by JC Harroway
The panic and desperation must be etched into my face, because she slides her hands over mine and holds them to her cheeks. ‘You feel things so deeply. You’re an all-or-nothing kind of guy. I understood that the first time you made me sign the security code of conduct that first time we met.’ A smile dances on her beautiful mouth and the urge to kiss her overwhelms me.
I stop fighting it. Pull her close. Brush my lips over hers in a whisper-soft caress. ‘Is that a bad thing?’
She laughs. ‘No. It’s wonderful because I know that, just like everything else you do, you love intensely too. So I know that, if you ever love me, it will be worth waiting for. I was never going to give up on you. You may have noticed that I’m fairly persistent when I want something.’
I grin, shrug, pull her mouth back to mine, properly this time. She climbs astride my lap and we kiss and kiss and kiss. I try to show her how I feel with my lips, my grip and the way I seem to need her air. It leaves me splayed open so that, when we pull apart for breath, I have to rest my forehead against hers while I seek composure.
‘I’m sorry the hat wasn’t a better gift,’ she says, her fingers stroking my hair.
I shake my head, gripping her tighter. ‘It’s perfect, just like you.’
She snorts in disbelief. ‘It’s riddled with holes.’
I lean back. Lock eyes with her. ‘Mistakes are what make us human.’ I blow out a prolonged exhale, my heart fighting to escape my chest. ‘I’m not going to lie, Lady Madden. This emotional stuff has me feeling seriously off-balance.’
This time her smile is wide and uninhibited—a private smile, just for me. I’ll never tire of witnessing that privilege. ‘It’s meant to feel like that,’ she says. ‘Life-changing. That’s how we know our connection is the real thing.’ She presses her lips to mine. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Another kiss. ‘Think you can handle that, Big Guy?’
I grip her waist, crush her to my chest and suck in the comfort of her familiar Brooke scent.
‘For you I can.’ The steady beat of her heart thuds under my cheek.
‘Good. Then it’s all settled.’
And just like that a bad decision becomes the best one of my life.
EPILOGUE
Seven months later
Brooke
SUNDAYS HAVE BECOME my favourite day of the week. A day where we hide away at home. Sleep late and make lazy love. Venture out to Covent Garden for brunch and spend the evening on the sofa together. Which is where I find myself now, sprawled next to Nick, relaxed and content while the summer sun sets over London.
‘Oh, let me read you this,’ I say, folding up the Sunday newspaper so I can hold it with one hand while I tangle the other in Nick’s hair. His head rests on my chest as if I’m his favourite pillow.
I clear my throat. ‘“Rumours abound this week that, in what is believed to be a highly secretive ceremony attended by only close family and a few select friends, Lady Brooke Madden, daughter of Earl Madden and Countess Madden, better know as the actress Lori Colt, is thought to have married her former bodyguard, Nicholas Rivers of Rivers Security”.’
He shifts against me. Mumbles. Wraps his arm around my waist more securely.
‘“The pair have been regularly spotted around London in recent months and, while they have made no secret that they are a couple very much in love, no official announcements have been forthcoming from the top model’s team”.’
Nick lifts his head, presses his mouth to mine and then trails kisses across my cheek and down my neck.
I grow breathless but keep reading. ‘“Sources close to the couple confirm that the nuptials took place in an intimate twilight ceremony at an undisclosed location in the playground of the rich and famous, Saint Moritz in Switzerland”.’
‘Blah, blah, blah...’ says Nick, his voice sleepy but husky with desire. ‘They know nothing.’
I spread my legs to accommodate his thick thigh so that it’s where I want him most. He pops the first button on my shirt and presses kisses to my collarbone and the valley between my breasts.
‘They certainly don’t know what a kinky bastard I married,’ I finish, tossing the newspaper so my hands can glide up his warm back under his shirt.
I feel his smile against my skin. Catch the low rumble of his sexy chuckle. With one hand he pops the back fastening of my bra and tugs the garment down so my aching breasts spill free. Each nipple gets some of his divine and very through attention, and then he says, ‘They also don’t know how delicious my wife is.’
His hand moves south and his weight shifts so he can press his mouth over my stomach. ‘And they have no idea who’s in here.’
I look down at my husband, his handsome face transformed by love. Once he stopped punishing himself, Nick’s defensive barriers crumbled one by one. I never once doubted his love—I could see it written in his expressive conker-brown eyes, eyes I hope our baby inherits.
‘No...that’s our secret,’ I agree, tangling my fingers in his thick, luxurious hair.
