I looked up at Annabel and Iris, standing so quietly next to Will P., who had Ezra in his arms. I grinned over at Hanna and her Will, who were taking in the scene in the room with silent wonder.
Wait.
Eleven faces.
Will, Hanna, Max, Sara, Annabel, Iris, Ezra, Will, George . . .
I lifted my chin to Jensen, who stood at the periphery with his arm around Pippa.
“Congrats, guys,” he said, grinning as he looked around. “Everyone brought baby blankets or flowers. We . . . ah . . .”
“We brought booze,” Pippa finished with a salute, handing me a bottle of Patrón.
“Thanks,” I said, laughing as I crossed the room to shake Jensen’s hand and then bend, kissing Pippa’s cheek. “I will make use of both. So, this.” I waved a finger between them. “It’s a thing.”
He nodded. “It’s definitely a thing.”
Hanna smacked his arm. “They didn’t tell me it’s a thing.”
“I was going to,” her brother said, laughing, “and then you split to New York, so we followed you here!”
“I feel like I should apologize,” Chloe said from across the room.
The group stared at her, our collective brow furrow felt in the ringing, confused silence.
“Oh fudge off, glassholes,” she growled. “I feel like I should, but I’m not going to.”
“Oh, thank God,” Max said on an exhale.
“The bitch is back!” George crowed.
“You’re fired,” Chloe shot out.
“He works for me, sweetie,” Sara reminded her in her gentle refrain we’d all heard a hundred times.
“And be nice,” George told Chloe, reaching out with his left hand and dropping his fingers to show us a gleaming silver band. “Or you won’t be my monster of honor.”
“Your Best Bitch?” she asked in a reverent whisper.
“Right up there at my side,” George said, “reminding me I don’t deserve him.”
Apparently my wife wasn’t completely recovered from her delicate emotional state, because she burst into tears at the sight, waving George over so she could hug him.
“You too, Will Perkins,” she insisted, reaching out with her free arm.
Jokingly, Will Sumner leaned against the wall as if to steady himself from the rolling thunder of the world cracking wide open and eating us all. But, in fact, the room remained perfectly still. Chloe hugged George, George hugged Chloe, and—to all of our surprise and relief—the apocalypse never rained down.
I gazed at my wife, propped up in bed, beaming from ear to ear and talking to the two men about their upcoming wedding and the adventure of our daughter’s arrival. Sara stared hungrily at the baby in Max’s arms, and I wondered how desperate she was to be finished with what was clearly her most challenging pregnancy. Will and Hanna crouched on the floor, listening to Annabel tell them an elaborate story about a butterfly who lived in the flowers they brought. Pippa’s phone rang, and she and Jensen walked over to Max and Sara, letting Ruby and Niall meet my baby over FaceTime.
My parents burst into the room, Henry and family in tow, and even the large private suite became nearly too small to hold us all. They moved across the room in a sea of embraces to the new baby, taking turns holding her, smelling her, proclaiming her to be the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen.
My brother’s two children sat on the floor with Max and Sara’s kids, playing in the baskets of flowers. Normally I would have encouraged them to keep the petals from falling onto the floor and getting smashed into the linoleum but . . . oddly, that obsessive tightness was gone. “Tidy” was a minor battle, one not worth my time. The battles worth fighting were the ones that protected my family, the enormous daily battle of working to make our world a better place for everyone. The battles worth fighting were the ones that rested on my shoulders as the father of a daughter—raising her to be confident, and strong, and safe.
Make a fucking mess with those flowers, kids.
“Enough hogging her,” I said, pushing through the crowd and taking my daughter into my arms. She was such an odd paradox of small and substantial, with tiny, tight fists and wide, searching eyes. I sat on the bed next to Chloe, leaning against the pillows and feeling her head come to rest on my shoulder. We stared, in love, at the little girl.
“Maisie,” she whispered.
“Lillian.”
Chloe turned her face to me and shook her head, jaw set. “Maisie.”
What could I do but kiss her?
“To get the best woman in the world,” I whispered, “I had to start with the basics: Love her as she is, not as you want her to be. Become the person she can’t live without. Be her right-hand man. Learn what she needs, and she won’t give you up, not for anything in the world.”
I had become the person she couldn’t live without. I had become her right-hand man . . . and the father of her child. And it just so happened, every single day, I was the luckiest bastard alive.
Acknowledgments
With this, the final Beautiful, we thought we might order a whole set of buttons to bring to our signings: one design for each character. Readers could pick the female and male character they related to most. We thought this would be easy—a quick bit of fun swag to take home! Alas, we were wrong.
