“What brought this on?” he wondered. “Not that I’m complaining one bit, but it was unexpected, to say the least.” Once he found the clasp and released it, Red pulled the chain free, turned off the device, and tossed it aside.
Piper tracked its location, not wanting it to get lost in the sheets. She had no idea where he’d procured it, but they were definitely going to be using that baby again.
“I know. I wanted to thank you for not giving up on us, and it seemed like an obvious choice. Plus, I feel like I kind of owed you one. Or even two,” she said.
Red closed his eyes. “How can you say that? After everything that’s happened?”
“I just…feel guilty that I didn’t hear you out sooner. I should’ve trusted you. I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t say that.” His eyes popped open and searched hers. “After what happened to you before, it was totally understandable.”
“But I still could’ve made a better effort to find out the whole story,” Piper said wearily.
Red disengaged carefully from her, then laid back and rolled them to the side. “It’s done, little dove. Let’s not give it more traction than it deserves. We just have to agree to do better in the future.”
She sighed. “You’re right.”
He stroked a hand down her arm thoughtfully. “Listen, there are some things I wanted to run by you. Since your advice about Eva East was so good, I thought maybe I’d better check with you before I screwed anything else up.” Red’s mouth pulled the side in a sardonic little smirk.
Piper laughed.
“No, really,” he said.
Her eyebrows went up, gauging his seriousness. “Okay. What’s up?”
“Now that Trident is stabilizing, we’ve been making some new hires,” Red explained. “We snagged this terrific woman named Daisy to replace one of Rachel’s old cronies in the design department. And we’ve gotten new editors and formatters, but…”
“What?” she prodded.
“I had another idea.” Red looked uncharacteristically sheepish.
“Well, spill it!”
He took a deep breath. “I was looking at some market research a couple of weeks ago, and the numbers surrounding the mystery genre are really interesting. I thought we’d keep Trident romance-only, but what if we added a small mystery imprint, just to test the waters?”
Piper kissed him. “Not a bad idea.” Another kiss. “Mystery readers are nearly as voracious as romance readers.”
Red’s lips followed hers when she pulled away. He murmured against her mouth, “So I’m not crazy? It doesn’t sound bad?”
“No, not at all. It sounds very savvy.” She kissed him again, but he resisted her efforts to take it deeper.
“Mmmm. Now we just need to track down some authors. Don’t suppose you know any of those?” he wondered, idly tracing her ribcage with his fingers.
Piper sat up and pointed at him. “As a matter of fact, I do. Lyla Lawson. She was already with Trident, too—I run into her at conferences all the time. Her books are insane. You can’t put them down. And I bet if you could get her back on board, she’d know other writers you could check out.”
“Excellent.” Red grabbed Piper and pulled her back down against his chest. “Tomorrow, maybe you could give her a call and feel her out. I’ll tell Rob and his team to reach out, too. And later, we can think up a name for the new imprint. Something cool and mysterious.” He traced up the underside of her chin with his tongue.
“Why not now?” Piper giggled.
Red gripped her rear end in his large, hot hands and squeezed.
“Now, we have stuff to do.”
THIRTY-NINE
GUILT WAS A powerful thing. Red was pretty happy he didn’t often have to feel it, because the way it gnawed at you really fucked with your ability to be happy.
When he couldn’t take the heat anymore, he finally said, “Piper, honey, maybe I can talk to Eric Whittier for you. If we can find another house for his sister before she moves into your old place, I bet he’d consider selling it back to you.”
Piper had diluted the majority of Red’s anger at the contractor once she’d explained that Eric’s offer had arisen out of kindness, rather than a desire to take advantage. Still, it bugged Red that the way things had shaken out was not what he’d intended when he’d hired the man.
Piper shook her head, though. “There’s no need,” she said. “I already talked to him. I don’t want the house back.”
That was a surprise, but not necessarily an unwelcome one. “But why?” Red asked. “It was so special to you.”
“Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve realized that most of the trauma I felt was because we’d broken up and because Fredo got lost. Not because I gave up my home.” It was definitely lowering to be put on such an even par with a skinny little cat, but Red let it pass.
“We were not broken up,” he insisted, vehement now. “It was a brief hiccup. That’s all.”
“A hiccup.”
“Barely a blip.”
“I…see,” Piper muttered, eyeing him like he’d lost some IQ points. “Anyway. It occurred to me that even if my grandparents loved their house, it was mainly because of who was in it. They never would’ve wanted me to feel tied down or burdened by the place. Especially if there was somewhere else I’d rather be.”
That sounded promising. Red barely dared to hope, “Is there somewhere else you’d rather be?”
“You might say that,” Piper smiled. “I’ve recently become rather enamored of city life.”
Red snorted. “Sell me another one, little dove.”
“Okay fine. On occasion, I enjoy certain parts of the Northeast.”
He debated whether it was the right time to spring what he’d done on her but figured it didn’t get much better than this. “That’s very interesting,” he drawled. “As it happens, I may have something to show you in a certain part of the Northeast very soon.”
“When will you know for sure?”