Nick pops the button on my jeans and I lift my hips so he can shimmy them and my underwear down my legs. Then his eyes meet mine. ‘I don’t care about anything apart from what I know.’
He strips off his shirt and drops it on the floor before shoving down his jeans and boxers.
‘And what’s that?’ I pant as he takes my hands in his and then pushes inside me, as if he’s coming home.
‘That I love you.’ His kiss steals my air and another little piece of my heart. ‘That I love our baby. That I love our family.’
‘I love you too,’ I say. ‘That’s a lot of love, Big Guy.’
He nods, freeing his beautiful smile. ‘It’s only what we deserve.’
And there’s no arguing with that truth.
* * *
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CHAPTER ONE
LAURA EDWARDS LOVED CHRISTMAS. Not just because she rivaled Mariah Carey as the queen of Christmas either, though that was very true, but because standing in the lobby of the hotel she’d been hired to transform into a winter wonderland made the foster-care past that always seemed to haunt her seem far behind. A time so faded from her memory that it was almost as if it hadn’t happened at all, which was just what she’d always wanted.
“Could you move the silver garland up a little farther?” Laura asked her assistant Maisey before she stepped forward to the massive twenty-foot tree and fixed the glittery beaded strands herself.
Maisey gave her a wry side-eye which Laura had received an inordinate number of since this particular hotel job began nine months ago. It might be possible that Laura’s level of micromanaging had skyrocketed since landing the lucrative #goals job for the exclusive WW hotel chain, but it would be worth it in the end. This client was going to catapult her business to the next level of success, her name synonymous with event decorating in every major city in the country. Since she’d moved to New York five years ago, she’d been building her business, taking any and all jobs she could, but this was the break that would take her from boutique business to industry go-to.
Once out of design school she’d started a staging business for Realtors and from there slowly built a company that designed window displays for department stores across the country. She’d competed against the biggest designers in the city to get the WW Hotels contract and she wasn’t going to let even a small, seemingly meaningless detail like garland placement go overlooked.
“It already looked perfect,” Maisey grumbled as Laura stepped away from the tree, “so how does it look better now that you’ve adjusted it?”
Laura laughed, still considering whether or not to relocate one of the shimmery crystal snowflakes to a less congested area of the tree. “You have an eye too, Maisey, that’s why I hired you.”
Maisey shook her head, still looking the tall evergreen up and down, all the silver-and-gold decorations sparkling like jewels beneath the multitude of crystal chandeliers. “No,” Maisey disagreed, “I can help you carry out a vision, but I couldn’t have dreamed this up in a million years.”
Laura slung her arm over her assistant’s shoulders, pulling her in for an encouraging squeeze. “You’ll be doing this same thing in no time, I promise. Look at the kind of stuff you were doing when you first came to me and what you’re creating now—we’re all constantly learning.”
Maisey shook her head, clearly not accepting the logic and compliment. Laura took her mentorship of Maisey very seriously and was prepared to settle into another meaningful life lesson that her young assistant would surely hang on and treasure forever when Maisey’s attention was pulled away.
Her blue eyes went wide as she gripped, not especially lightly, Laura’s hand. “Oh, my god, I think that’s him,” Maisey whispered furiously, nearly out of breath with excitement.
“Who?” Laura asked, leaning in closer to Maisey to hear her better, but also because her assistant was literally pulling on her arm which, because Maisey was much shorter than Laura, was causing Laura to hunch over as if she were playing an impromptu game of reverse limbo sans the stick and catchy tunes, and well, bending backward.
“Will Walker, our boss,” Maisey managed above a deep, yet silent gasp of excitement. “He’s headed this way.”
Laura’s stomach dropped basically all the way down onto her feet at the mention of Will Walker. The research she’d done on him while preparing for the job had produced photos of a man she’d known once upon a time in a life she’d spent a lot of time forgetting. But the intervening years and the fact that his name was different had made her unsure if she had the right person. More significantly, there was also the note that she’d left with his secretary that had gone unanswered and the countless letters and emails she’d sent him during the fifteen years since they’d seen each other that had always been returned.
That her old friend might be mere feet away from her now sent her pulse thundering in her veins like a marching-band drum line. As soon as he approached, her body instinctively knew it was him, the best friend she’d ever had in her life. And for a variety of reasons, but mostly because she’d had to abandon him to a shitty life with a foster family from hell without so much as a goodbye mere days before Christmas, she felt like she might vomit right onto the gleaming black onyx floor of his hotel.
