I took her to this small restaurant that one of the guys at work had recommended to me. When I mentioned to him what I planned to do, he called ahead and let the owner know, and they had a special table for us ready on the roof. Nina had gasped and clutched my arm, coming to a dead halt as she saw the view we were being treated to.
“This place,” she breathed like she was having trouble catching her breath. “It’s incredible.”
“Only the best for you,” I told her, squeezing her hand and leading her to the table. Maybe it was a little cheesy, proposing to her on a rooftop like this, but I had never really wanted to do romance before I met her, and I was going to indulge that side of me as much as I could.
She took her seat opposite me and clasped her hands in her lap as I poured her a glass of champagne from the bottle I had picked out for us when I booked the table.
She lifted her glass and tapped it to mine. “To us,” she announced firmly, her eyes shining happily.
The way she was looking at me, the atmosphere, the way the city was laid out below us like it had been made for us—I knew I had to ask her. Now. Before I could back down. I pulled the ring box from my pocket, popped it open, and looked at the woman I loved.
Her jaw dropped. I had never actually seen it happen so literally before, but there was no other way to describe the look on her face. She clapped her hand across her mouth.
“Nina,” I began. “Will you—”
“Yes!” she shrieked, so loud I was sure that the whole city below could hear us. “Yes, of course, I will!”
I laughed, and she laughed, and she held her hand out, so I could slip the ring over her finger; she held it up to the light, and just like I had imagined, it matched her eyes so beautifully it nearly hurt. I stared at her, unable to drag my eyes away, and wondered how in the name of God I had managed to land someone this utterly perfect, this wonderful.
“Oh my God, Logan,” she murmured when she seemed to have come back down to earth. “This is …”
“This is what you deserve,” I told her, catching her hands and holding them tight. “I love you so much, baby.”
“I love you too,” she replied, and she leaned across the table, caught my head in her hands, and planted a kiss on my lips. These were the lips I was going to be kissing for the rest of my life, and I couldn’t have been happier. The woman I was always meant to be with.
Nina started planning the wedding almost as soon as that ring was on her finger, and Ant had stepped in as maid of honor to help her get it right; the two of them would spend long evenings just sitting at the dining table together, seriously discussing the option of white roses versus red, a pastel blue dress instead of a pastel pink one. I offered to help where I could, but they pretty much told me to keep my nose out and that it would be perfect on the day. I trusted them. My girls.
Erin couldn’t have been more excited when she found out we were getting married. She leaped off the couch, raising her little fists into the air, and doing a small dance around the living room. Nina caught her hands and danced with her.
“Does this mean I get to be a bridesmaid?” Erin asked breathlessly, and Nina nodded.
“If you’re ready to take on that responsibility,” she replied, furrowing her brow with play-seriousness.
“Of course I am,” Erin replied firmly, and then a big smile cracked out over her face once more. “You’re going to be my mommy! For real!”
Nina shot me a look as Erin wrapped her arms around her waist, and I could tell that hearing those words come out of her mouth meant the world to her. Nina had all but moved in with us not long after we officially got together, and she had been acting as a mother to Erin all that time. But Erin was right—this would be it, once and for all. The three of us would be a real family.
Samantha, thank goodness, was firmly out of the picture, and she would be staying there as long as I had my way. I filed a restraining order against her, deciding against the charges for attempting to abduct Erin, and she had sat there in court getting chewed out by the judge and looking as though she wanted to vanish deep inside herself. I didn’t feel even the remotest scrap of sympathy for her. She had been the one to bring this on herself, and she had proved that she was no kind of mother to Erin. She had never been, and now she never would be. Which worked fine for me as Nina had embraced Erin into her life as though she was her flesh and blood. Erin had done likewise. In fact, Erin had actually come out of her shell quite a bit in the year that Nina had been living with us; she was more expressive now, chattier, and even brought home more friends from school, a little gaggle of girls her age who came in and out of the house and demanded my pancakes in the process. I was always happy to oblige; I had only ever wanted my daughter to be happy and as loved by those around her as she was by her family, and now I had that.
I think it took Nina by surprise, how much she enjoyed being a mother to Erin. Sometimes she would sit there on the couch and watch her playing or reading or working on her homework, and I could see that look of pure and utter shock running through her, as though she could barely believe that this was the way her life had turned out. I knew how she felt.
One evening, about six months in, Nina and I were cuddling on the couch after Erin had gone to bed when Nina lifted her head from my chest and looked me in the eye.
“Uh oh,” I teased. “You look like you’ve had an idea.”
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” she admitted. “In the last few weeks. My contract at work is coming to an end soon and I just … I don’t want to end up at another dead-end job, you know?”
“Oh?” I prompted her, sitting up so I could look at her properly. “And what exactly were you thinking of?”
“I’ve actually been looking at doing some early childcare courses,” she admitted, as though she was dropping this enormous bombshell. I raised my eyebrows.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, brow furrowed. “I never thought it would be something I was interested in, but after everything that happened with Erin … I just want to make sure that other kids in her situation get the best care they can, you know?”
