“Jennifer,” Lisa said when she pulled herself away from Tank and looked at me. “It’s here. I’ve finally got a date!”
I was a mess, but I didn’t care. “I’m so happy for both of you,” I said as I wiped the tears from my eyes and walked over to her. “I can’t even tell you.”
At that moment, we crossed the room and held each other for several moments while we whispered in each other’s ears that Tank had come through—and that June was only six months away.
“I’m going to get married,” she said to me.
“And when you do,” I said in a low voice that only she was meant to hear. “Especially to that man? Trust me on this, Lisa, it’s going to be the happiest day of your life. You’ll see, because after I married the love of my life, I already know that to be true. When you marry Tank, you will never be the same again. Not with that kind of love surrounding you. So cheers to you, love. He did the right thing, Lisa. He came through. He finally did it—and with style.” And then, in a voice everyone was meant to hear, I said, “Let’s celebrate!”
“Hear, hear!” Blackwell said. “Somebody give me another martini!”
“You know, after what just happened, I think that I might,” I said.
“Congratulations!” Epifania called out.
“Love to each of you,” Kate said.
“And my love to you, Tank,” Lisa said when she walked back to him. “Thank God we met. Thank God that you gave me a chance when I first met you. And thank you for putting up with me and all of my damned zombies. I’ll love you forever, Mitch McCollister. And that’s a promise I hope you feel in your heart and soul—because I do love you, Tank. And I can’t wait to be your wife!”
EPILOGUE
WHEN I AWOKE THE NEXT morning after a night of making love to my husband—which had been so off the charts, it was one for the record books—it was Christmas day.
The first Christmas Alex and I would share with our son.
From the robust smells of freshly brewed coffee that wafted up from the kitchen below, I already knew that Alex was up and preparing something special for us, which made me smile as I stretched out my arms and swiped a few strands of hair away from my face. Alex loved to cook, and from what I was smelling now? It already was clear that it was going to be delicious.
I looked at the clock on the bedside table, saw that it was just after eight, and then I sat up in bed and looked out the wide expanse of windows in front of me. It was snowing hard in the city—and on Christmas day—which would make this Christmas even more memorable.
Before I got out of bed, I saw a note on Alex’s pillow: “Care to join us downstairs? Aiden and I are making a killer breakfast for you.”
They are? And how is that going?
Quickly, I put on a red-silk robe before I hurried down the stairs and saw my husband naked except for his boxer shorts. He was holding Aiden, who was swaddled in the same blue blanket he’d slept in last night.
“Good morning, beautiful,” Alex said.
“Good morning to you,” I said when I walked over to give him and Aiden a kiss. “I can’t believe that he’s asleep,” I said in a soft voice as I looked down at him. “This is unheard of.”
“I think he had too many martinis last night,” Alex said.
“Not unlike Blackwell. I should feed him soon.”
“Not yet—he’s still asleep and content. When he wakes and wants his mother, he’s all yours. In the meantime, Aiden and I have managed to make you and me a frittata.”
I cocked my head at him. “You were able to make a frittata with a baby in your arms?”
“In fact, I was, Mrs. Wenn.”
“Then color me impressed, Mr. Wenn. Because that involves peeling and dicing potatoes.”
“It wasn’t so hard,” he said. “Aiden was more than cooperative. And it’s the same recipe that my parents’ chef Michelle used to make for me when I was a kid.”
“Michelle was like a mother to you. In fact, she was the mother you should have had, just as Blackwell is the mother I should have had.”
“True enough. Michelle knew that I loved this dish so much that she used to make it for me whenever I wanted it, especially since my mother wanted nothing to do with cooking and my father always was at work. The recipe is actually simple. A few eggs, some diced potatoes, basil, a bit of milk and ricotta, some spinach and parmesan, and a little salt and pepper. Mix it up in a bowl, pour it into an oven-proof pan, and you’re pretty much good to go. It should be done in ten minutes or so. Want some coffee?”
“I’d love a cup,” I said to him. “But you’ve got Aiden in your arms. Let me get it.”
“As you noted, I had Aiden in my arms when I diced those potatoes,” he said. “So pouring you a cup isn’t a problem. Now sit down at the bar, and let me get it for you. Today, Aiden and I are treating you.”
Could I love you even more than I already do, Alex? I thought. No—not by far.
As he poured coffee into a mug for me, he held Aiden tight to his bare chest and I just soaked it all in. My son was being held against my husband’s chest while Alex deftly poured me a cup of coffee as if he’d done this dozens of times before. Since I liked my coffee black, he simply handed it to me with a grin when he was finished pouring.
“What’s with the grin?” I asked.
“I’m just happy,” he said. “This is our first Christmas together with our boy, and it’s snowing. I mean, come on—it’s snowing on Christmas day. That almost never happens, so let’s call it what it is,” he said.
“A Christmas miracle.”
“Exactly. When I woke up this morning and saw the snow, I couldn’t wait to get up and get breakfast started so that I could celebrate today with Aiden and you.”