“Do you like this tree?” a male voice asked. His voice was much deeper than it’d been when they were kids, but it was familiar all the same. The drawn-out vowel sounds and clipped consonants they’d grown up with in New Jersey were still apparent. Her own accent had softened years ago, mostly by design, to distance herself from a past she had hoped to outrun.
Maisey nearly broke Laura’s fingers before letting go of her hand completely, as if just now realizing that holding her boss’s hand in public was strange. But Laura had more pressing problems than Maisey being self-conscious. Mainly that she was about to come face-to-face with her first love, her first real friend and the first person in her life after the deaths of her parents who she’d ever considered family.
She struggled to breathe as he gazed up at the work of art she was privately referring to as Quirky Christmas because of its tongue-in-cheek play on luxury. WW Hotels were considered a playground for the rich and famous, so she’d found carved-crystal slides and platinum seesaws, sneakily nestling them alongside the hand-painted glass ornaments.
“I do like it, yes,” she finally answered, keeping her eyes focused on the tree as her chest tightened with fear and dread. Did he not know who she was or had he actually gotten the note she’d left him and finally come to see her? “Do you?”
Her heart stopped for a beat as she waited for his answer because considering that she now knew who he was, it would be awful if he hated her work. She’d always hoped that he’d be proud of who she’d become.
“I don’t know,” he answered, tone gruff. “People keep telling me it’s inspired, but fuck if I know what that means. It looks like just another Christmas tree to me. An expensive one, but a Christmas tree nonetheless.”
Laura could see Maisey’s mouth open to come to her defense, but Laura squeezed her hand to silence her.
When Maisey appeared to get the message, Laura peered at the tree again trying to see it from a man’s perspective, but it was impossible. All she saw were the months of hard work, planning and curation glittering like so much fairy dust under his modern black minimalist light fixtures.
“Well, it has a certain whimsical charm mixed with a modern flair that is in sync with the reputation of these hotels,” she told him, as if she were one of his hotel guests instead of the person who created just another Christmas tree. As if she weren’t melting from the inside out, terrified of revealing herself and receiving a blank stare of nonrecognition on his face, or worse, the contempt she knew she deserved for deserting him.
It didn’t help her peace of mind, either, that the electrical current she felt at being in close proximity to him was plucking her nerve endings up like a dog who heard his owner’s key in the front door. As hundreds of hotel guests rushed by them, Laura was experiencing every available human emotion within the course of five minutes.
On top of everything else, she’d been hoping for a better first meeting with her technical boss. Maybe one that included effusive accolades and shocked expressions of speechless wonder, but she’d deal with it. It was what she did, after all. That was her superpower. She dealt with whatever steaming pile of crap life threw at her, starting from the death of her parents at age four to the endless line of negligent foster parents all
the way up to the one who nearly hit her. It just so happened that the reason she’d made it out of that life alive was due nearly entirely to the man standing beside her.
“Whimsical charm,” Will repeated, mulling the term over. “I guess anything would be lost on me since I hate Christmas.”
Maisey audibly gasped, the thought simply too much for her to bear.
“That’s a long season to dislike,” Laura pointed out.
“The fucking longest,” he muttered, the irritated statement uttered in his deep, gravelly voice so like the Will she remembered as a kid. He hadn’t minced words then either.
When she couldn’t stand not knowing her fate, she finally turned to face him but saw that he was already facing her. His dark brows were knitted and the muscles of his neatly squared-off jaw were ticking as he put the pieces together.
And when their eyes met, she knew they both knew.
“Laura?” he asked at the same time she said, “Will?”
It was as if someone had dropped her insides out of a thousand-story building without a parachute when she slowly locked gazes with the boy she’d thought she’d lost forever. The one up until this moment, she’d thought hated her and deliberately didn’t want her in his life.
The moment stretched, loaded with unresolved history, neither one of them knowing what to say.
“I thought it was you in all the Page Six photos,” she finally blurted. “But you look so different from when we were kids and you changed your name so I couldn’t be sure. Then you didn’t return the note I left with your assistant, so I figured I had the wrong guy after all.”
“Wow,” Will said, running a hand through his too-long black hair as he stared at her. “I can’t believe it’s really you. Shit, that you’re even alive, I—” His words trailed off as dark brown eyes roamed her face, taking in all the changes the years had made. She was still young, but she certainly wasn’t sixteen anymore like she’d been the last time they’d seen each other. When he met her eyes again, the tormented look in them was gone. Then he said, “Of course, if I’d gotten your note I would have gotten back to you. My assistant has strict instructions about what to push through to me.”