched a dry shirt from my school-­issued dresser. “If you must know, I was at the cemetery.”

  He raised one dark eyebrow—­the one with the scar through it, a perfect crescent moon of brown skin where dark hair should have been. “Cemetery?” he echoed.

  Then indignation swiftly replaced bewilderment.

  “Was that what I felt earlier?” he demanded, rising from the bed. “I thought it was because you were out there driving in this storm. But that wasn’t it, was it? It was because you were chasing a ghost, alone, in a cemetery, at night.”

  I’d begun peeling off my boots. I know he’d asked me not to undress in front of him, but my jeans were soaked. I needed to change them.

  Okay, they might have not been that wet. But I needed time to come up with a reply that wouldn’t
enrage him. This was an evasive maneuver.

  “Jesse, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean, what you felt earlier?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. We may no longer have a ghost-­mediator connection, Susannah, but I can still tell when you’re feeling afraid, and earlier this evening, you were very, very afraid—­”

  Now I was the one who felt indignant. I nearly dropped one of my boots.

  “Afraid? I wasn’t afraid of that little brat. I just didn’t enjoy being pelted by funerary floral arrangements, that’s all.”

  “Susannah.” Now he was looming over me, seventy-­three inches or so of tasty man-­meat. “What happened in the cemetery?”

  Susannah.

  I felt another chill down my spine, but unlike the one I’d felt when I’d seen the name Paul Slater on the envelope Lauren had handed me, this one was pleasant.

  As hard as it is to date someone with nineteenth-­century manners—­seriously, it’s getting to a point where I spend so much time swimming laps in the campus pool to work off my sexual frustration, my highlights are becoming brassy—­I still feel a thrill every time Jesse calls me Susannah. He thinks the name everyone else calls me—­Suze—­is too short and ugly for someone of my strength and beauty.

  Yeah. He gets me. Well, except for the part where I’m totally fine with premarital sex and am also convinced that God, if he or she exists, is, too.

  “Well,” I said, since he was still looming over me, looking more like a dominating he-­male than a nerdy doctor-­to-­be. I had no choice but to tell him, even though I knew it was going to make him mad. “Okay, so there’s this NCDP who’s been stealing flowers off his dead girlfriend’s grave, and the girl’s family got it on video—­well, static is what they mostly got, but it’s been freaking everybody out—­I’m surprised you haven’t seen it, it’s been all over the news. But I guess you’ve been busy with your studying and interviews and stuff. So, anyway, I decided to go check it out tonight.” I wiggled out of my jeans. “And long story short, this guy, Mark, says—­”

  “Susannah.” My name came out in a frustrated hiss. When I glanced in his direction, I saw that Jesse had turned to face my window, the curtains of which he’d closed, so no one could see that a resident of the Virgin Vault was entertaining a contraband man in her room.

  He had his arms folded across his chest and his dark head bent, his gaze fastened to the floor. I felt a surge of shame for my bad behavior—­but not for my black hipster briefs, which even I have to admit I look pretty hot in.

  “Sorry,” I said, pulling open a drawer and grabbing a dry pair of jeans. “But you’re the one who told me to change out of my wet things.”

  “Not in front of me,” he ground out. “I’m not a eunuch.”

  “Oh, believe me, I know. But you’re the one who says we have to wait until we get married to have sex, and that we can’t get married until you can financially support us both, which is just about the most ridiculously chauvinistic thing I ever—­”

  “Can we not have this conversation again right now?” he questioned over his shoulder. “I’ve told you, I respect you and your family both too much to be a financial burden—­”

  “I thought you said you didn’t want to have this conversation again right now.”

  “Are you finished dressing?”

  I zipped up my fly. “Yes.”

  He turned around. His angular jaws—­beneath a dusting of five o’clock shadow—­had a slight flush to them, and his dark eyes were brighter than ever. “What happened in the cemetery? Did he hurt you?”

  “Geez, of course not.” I thought it better not to mention the vases, or that Mark seemed to have been the one who’d whipped up the super cell. That was probably only a coincidence, anyway.

  Except that in my business, there are no coincidences. Had it been a coincidence that of all the houses in all the world, I’d just happened to move into the one Jesse had been murdered in?

  I think not.

  But if there is some higher power in charge of all this stuff, he or she has some explaining to do. Because why would they put someone like me in charge of mediating a case like Mark’s? I was already doing a supremely crappy job of it, if the expression on Jesse’s face as I described to him what had happened in the cemetery—­well, an abridged version, anyway—­was any indication. How I’d gone there to convince Mark to move on, and how he’d revealed to me that he couldn’t, because he hadn’t actually killed Jasmin (like everyone thought), and how he was now convinced he had to go get revenge on the person who (allegedly) had.