“And Aiden slept through everything,” I said as I sipped my coffee. “How can that be?” And then it came to me. “You know what?”
“What’s that?”
“You might be that coveted husband known in certain circles as the ‘child whisperer.’ Because at this time of morning, Aiden is hungry, which he usually makes perfectly clear to the world.”
“Maybe he was mesmerized by my cooking skills,” Alex said. “Because he watched me do all of it.”
“When did Helga leave?” I asked.
“An hour ago?”
“She has her quirks, but she did well by us,” I said.
“I couldn’t agree more—especially after last night, when I got you alone...”
“About last night,” I said. “You were amazing.”
“As if you weren’t?”
“I wish we could do it again right now, but that would be selfish of me.”
“Once we’ve opened presents and Aiden is sleepy, maybe we can?”
“Deal me in.”
“Consider it done.”
“When you took Aiden from Helga, had she already fed him? You know, from the bottle?”
He nodded. “This morning, Aiden drank from the bottle,” he said. “Which is a good sign.”
“To say the least. Let’s consider it another Christmas miracle. And speaking about miracles, how about last night?” I said.
“You mean when I was between your legs?”
“Well, there’s that. And there’s also what happened between Tank and Lisa.”
“My main man finally stepped up to the plate.”
“Lisa was fretting over this, but now she officially has a date. I’m thrilled for them.”
“Same here. It was about time they sealed the deal.”
At that moment, the oven’s timer went off, and Alex quickly shut off the stove before the beeping could awaken Aiden. When he removed the frittata from the oven, it looked golden, crispy, and delicious.
“Michelle taught you well,” I said. “Because that looks amazing.”
“I wish she was still alive so that you could have met her. She was the one person who grounded me and made me feel safe in ways that my parents never did.”
I looked at him when
he said that, and my heart reached out to him. One of the things that bonded us together is that both of us had been scarred by our parents, but saved by our mother figures. And because of that alone, I knew the depths of his feelings about Michelle—and I honored them because I knew just how profound those feelings could be. What would my life look like today without Blackwell in it? And what would Alex’s life look like without Michelle’s influence?
We got lucky, I thought. God, did we get lucky, in so many ways...
“So,” Alex said as he poked a knife into the center of the frittata. “This is done. How about if we have some before junior wakes up? After that—and once you’ve fed him—we can open the presents beneath the tree and enjoy the rest of the day together.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said to him.
In the end, it was more than perfect. The breakfast Alex made for us was fabulous, Aiden woke up soon after we’d finished eating, and then I fed him in the bathroom off our foyer before I joined Alex in the living room to open presents.
As I sat on the sofa with Aiden in my arms, Alex knelt next to the tree and started opening present after present for Aiden, who was in such a coma after his feeding, he just looked on without a sound, as if he didn’t give a damn about any of it. And why would he?
But Alex and I did.
With each new comforter, toy or pair of clothes that were offered to him by either us or our friends, Aiden just kept looking up at me with eyes that were so blue, they matched his father’s. They were a brilliant turquoise that I hoped would never change. Because Alex’s eyes were magical. Never in my life had I seen such an intensity of color, and I prayed that our son would inherit the depth of that color as he grew older—as well as the depth of his father’s heart.
With Alex sitting with his legs crossed in front of us—and laughing as he opened each gift with a flourish in an effort to get a rise out of Aiden—I felt an overwhelming sense of completeness.
Finally, we were here.
Alex and I now had the family that had been denied us. I looked at him as he held up this present and that present for Aiden, and as I watched him interact with our son, I committed the moment to memory. Because this day? This morning? It was everything that I’d dreamt it would be. Alex and I had our baby, and we were more in love now than we’d ever been.
As the knowledge of that sank in, I held my child close to my heart, I blew Alex a kiss with my free hand, and when he tossed me a kiss of his own, I thought I never could be as happy as I was at that moment.
THANK YOU FOR READING Annihilate Them: Holiday. I hope you enjoyed it! Coming up next is a new, long-awaited book in the Unleash Me series—Unleash Me: Wedding. I know that many of you have asked for a new story about Lisa and Tank, and I plan to deliver a juicy one.
If you are interested in reading more about Kate and Ben, I’m including the first chapter of A Dangerous Widow on the next several pages. This is a second-chance stand-alone novel loosely set in the Annihilate Me world, and it’s filled with romantic suspense. Here is the book’s description:
Five years after her beloved husband’s death, Kate Stone suddenly learns that it was no accident. Instead, due to a chance encounter with a psychic, she discovers that it was a full-on, calculated, cold-blooded murder.
Initially, Kate rejects the idea. How could Michael possibly have been murdered? All of the evidence surrounding his death suggests that it was an accident.
Enter Ben Cade, the first love of Kate’s life—a man she hasn’t seen in sixteen years. Now a former SEAL turned private investigator, Ben agrees to help Kate learn the truth. Soon, the love they once shared for each other begins a slow simmer—just as chaos ignites around them as twists, turns, death threats and deceptions abound.
Enjoy the excerpt! The A Dangerous series continues in 2017 with A Dangerous Agenda.