“That’s amazing,” I said with a nod of my head. “You think you’re going to start studying for a degree?”
“Hey, I have to apply to college first.” She held her hands up. “And I have no idea whether I’m actually going to like it or not. But I thought … I want to do something useful with my life, you know? Not just wait tables till the end of time. And now that I have some spare money, I figure now is the best time to start.”
“That sounds incredible.” I planted a kiss on her temple. “I’m so proud of you, Neen.”
“I can’t believe how much I thought I didn’t like kids before I met you guys.” She shook her head and snuggled into me again. “I guess I had just never really spent time around any before Erin.”
“She really is that good,” I joked, and Nina giggled and slid her hand under my shirt, resting comfortably against me.
And, like anything Nina set her mind to, it wasn’t long before she got into college and started studying. She worked her ass off, and soon enough she had started planning for her degree. She was going to do an amazing job, I could tell. The way she was with Erin, that kindness and wonder with which she treated her, would translate so well to the work that she wanted to take on. Any kid would be lucky to have her around. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too long before we started thinking about having another of our own, a little sibling for Erin, but that would be after the wedding.
A few months before, I might have balked at the thought of paying for a whole wedding, but since what had happened at work, I knew that I would be able to afford anything we wanted. I had been up for a promotion at work—going from chef to kitchen manager, with a sideline in putting menus together when they were needed. It had been Oliver and I fighting it out for the top spot, and I just knew there was something off about the campaign that he had been waging against me. I figured out what th
at was when I strolled into the locker room one evening to grab my phone from my bag to check in on Nina and Erin.
“Oliver?”
He stopped dead where he was; he was standing next to the coat rack, and the only jacket hanging there was mine. He couldn’t have mistaken it. No way. He had to know what he was doing. He turned around slowly, a look of sheer, panicked horror on his face, and I saw what was in his hand. A note. A small note that he had been about to slip into my pocket.
“What the fuck?” I strode forward and snatched it off him. When I unfolded it, I found myself met with the same lettering that had been on those notes I had been so sure Samantha had been sending to me. And just like that, it clicked into place.
Oliver had known about the potential promotion before I had and was hoping to oust me from my position long before it came to actually going for it. Samantha had never been the one sneaking into my work and dropping off those notes, it had been him all along. I reported him to Elijah, and he was promptly fired, and soon enough I stepped up to the kitchen manager role. It was harder than I’d imagined it would be, but since I had Nina splitting the childcare, I could pull it off.
And so it fell into place. For so long, I felt as though I had been struggling to keep my head above water. I had been lacking a family after my parents had been so cruelly taken from us when I was so young. But now, I was starting to believe that I wasn’t doomed to go without a family for the rest of my life. This little one suited me just fine.
“How are you girls getting along?” I asked as Nina returned with some of her books for studying.
She shrugged. “Not looking forward to getting through all this work,” she told me. “But looking forward to Christmas dinner.”
“Me too,” Erin piped up and hopped across to join Nina at the counter. “What do you want me to quiz you on?”
“You’re such a harsh quizmaster,” Nina joked. “You never let me get away with anything.”
“That’s better, though,” Erin told her authoritatively. “Then you learn more.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she sighed, and I shot a wink in her direction that she fired right back. I grinned. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face these days.
“Oh, Ant just texted,” Nina told me, pulling out her phone and squinting at the screen. “Says she’s going to be over early.”
“Guess you’ll have to leave your studying till later then,” I remarked, and she closed her book and got to her feet. She came over to join me and planted a kiss on my cheek.
“Guess so,” she agreed softly, and I kissed her on the mouth, just once, gently.
“Yuck!” Erin exclaimed from across the table, and both of us laughed.
“Sorry, we’ll keep the PDA to ourselves,” Nina apologized, and playfully squeezed my butt out of sight of Erin as she moved away.
“That’s better,” Erin nodded firmly, and Nina ruffled her hair and gathered her books to take them back through to the bedroom, out of sight for the rest of the day. It would be good for her to catch a break—she worked so hard, she could probably use it.
And I turned back to my meal on the stove. This was going to be perfect. Not just this day, but everything that lay ahead of it, too. I could hardly wait to see how it turned out.
THE END
Dear reader,
Are you up for another ONS?! ;-)
First of all, thank you so much for reading my book! It’s passionate readers like you that allow me to live my dream and do the thing I love most on earth, which is writing books and entertaining people. As a way of saying thank-you, I’ve included a preview of one my favorite stories – be sure to check it out!
Preview of “One Night Bride”
Chapter 1
Xavier
I hated Vegas. I remembered how much I hated Vegas when I stood there in the lobby of the Bellagio listening to the incessant dinging of the money stealing, soul-sucking contraptions simultaneously begging for my attention. This wasn’t my place; Vegas was never my thing. Unfortunately, being a famous fashion designer and a self-made multi-millionaire, Vegas was something I had to swallow at times. High rollers wanted to look their best. This was why my likeness was on a seventy-foot-tall billboard in the center of the Las Vegas strip. I was wearing only a pair of jeans, no shirt. The caption read “Bare it all, Xavier Dean.” It was titillating. I’d just been named one of the sexiest men of the year, and my PR company was taking advantage of it. One of the reasons I agreed to the billboard was I thought I’d never see it, and yet, here I was.