Now or never. “Fly up to see me next week,” Red replied. “I’ll know by then.” What he wasn’t sure about was how Piper would take it.
RED ARRANGED FOR him and Piper to fly out to Shelter Island by seaplane before she even got a chance to set foot in his loft. The real estate agent had couriered over keys and a remote control for the gate the day before. Like clockwork, they soon found themselves walking across the driveway pavers of the pretty shingled cottage, with its incomparable view of the harbor.
The breeze blowing in off the water was brisk, making Piper’s cheeks rosy as she looked around. In summer, they’d be sheltered in a green, grassy enclave. The garden off the kitchen would deliver up its herbs and vegetables and flowers, and there was a little red barn that Eric Whittier had already agreed to turn into an office for Piper.
“What is this?” she asked, a hesitant smile flirting at the edges of her lips.
Red took her hand. “Let’s go inside.” She followed him up the steps to the front door with a frown.
“You have keys,” she pointed out.
“I do.”
Inside the foyer, she gasped, completely unable to mask her admiration. Red could hardly blame her—he’d fallen for it in two seconds flat, too.
Then she wheeled on him. “Wait. Why do you have keys?”
Here goes nothing. “Well, after we visited my parents’ house, I started thinking that it would be nice to have our own place. I had a real estate agent look around, and a couple of weeks ago, he showed me this.”
Piper blinked rapidly, her clever brain sifting through the many tempting tidbits he’d just laid out. Her mouth simply said, “And?”
“And I bought it.” Her eyes turned into saucers and her mouth dropped open. Red’s chest expanded with excitement.
“You bought it. Just like that.”
“I wanted to show it to you first,” he explained, “but then this bidding war happened…”
Piper muttered, “Oh, Jesus.”
“You don’t say,” she said drily. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Anyway, I won. So…” Piper grabbed for the carved bench he’d found for the front hall and sank onto it. “Welcome home,” Red told her.
“Red, you—” she looked around with disbelief. “—you bought us a house?”
“What can I say? I seem to have a flair for over-the-top romantic gestures.”
Piper just snorted at that.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he laughed, “I’m as surprised as anyone.” When she didn’t get up and immediately start investigating, Red began to get worried. “Piper? Do you like it? I’m sorry I didn’t ask you, but there was no time. I had to jump on it. And it just seemed so much like you that I…”
She jumped up and threw her arms around him, stretching up onto her toes to smash her mouth clumsily against his. Red wrapped his hand around the back of her head and guided her into place, so he could kiss her more easily.
“I love it,” she managed to say between long swipes of his tongue. “I already love it so much.”
“I love you,” he said. And then, “Even if you weren’t here, you were the deciding factor, you know. We noticed that the owner had a ton of romance books in the library, so my agent—accidentally on purpose—let slip that you were the other buyer. It worked. And the seller left a ton of them for you. Come see.”
In the little library, Piper went straight to the window seat set into a deep alcove and stared out at the steel-gray water. “Oh my God. This place is like something out of a movie.”
On a shelf, Red found the package he’d sent to the agent. He brought it to the small table in the center of the room with a pointed thunk.
“What’s that?” Piper asked, spinning around and studying the wide, flat box cagily.
Red smiled. So suspicious. “Open it and see.”
Her elegant fingers released the ribbon and carefully dismantled the wrapping, then extracted the album within. Red suppressed a chuckle at the cover—Daisy, the new hire in Trident’s design department, had really outdone herself.
Piper scowled down at it, taking a long moment to realize that it was, in fact, her and Red’s faces photoshopped onto the enlarged, old-school romance novel cover. From The Perils of a Pirate’s Woman, Red believed. Out of print now, but a huge seller back in its day—likely due to the entangled, overwrought specimens of passion on its cover.
He’d have to see if he could find a vintage copy somewhere. Shouldn’t be difficult, given how many printings it’d gone through. This version was rarer. One printing. One copy.
He’d renamed this edition Falling for You. Well, actually Wayne had come up with that one after Red’s early efforts had fallen totally flat. As Piper examined it, her face settled into its customary expression of delighted curiosity.
Red congratulated himself. This was absolutely the way to do what he’d been aching to do for a while now. If only the printing hadn’t taken so long.
Piper cracked the cover and turned to the first page. At the top was a large, posed publicity shot, taken for the press releases when she’d signed her new contract with PKM. At the bottom, was the beginning of their story.
“Once upon a time,” she read aloud, “A lonely but dashing pirate met a glorious sorceress.”
Piper looked up at him with laughing eyes, so Red gave her a jaunty salute. “Ahoy,” he said.
She paged through the next couple of pages. More photos, more sentences about the way her staggering beauty made otherwise-strong men weep. One or two asides detailing Red’s undeniable virility and roguish good looks.
Piper paused for a long moment on a photo she’d never seen, another Wayne contribution. They’d been in Red’s office, their heads bent over a galley on his desk—the first one from her new series, the first that PKM would launch into the world.
Red thought it was perhaps her best novel yet, and that was a high bar to clear. His assistant had snapped the photo to prove a point to him, to underline how obvious it was to everyone else that Red was head over heels for the woman beside him. Good thing he’d told them already. There was no hiding it now.