For one, holy crap, that’s a lot of buttons. But more important, our expectation that readers would walk up, easily choose their two favorite characters while we chatted and signed their book, and then head on with their day was wonderfully, surprisingly inaccurate.
We didn’t expect readers to struggle so much with which buttons to choose. We didn’t anticipate that each person who came to our table would see a little of themselves in all the characters. Maybe they yearned for Chloe’s fire but related more naturally to Sara’s quiet strength. Maybe they liked the idea of a Bennett but were happily married to a Niall. It was the most wonderful of revelations—to have written a cast of characters to which so many people relate. Did we do what we set out to do? Did we create women who are as varied as the vivacious, strong women who read them? We hope so. But we know we can do better. We can be more diverse. We can better capture the world we live in. You are all beautiful, and each of you who tells us what you love, and what you want to see from us, makes every second of the hard parts worth it.
Never stop being as open, and honest, and hungry, as you are. It’s how we are as readers, too. It’s precisely how we love you.
And none of this could have happened without some very important people. We would be lost without our agent, Holly Root, who signed us for a book that didn’t get bought by a publisher but saw something she liked enough to keep us around. It’s proof that you never know which book will take off, so to all the writers out there: Keep writing. Start the next thing. Lift those weights in words.
Our incredible editor, Adam Wilson, has the longest, shiniest, most luxurious hair in the business and loves us even though we ask him if we can braid it. We’ve now published fourteen books together, and every bit of feedback makes us better. Thank you for your patience and everything you do.
Kristin Dwyer is the best publicist in the world. Full stop. Thank you for being our Precious and helping our books get out into the world. You always do so good, girl.
We truly love our entire Simon & Schuster/Gallery family: Jen Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Carolyn Reidy, Paul O’Halloran, Liz Psaltis, Diana Velasquez, Melanie Mitzman, Theresa Dooley, the tireless sales force that works to get our books on the shelves (we love each and every one of you), and every person who dots an i, or transports a box of books, or ever has to type the words Christina Lauren. We hope you heart-dot both i’s, by the way. We are so lucky to have you all.
It’s hard enough to write books, and it might be even harder to tell someone what’s wrong with them. Thank you to our prereaders, Erin Service, Tonya Irving, and Sarah J. Maas. To Lauren “Drew” Suero, who has been there since the start and keeps our social media train running. Heather Carrier, when we
ask you for something sparkly and pretty and Oh could we have it by tomorrow?, you never even flinch (or maybe you do, but we’d never know because email ha ha ha). Thank you to all the bloggers who review, tweet, post, Instagram, skywrite, or just tell a friend about our books. You put your heart and precious time into our books to help them find new homes, and without you, we’re just two gals with a computer.
To our families who have stood on the sidelines and cheered us on, loved us despite the deadline mania, travel, and fish sticks and frozen peas for dinner: you always have the perfect I love yous just when we need them. We couldn’t have done this without you.
And to the funniest, most generous readers in the world, even those of you we’ve never met, or never see on The Twitter or That Facebook. Thank you for letting us into your homes and your hearts. Thank you for following us on this journey and for loving our characters as much as we do. We have so many more stories to come and can’t wait to share them with you.
(PS: Bennett is still waiting for you in his office.)
Lo, you are the best friend I’ve ever had. We’ve traveled the world and you still put up with my snoring; we’ve almost been arrested together, got matching tattoos, and took pictures in a La Perla dressing room just to see if it was really possible. I can’t wait to see what dumb stuff we do next. ~PQ
PQ, I look at the books on the shelf and still can’t believe we get to do this, together every day. I am the luckiest Lolo. Meet you at the airport? ~Lo
© ALYSSA MICHELLE 2013
Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners/besties/soulmates and brain-twins Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA Today, and #1 international bestselling authors of the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series, Sublime, and The House.
You can find them online at christinalaurenbooks.com, Facebook.com/ChristinaLaurenBooks, or @ChristinaLauren on Twitter.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Christina-Lauren
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BOOKS BY CHRISTINA LAUREN
The Beautiful Series
Beautiful Bastard
Beautiful Stranger
Beautiful Bitch
Beautiful Bombshell
Beautiful Player
Beautiful Beginning
Beautiful Beloved
Beautiful Secret
Beautiful Boss
Beautiful
Wild Seasons
Sweet Filthy Boy
Dirty Rowdy Thing
Dark Wild Night
Wicked Sexy Liar
Young Adult Titles
Sublime
The House
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Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books trade paperback edition October 2016
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Cover image © Volodymyr Leshchenko/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-2799-1
ISBN 978-1-5011-2800-4 (ebook)
Beautiful Page 30