While I was often here on business, this time I wasn’t. My best friend, Damon Rockwell was holding his bachelor party in Vegas of all the god-awful places, so I was drinking a big gulp of Vegas in a fancy, high octane, one hundred proof glass that scorched my throat as it went down. Damon and I grew up on the same street. We learned to skateboard with one another, and his grandmother made the best spaghetti with meatballs and homemade sauce. I can still taste it. My mother was never one for cooking. We were both raised in a moderate middle-class town where we weathered boyhood travails such as crushes on girls who were aloof and disinterested and learned to deal with the occasional bully. We found and defeated enemies attacking us on the X-box and went head to head, one upping each other in sports. We eventually matured, went to college and found different interests, but we remained friends.
He became a lawyer and a staunch businessman and was marrying a stunning trophy wife in a week. The goal of this boys’ weekend with me and a few of his closest friends was to be mostly drunk and debaucherous, and all was going to plan. I, however, could only take so much drunken revelry and ducked out of the last event, which was a strip club where the girls offered special services after the show. I was not interested. After only twenty-four hours, the hedonistic lifestyle was wearing thin. Contrarily, Damon was enjoying himself. I was not. Standing in the casino with nothing to do, I thought about playing for an instant. I didn’t need to play for more money, I had more than enough for my lifetime and then some.
My clothing brand was one of the most successful menswear brands in the world. I started out with a vision for men’s fashion and built it into a San Francisco-based fashion label which I simply entitled after myself: Xavier Dean Designs. My label nearly ran itself after a decade of success. I worked hard on creating elegant menswear, but I wasn’t so busy I couldn’t go out and have some fun. The trouble was, I wasn’t really having any fun.
I was sitting at the bar trying to focus on the one thing that had caught my eye amid the dinging and clatter. In fact, it nearly dragged my eyes right out of my face. Bent over the craps table was the most perfectly formed ass I’d ever seen. It was round, firm, and delicious. Connected to that perfect ass was a pair of long shapely legs with a tiny little golden purse dangling at her hip.
The dress she wore wasn’t as garish or offensive as some around me, too low cut for their shape or too high hemmed for their size but was an exquisite silhouette on a beautiful form. She was draped languidly over the table, nonchalant and almost bored. She wasn’t trying to entice anyone overtly, but thoughts of taking that ass on the table, holding it still and diving my cock right up into her pussy, were pretty all-consuming. The alcohol haze wasn’t doing anything to subdue my libido, so getting my mind off taking her from behind wasn’t going to happen.
She seemed not to care about what others in the room thought of her. She had rings of golden hair with highlights that shone like strands of gold in the dim light. Her large round eyes made you weep, but her soft full lips were the real draw. I had a hard time taking my eyes off them as they screwed into a sneer when she threw the dice. It must have been habitual, but it was sexy as fuck.
I’d be hard-pressed to find any man in the room not thinking about having their way with her, bent over the table as she was. I liked to wine and dine a woman into bed. Treating women well was my trademark and yet, I’d always leave behind a note the next morning thanking them for the fun without giving the
m so much as an email address. Some found me and tried to pursue something more, but most got the picture; I was only interested in one night. I wasn’t exactly a bastard. I had my reasons for not wanting complications to my already hectic life.
Truthfully, it was much easier for me to commit to a one-night stand than it was to a mature relationship with its inevitable ups and downs, those were not the kinds of ups and downs I was looking for. Sex was fun, sex filled the gaps in my life when they were empty. I could count on one finger the number of truly committed relationships I’d had.
Being in the fashion industry, there was no shortage of exquisite women to take to bed for the night, or sometimes more. One of my biggest issues was variety, there were simply too many to choose from. The other major challenge was a deep buried fear of getting too close. Lauren was, by all standards, one of the most beautiful women on the planet. I’d met her on the catwalk during fashion week. She wore this ridiculous peacock dress, a debut designer’s tour de force, that lit her up like a Cirque du Soleil poster; sexy, intriguing, evocative. It was an image that had you thinking of her long legs being bent over yours, contorting easily to accommodate your “love.”
In reality, she was nothing like the image I, and many others who praised her saw in our minds. She was shy and lovely. She refused me too many times to count, so I settled for friendship. It was my first and only friendship with a woman, and I desperately wanted to fuck her. Friendship with her didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to let my cock get a chance at her; I tried often. I was good at trying. Being rich, I did way more than wine and dine her. I upped the ante with surprise vacations to Bali, weekend trips to Morocco on my private jet, a brand-new Mercedes, and a puppy.
I worked hard to earn her trust and eventually her love, which finally brought me to the glorious moment a year later when we spent an entire day in a New York hotel room in bed. We fucked so hard we were both too sore to move the next day, so in essence, it was two glorious days in bed.
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