by Chloe Cox
Chance gave her his most winsome grin. She knew what went unsaid: he was probably done with his former job for a reason. He’d seen a lot of violence and death, stuff he’d never talk about, and if anyone deserved a young retirement running a sex club to the stars, it was Chance.
Lola smiled, linking her arm with his while they both looked over the architectural model. It really was stunning.
“Chance,” she said. “You’re a partner. Couldn’t you take the LA club if you wanted it?”
“You’d think, huh?” he said, smiling back at her. “Wait ‘till you see tomorrow’s surprise.”
“What—”
“All further questions will be answered in noogie form, Theroux. Come and check out this place.”
Lola let him to play with the model on the table. She still had the sealed envelope. She was meant to read the contents, right? She should definitely open it.
Inside she found only a note:
I know Chance will not sing, no matter what he has told me. I hope you extracted a high price for your silence.
I did not tell you about this out of weakness and cowardice, Lola, even if I could not admit it to myself. I’m sorry. It represented one of the myriad ways I could lose you. That is all.
It’s yours if you want it. I hope you will stay.
I love you.
-Roman
Two days later Lola was going out to get coffee—in her sweatpants—when a limo pulled up beside her as she walked up Broadway.
She wasn’t even surprised when the window rolled down.
“Bashir, how you doing?” she said.
“Very well, Lola,” Bashir said. “Get in.”
Lola sighed. She knew by now there was no point in arguing. She got in the limo.
“So he dragged you into this, too, huh?” she said.
“On the contrary, it is my pleasure,” the Sheikh said in that lofty Cambridge accent. He was smiling. Why was everybody smiling every time they sprung one of these things on her?
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“No.”
“Of course. Can we at least stop for coffee?”
Bashir actually laughed out loud. “You are more likely to need a drink.”
Lola looked down. Nope, still wearing sweatpants.
Only a few incredibly tense minutes later, they pulled up to a building that Lola did indeed recognize.
“This is Ford’s corporate office,” she said accusingly.
“Yes.”
“You made me think I was going to some kind of…red carpet thing.”
“Come,” Bashir said, getting out of the limo and extending his hand. He appeared to be enjoying this, nearly as much as Chance had. Lola was momentarily nonplussed at the idea of Bashir singing.
“Well, it’s kinda fun to walk through a law office in sweatpants,” she conceded.
And it was, in a terrible sort of way. Lola made a mental note to send flowers or donuts or a mountain of highly caffeinated espresso beans to this office as soon as she left. All those over-worked associates eyed her comfy sweatpants with just a little too much weariness in their eyes.
Bashir led her to Ford’s office, which she had expected. And Ford was there, also as expected.
Lola couldn’t, however, decipher the vaguely pained expression on Ford’s movie-star face.
“Ok, you two, out with it,” she said.
“I believe you have the floor, Bashir.” Ford really did look distressed. He kept looking down at a stack of papers on his desk.
“Lola,” Bashir said, commanding her attention. “You know about my skills in reading facial expressions?”
Uh oh.
“Yes,” she said, warily. “You can read people like a freaking psychic. Don’t look shocked, Stella told me all about it.”
Bashir looked vaguely put out, like she’d stolen his thunder.
“Bashir, come on. Of course she told me. You’re welcome for setting you two up, by the way.”
“And I will be forever in your debt,” he said with that well-bred formality. “Roman has asked me to return the favor in part by telling you what I saw when I first joined Volare.”
Lola was going to just lose her mind if one more person paused before telling her the big important information they were supposed to tell her. “Which was…?” she said.
“You have been in love with each other since I’ve known you,” Bashir said simply. “You may know that about yourself; that is not my concern at the moment. But you must believe me, Lola, that to the best of my abilities, it has been painfully obvious to me that Roman has been in love with you since I first met him. It was written on his face every time he looked at you.”
Lola looked from Bashir to Ford, and back to Bashir. She was, she supposed, in some kind of shock. To their credit, both men waited patiently for her mouth to link back up with her brain.
“Why the hell didn’t you say something?” she finally managed to get out.
“What would you have done?” Bashir asked gently.
Lola got his point. She would have laughed him off, freaked out, and run for the hills.
“Roman wasn’t ready either,” Bashir went on. He seemed fairly unconcerned. “I tell you this now so that you know that, at the very least, he is telling you the truth. He says that you can trust him.”
Lola was trying very hard to choke back tears. She had promised herself that she wasn’t going to cry anymore; she’d already used up her crying quota for possibly the next decade.
The thought of Roman being in love with her, all this time that she’d been in love with him, was testing her vow.
She turned on Ford. She had not forgotten that he must have known about the LA expansion the whole time. He hadn’t been obligated to inform her, since she wasn’t a partner, but that didn’t mean it didn’t rankle. “And what’s your role in all this, Mr. Co-Conspirator?”
Ford sighed. “This,” he said, pointing at the stack of papers in front of him. “And this,” he said again, brandishing another of those envelopes.
Lola took the envelope, but hesitated when she heard Ford clear his throat.