  “But technically it isn’t my fault,” I said in my own defense. “How was I supposed to know there’d been a second vehicle involved in the accident? Nothing in any of the news reports mentioned that. You would think there’d have been skid marks or broken glass or paint from the other car or something—­”

  He had me in his arms so fast, I hardly knew what was happening. One second he’d been over by the window, and the next, he was crushing me in his embrace. He may not have been a ghost anymore, but he could certainly move as rapidly as one when he felt like it.

  “Thank God you weren’t hurt,” he said, burying his face in my rain-­dampened hair. “Susannah, how could you have been so foolish as to have gone there alone?”

  “Well,” I said. The hug was surprising, but not unwelcome, especially since I enjoyed the feel of his rock-­hard chest against me, and in particular the familiar tingle from the general vicinity of my pubic bone I always experienced whenever it came into contact with any part of his anatomy. “I didn’t have a choice. Father Dominic is away at some ministry conference. And I didn’t know you were coming. If you’d called sooner, I’d have waited for—­”

  “You can’t go on doing this, querida,” he said, shoving me roughly away from him so he could look down into my eyes. But he still held on to my shoulders, so I couldn’t get away. Not that I wanted to. “I’ve already lost everyone I’ve ever loved. I can’t lose you, too.”

  “Jesse, you’re not going to lose me. I had the situation totally under control.” Sort of. “But I have to say that after so many years of you keeping your feelings for me hidden out of propriety, it’s really nice to hear you say all those things. Plus, it’s emotionally healthy that you’re letting them out in this way. Keep unburdening yourself.” I wrapped my arms around his neck. “What is it exactly, that you find so irresistible about me? Is it my magnetic personality? Or my emerald green eyes? Or maybe it’s just my hot bod?” I felt something against my torso. “Oh, I’m getting the impression that it’s my hot bod.”

  He thrust me away from him again, this time looking disgusted. “This is nothing to joke about, Susannah. If that boy had murder on his mind when you left him, he may not stop at killing only his rival for his sweetheart’s affections. You may also be on his list.”

  I wasn’t listening anymore, however. Well, not really. I’m on the kill list of so many spooks, the whole thing has really gotten old.

  “Jesse,” I said, my gaze fastened on the front of his jeans. “Is it my imagination, or are you overly glad to see me?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Susannah. If this boy wants to kill you—­or even if he only wants to kill this other boy, Zack—­we should go now, and try to stop him.”

  “Yeah, in a minute. Jesse, what’s in your pocket?”

  His hand went instinctively to the hard lump I’d noticed—­and been mistaking for something else all night. His expression turned unreadable—­as it always did when the subject changed to something he didn’t want to discuss, like what being dead had been like, or his predilection for the musical stylings of Nicki Minaj—­and he dropped his hand away.

  “It’s nothing. We need to go. Get your coat.”

  “Jesse, that is not nothing. I thought you were glad to see me, but I thin
k I was sadly mistaken. Is that a gun in your pocket?”

  He threw me a sour glance. “No, Susannah, I do not have a gun in my pocket. Doctors swear an oath to protect human life, not take it.” Then his brown-­eyed gaze grew hard. “Well, unless it’s a human who’s already dead, and is trying to harm my girlfriend. Now can we go?”

  “No, we cannot.” I took a step forward.

  Jesse’s pretty fast, what with the whole having-­walked-­in-­the-­valley-­of-­the-­shadow-­of-­death thing.

  But with all the laps I swim in the campus pool (and paranormal butts I have to kick), I’m faster. I had one finger through a belt loop of his jeans (to hold him still) and another down his pocket more quickly than he could say, “Good morning, ma’am” (a frustrating habit of his of which I’ve tried to cure him. No one wants to be called ma’am. The first time he said it to my mom, I thought she was going to have a coronary).

  “Susannah,” he cried, struggling against me—­or more like against himself. I don’t think he could decide whether he was more outraged or delighted to find my hand down his pants pocket.

  But then when I cried, “Aha! Got it!” and withdrew the treasure I’d discovered from the depths of his jeans, he grew very still. I don’t know which one of us was more mortified when I saw what it was.

  Because of course it wasn’t a gun.

  It was a ring box.

  Seis

  JESSE WAS THE first to recover himself.

  “Well, I hope you’re satisfied, Miss Simon,” he said, and nimbly snatched the box from my hand, then stuffed it back into his pocket.

  I was too emotional to say anything. I was experiencing many “feels” as the kids on Tumblr—­my computer-­savvy friend CeeCee has told me about it—­often say. I felt panic and joy and shame over my behavior, but also exultant over the fact that the ring box wasn’t large enough to have caused all the hardness I’d felt against me while we’d been making out earlier. So I’d been right: he had been happy to see me.