A Dangerous Widow
by
Christina Ross
PROLOGUE
New York City
October
JUST HOURS BEFORE HIS brutal and unexpected death, Michael Stone woke to greet the day just as he had every day since he’d married Kate seven years ago—with optimism, with a hunger to tackle the day head on and to see what would come of it, and with the same burning sense of love he had for his wife.
In the master suite of their Park townhouse, he looked over at the clock on the bedside table and then turned onto his side, came up close behind Kate, kissed her on the base of the neck, and held her next to him as she woke up.
“It can’t be morning yet,” she said.
“Like clockwork, the globe has turned.”
“Didn’t we just go to bed?”
“Technically, we went to bed around eleven. But in reality, we went to sleep around twelve-thirty. You know, after I had my way with you.”
“That was nothing short of a marathon.”
“It was meant to be one. And let’s just call this day what it is—a celebration. StoneTech remains mine. Thank God I didn’t sell it.”
When she turned to face him, Michael thought how beautiful she was, even fresh from the throes of sleep. He watched her sweep her long brown hair away from her face before she leaned in to kiss him.
“Sorry about the morning breath,” she said when they parted. Her brown, almond-shaped eyes sparkled at him. “But consider it my gift to you—if you weren’t awake before, you certainly are now.”
“I’d exchange morning breath with you any day, love. And Kate, I want to thank you again for listening to me over the past week, and for helping me come to the decision I made.”
“You made the right call, Michael. I know how difficult it was for you to do what you did, but in the end, StoneTech is your baby. You’re the one who built it into what it is today. You’re the one who created a company that apparently everyone wants, and for good reason. You’ve turned it into a billion-dollar powerhouse. Let’s just be grateful that you never took the company public, because if you had, anyone with serious capital reserves—such as Apple, for instance—could have come in with an aggressive takeover strategy, and you’d be dealing with a whole host of other problems right now. I know that yesterday was hard on you because you let down two of your closest friends, but in comparison to a hostile takeover, that was minor. At least all you had to do was to give them an honest explanation for why you weren’t going to sell StoneTech, and then walk away from the deal that they proposed to you.”
“The deal that I’d pretty much promised them would happen,” he said.
“You had the right to change your mind. But I get it. I understand how you feel about letting people down, especially when it comes to Mark and Tom. They thought that everything was set to go. Legal was present, the papers had been drawn up, and everyone was excited for the buyout to happen. But in the end? It was your choice not to sign those papers. Yours hardly is the first deal to fall through in this city, that’s for sure. And it won’t be the last. We both know it—and so do they.”
She kissed him again on the lips. “How about some coffee?”
“I’d love some coffee.”
“Then let me make us both a cup. Because with the slate of meetings I have in front of me today—and after what you did to me last night—let’s just say that this girl needs one. Or three. Probably three.”
She slid out of bed, and he admired her naked body as she crossed the room with the same unaffected confidence that had attracted him to her the moment they first met in grad school at NYU.
Back then, each had been pursuing their graduate degrees in business, and when they met, the mutual attraction was as swift as it was powerful. Two years later, the summer after they graduated, they married in a small ceremony that included only family and close friends, because, at that point in their lives, they were so broke, they couldn’t afford a large wedding.
Each had hailed from modest backgrounds, and with hefty student loan debts hovering over them, there literally was no money for the sort of big, expensive wedding Mi
chael wished he could have given Kate.
And look at us now, he thought as he watched her slip into a silky white robe. Christ, we’re lucky.
At thirty, Kate Stone was a senior vice president of finance for Bank of America in Manhattan. At thirty-one, Michael headed a multi-billion-dollar company that had made its fortune on the encryption software he’d written and perfected. It was now considered the industry standard in data protection.
StoneTech had been revising and selling versions of its software for the past seven years. Its clients included the government, the banking, insurance, medical, retail, and hospitality industries, as well as the airline industry, the global marketplace in its many forms, and also a whole host of other corporations and businesses that needed to ensure their clients that their personal data was locked down.
That’s where StoneTech shined—and that’s where Michael Stone had made his unlikely fortune in only a matter of a few short years. It was his deep affection for what he’d built that had stopped him from signing over his company—despite the three billion dollars he would have reaped in the process.
Neither he nor Kate denied that the lure of that kind of money was enticing. But the more he thought about the deal and giving up StoneTech—and the more he talked to Kate, who was against it because she thought that he’d eventually come to regret it—the more he realized that she was right. He would come to regret it. Until he and Kate decided to have children, which each wanted sooner rather than later, StoneTech was his child for now. With new software in the works, there was a whole host of other opportunities to explore that excited him.
He wondered what he would have done with his life if he’d sold it. Since the contract had carried with it a non-compete clause, he couldn’t have designed a better version of his encryption software. So, where would he have gone next? Where would he have fit in? How could he ever duplicate that kind of success? Knowing that he couldn’t unnerved him, and so, with Kate’s support, he decided to keep the company, despite the anger and disappointment of too many people to count.
Holiday: Annihilate Them, #2 Page 20