“I’m supposed to explain what this is,” he said. “Please understand, this just pains me, as a lawyer. The pre-nup I helped craft for you two was just a thing of beauty, honestly. And this…this undoes it all,” he sighed again. “Lola, sign where indicated, and you’ll own every single one of Roman’s assets. You don’t have to stay married to him. You don’t even have to see him again if you don’t want to. He’s just giving it all to you.”
Lola tried to swallow, and found her mouth was dry. She went and took a drink of water from Ford’s bar, then changed her mind and made herself a vodka.
Then she coughed for thirty seconds straight.
“Ok, maybe too early for vodka,” she said. “Seriously, though, this is ridiculous.”
Both men shrugged. They seemed entirely too smug about the whole thing.
“What if I don’t sign?” she demanded. “What happens then?”
“I imagine Roman’s taxes get extremely complicated,” Bashir laughed.
Ford stood, and Lola collapsed in the offered seat. “I just…I mean…what?” she said.
Ford finally smiled. “It is worth it, though, for the look on your face. Open the envelope and read the card. Maybe he explains this lunacy in there.”
Shaking, Lola ripped away the envelope and fumbled with the card. There, in Roman’s aggressive hand, was another short note.
You already hold my heart in your hands. The rest is nothing.
I love you.
-Roman
“What does it say?” Ford asked.
But Lola was crying too hard to answer.
Three nerve-wracking days passed. Three days in which Lola looked for surprises around every corner, in which she had all the time in the world to wonder about what Roman had planned next, and, worse, about what her reaction would be. She felt like a total jerk for still havi
ng reservations after everything he’d already done, but the truth was, he hadn’t addressed her single biggest worry: that he only truly had room in his heart for Samantha.
Honestly, she still wasn’t sure it mattered if that were the case. It wouldn’t change how she felt about him, that was for sure—she’d assumed all along that he’d always carry a torch for Samantha. But she did want to know what she was getting into. She wanted to make sure he wouldn’t wake up in a month, or a year, or ten years, and hate her for not being Samantha. Or if that was a risk…she just felt she had to know.
Lola was a wreck by the time her erstwhile doorman called up on that third day.
“A Mr. Roman Casta here to see you,” he said.
“Oh shit, seriously?”
“…Yes?”
“Oh God. Oh God.” She looked down—sweatpants again? Seriously? She was never wearing sweatpants ever again. Ever. She was going to burn all of her sweatpants. She sighed. “Ok, send him up.”
She raced into her bedroom and tore through her closet, finally having to face facts: the only clean items were her favorite jeans—which were not so bad, really—and another one of those off-the-shoulder tops that she’d bought in a brief off-the-shoulder frenzy a few months back. Well, at least Roman liked them. She threw her clothes on just in time for the knock on the door; just as well she didn’t have time for the mirror.
Theroux, what are you so nervous about? He’s winning you over, remember?
Then she opened the door, and saw Roman for the first time in nearly a week.
Her mouth stopped working.
She leaned on the door for support.
She felt hot all over again.
He was dressed down, for the first time that she could remember, in jeans that were slung low on his hips and a white t-shirt that did nothing to hide the physique underneath. He held a motorcycle jacket in his hands, and his coal black hair was attractively mussed, like he’d been running his hands through it.
And his eyes.
Oh God, his eyes. They simmered. Smoldered. Held her in place.
“If you keep looking at me like that, I’ll never get a chance to say what you deserve to hear,” he finally said. Neither of them had moved.
Lola thought really, really hard about whether she could force herself to stop looking at him like that.
“Lola,” he warned, “This is important. Control yourself.”
And he had the cheek to grab her around the waist, kiss her, and give her ass a good squeeze.
He let out a long, slow breath. “I’ve been waiting for that for a long time,” he said.
“Roman…” she breathed. She was ready to jump him in the hallway.
“Not now,” he said, smacking her on the ass again. “I have something to show you first.”
“If you want to go anywhere other than inside,” she said, deadly serious, “you need to stop touching my ass.”
She should have known better.
“Oh, Lola,” he said with an evil grin, “You have forgotten which of us is the dominant?”
In the blink of an eye he’d pushed her back into the apartment and up against the wall in her tiny entryway. She moaned, already flying just by being so close to him, just by being able to smell him, and then he pushed his hand down the front of her jeans.
He found her already wet.
And then he stopped.
“Lola,” he said, his fingers so, so close, “I want you to think about how many blows you’ve just earned on the spanking bench. Don’t forget what we are in the bedroom. Keep that in mind when you think about what I have to say today, yes?”
“Oh God,” she said. “Roman…”
He took her face in his free hand and looked her in the eyes just before he kissed her again. This time it was longer, slower. Languorous.
Loving.
“Lola, please,” he said. “Please let me show this to you. Then you make your decision, yes?”
“Ok,” she said. “But if you want me thinking clearly, you really can’t keep touching me.”
Roman smiled. “I understand that completely,” he said. “Believe me.”