“The pirate needed the woman to work a very specific spell,” Piper read. “One that would ensure untold treasures filled his coffers for years to come.”
Another page. Another picture, this one from Red’s own phone. “The sorceress, being far cleverer than he, decided to work a different spell—one to heal the pirate’s wretched heart.”
In the photo, Piper was in front of her laptop but gazing out the window of her living room, deep in thought as she worked on some story or another. Here in this room, she was staring up at Red, somber now, with suspiciously watery eyes.
“Keep reading,” Red urged. “You’ll never guess what happens.”
Piper huffed out a laugh. “Plot twist?” she asked.
“Yes. And it’s even more fiendish than one of yours.”
On the last page, there was a picture of him down on one knee, holding a ring up to her. In it, Piper was smiling down at Red, hand over her heart—another wonder from Trident’s new, expert designer. Wayne had gleefully shot the photo of Red, making him pose over and over until it was declared perfect. Daisy had then grafted it onto a picture they’d unearthed of Piper at a conference earlier in the year, being charmed by a fan’s cute little dog. Now there was no dog—only Red, heart on display.
She gasped and looked up at the place he’d been standing only a moment before, then rapidly reoriented herself to Red’s current position, on his knee, ring in hand.
“You accepted a ring from me once before,” he said. “Can convince you to do it again?”
“Holy cats,” she sputtered.
“I don’t just want a part of you anymore. I don’t want only some of your days. I want all your days—I want to start every day with you and end each one with you, too.” Red explained. He lifted his grandmother’s beautiful art deco diamond toward Piper as an offering.
“Oh, Red.” She dropped to her knees in front of him and grabbed his arms. Under his sweater, the bulky bandage on his bicep crinkled, and Piper’s eyebrows pulled together. “What’s that?” She poked at it, tilting her head in confusion.
She hadn’t agreed to be his wife yet. Hell, Red hadn’t even gotten a chance to ask her to be his wife yet. That was Piper for you.
He sat back on his heels and pulled his sweater and t-shirt over his head. The big square of gauze was taped to the inside of his arm, and he’d be glad to be rid of it soon. It itched like crazy.
“Oh my God! What did you do to yourself?” she cried.
“Don’t worry, little dove. It’s not bad.”
“It sure looks bad.”
Red grinned, “Why don’t you take it off and see?”
He’d spent hours adding to his tattoo that week. Now, his curling treasure map had a second section, making it look like an antique book. The new page wrapped around the inside of his bicep.
The red dotted line led to a beautiful woman seated at a table with a quill in her hand, books stacked beside her and in piles on the floor. Crouching beside her was a red-haired man with an open treasure chest, two artful, scrolling P’s decorating the side of it.
He was offering her a gold necklace with a heart dangling from it. They stared at each other in affection. On the ground beneath them, lay a carpet decorated with a large red X.
“Red!” Piper gasped, “What did you—good Lord. You added the books, didn’t you? And then some.”
“I did. Plus, the ‘personal thing’ you mentioned. At least, the only personal thing that matters.”
“Treasure?” she teased.
Red rolled his eyes. He still had an undelivered ring in his hand. “You, Piper.”
“That’s me? You made me so pretty. Thanks.”
“X marks the spot,” he said.
“It sure does.”
“So, what do you say, Piper
Mae?” He winced a little at his unintentional rhyme but powered on. “Will you marry me?” Funny, Red sounded so calm. His heart was pounding, though.
Piper launched herself at him unexpectedly, nearly toppling him backward and knocking the black velvet box containing her ring a couple of feet away on the rug. “Yes,” she sobbed. “Oh, yes.”
Red held onto her with one arm and managed to get hold of the box once more. He fumbled the ring out of its nest and slipped it onto her trembling finger.
“That’s some plot twist.” Her voice was impressed but muffled, since her face was pressed into his chest. His skin felt suspiciously damp, and he suspected Piper was trying to hide that she was crying.
Which only made his eyes a bit watery.
“They lived happily ever after,” he murmured into her hair. “In case it wasn’t obvious.”
“It’s how all the best books end,” she told him.
He knew that now. Red didn’t intend to ever forget it.
EPILOGUE
A COUPLE OF weeks later, they found themselves at Anika’s wedding reception in town, huddled in a corner with some of the PKM and Trident employees. They were all too stuffed full of Persian delicacies to even consider dancing yet.
Red kept a possessive hand on Piper’s back as they made small talk with Rob, Wayne, and some others. The bride and groom were out on the floor, grinning from ear to ear and engaged in some complicated routine with the bridesmaids that involved a long knife, cash, and a significant amount of raucous cheering from the respective families.
Red’s cell buzzed insistently in his pocket, but most of the important people in his life were standing right next to him, and he doubted any critical work was being done at either company tonight—everyone was here celebrating.
In the off chance it was Tate or Luca, he pulled it out to check the screen, and lo and behold—Good Cop was calling.
He leaned down to murmur into Piper’s ear. “It’s Luca,” he explained. “Do you mind if I take it?”
The Titan Was Tall (Triple Threat Book 1) Page 38