He led her on what must have looked like to an outside observer a perfectly pleasant springtime walk to Central Park. To Lola, it was like a suspense sequence in an action film.
Oh God, what comes next?
Is it now?
Now?
By the time they’d turned towards Strawberry Fields she had decided that, if nothing else, she was definitely not suited for a career in espionage.
Suddenly, Roman came to a stop. They were in front of a bench. Just an ordinary bench. Nearby there were some kids playing ultimate frisbee, a couple playing hooky from work, lying on a blanket and ignoring the world around them. The whole place was full of sun-dappled joy, and then there was this bench, just another oasis of privacy and calm in the heart of the city.
“What am I looking at?” she asked gently.
“This is where Samantha told me she loved me,” Roman said. “It’s where we used to come on our walks. It is where I proposed. I have a lot of history with this bench,” he said, smiling wryly.
Lola tried to figure out how to feel. Her first instinct was that this was all wrong. She didn’t want to be a footnote to his life with Samantha. She wasn’t Samantha. At the very least…
Roman seemed to notice her discomfort. He bent down and tilted her chin toward him.
“No, Lola, no,” he said. “That is the point I wanted to make. It is my history. My past. Not my future.”
“Roman…”
“I brought you here to help me say goodbye,” he said. “Listen, carina. Samantha was perfect for the man I was then. I was perfect for her. She died, and it changed me. In some ways for the better, in some ways…”
Lola laughed, wiping away a tear. “Ok, yeah, I get that.”
“She was home to me then. Then she died, and I had no home. You were the first light I saw. The only one, in all those years. I have been very, very stupid, and very, very stubborn, but you are home to me now. Can you understand that I did not think any one man would be so lucky as to have two soul mates?”
Lola looked up at him sharply and he laughed, drawing her close. “You would never expect me to use that phrase, ‘soul mates’, no?”
“No,” she said, mimicking his accent.
“I feel guilty, it’s true. So many people in the world live difficult lives, that this…that you,” he said, his voice breaking, “You are like an embarrassment of riches to me.”
They had been drawing closer to each other the whole time, and now Lola couldn’t hold back anymore. She put her arms around Roman’s waist, and, just slightly vengefully, her hands in his back pockets.
“Roman, I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “Are you going to ask me?”
His eyebrows went up. “I planned a different event, so you’d have your own place, your own—”
“I swear, Roman, if you make me wait any longer, I’m going to lose my mind,” she said. “Besides, it’s kind of…she’s part of who you are, too, Roman. She shouldn’t be gone completely.”
Lola thought she saw those dark eyes shimmer a bit, but then Roman bent down to brush his lips against her forehead. He murmured something that she couldn’t hear, and then pressed his forehead to hers.
“Will you marry me, Lola?” he said. “Truly?”
She gave up on her ‘no tears’ policy and let them stream freely as she kissed him, lightly and tenderly and passionately, and hopefully forever.
When they caught their breath, Lola flashed a mischievous grin.
“I dunno,” she said. “How much money do you have?”
She wished she had a photo of Roman’s face. Lola took advantage of his stunned silence to grab the signatory pages from Ford’s stack of papers out of her back pocket and stuff them, crumpled and useless, into Roman’s pocket.
“I don’t want this, you nut,” she said. “I don’t even know what to do with it. J
ust freaking marry me, ok?”
Even the blissful college couple on the blanket looked up when they heard Lola’s shriek, only to see a tall, broad shouldered man carrying a very happy looking red-haired woman out of the park and over his shoulder.
epilogue
Roman couldn’t tell if the wedding was, so far, really this insane, or if he was merely in some sort of altered state of excitement, waiting for Lola.
A tiny, intense little blonde woman named Dagmar had ordered him, in severe tones, to relax. And it was just as well Dagmar had insisted, for security reasons, that they hold the ceremony at Volare itself—Roman couldn’t imagine everyone would be quite so ‘relaxed’ anywhere else.
Apparently Lola had decreed that no one was to be stressed out or unhappy at this wedding, and all of the guests had eagerly taken her up on that particular offer. Stella was off somewhere, preparing Lola, Chance was flirting with every single woman he could find, Ford was enamored with a beautiful blonde Roman recognized from the theater, and Dagmar was running a series of photoshoots involving bridesmaids and Volare’s best BDSM equipment like a sexy military campaign.
Ava, Jackson’s own wife-to-be, and Catie were both happily taking part. Jake and Jackson were watching them, perhaps even more happily.
It was almost a carnival sort of atmosphere, and the only thing it was missing, the only thing that mattered, was Lola.
“Where is she?” Roman exclaimed.
Bashir laughed. “I don’t think it will be long. I noticed Chance has disappeared, so that is, I would think, a good indication that things are moving along. How many roles is he playing?”
“All of them, I think,” Roman said. He had asked Chance to be his best man, and Lola had insisted that Chance give her way. By mutual agreement, and since they were, already, legally married, they informed Chance that he would also be officiating. Roman suspected that this was Lola’s attempt to keep her cousin out of trouble. He doubted it would be particularly effective, but he thought it was sweet that she tried.