She yanked the wheel in a sharp right, the tires squealing as she pulled along the curb and cut the engine. In seconds, she was out of her car, and rushing over to him. He held a bouquet of sunflowers in his hand, and the sight of them made her breath catch.
“Hi,” she said, as he took off his shades and met her gaze.
“Hi.”
Then he wrapped his arms around her, and she did the same, grasping his waist. The flowers pressed against her back. His sunglasses clattered to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry I left last night.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she said.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when it happened.”
“I’m sorry you had to find out like that.”
He lifted her chin with his fingers, raising her face. “I guess we’re both sorry.”
She flashed a rueful smile. “We say that a lot don’t we?”
He nodded, but kept his arms around her. She was glad he didn’t want to let go. She wanted him to hold her.
“Maybe because we fight a lot,” he said softly. “Maybe that’s just too hard a habit for us to break.”
“I think it might be. I just want us to keep coming back together.”
He sighed into her hair, and tugged her close again. “Me, too.”
“I’m glad you didn’t walk away,” she said, looping her hands tighter around his strong waist.
“I came back. I told you I would. I meant it, Shan. I’m not ever walking away from you. As long as you’ll have me, I will always be here.”
She wrenched back to look him in the eyes again. “You,” she said, as she ran her hands along his shirt, “are all I want. When you left, all I wanted was to see you again. For you to come back. To open the door and find you. And here you are.”
He set the bouquet on the ground, then cupped her cheeks in his palms. He gazed at her, his brown eyes full of passion, full of love. “I told you I won’t make the same mistake again. I won’t lose you twice.” He brushed his thumb along her jawline. “Last night floored me. You have to know that. It shocked me to the bone, and I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know how to feel about everything, but one thing I know is true is that I am in love with you. That’s never going to change, so whatever happens, I want to figure it out with you.”
His words tugged at all her heartstrings. His hands on her face were the reassurance she’d always sought. They were comfort and protection all at once. “I want that too. I want you here with me. Life is better with you, even if we’re dealing with something hard. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’ve been through enough to know that whatever comes our way we’ll get through it. And hey,” she said, her lips quirking into a small smile, “that’s my specialty. Maybe that’s what I can help you with. Getting through things.”
He nodded solemnly. “I’ll take it. I need it. I barely knew what to say last night. I left so I wouldn’t say something else that was wrong. Last time I said everything wrong.”
“So let’s say the right things now. It’s my turn. When we started seeing each other again, you said you weren’t going to let me go. You were damn insistent. You made it clear I was yours, come hell or high water.”
He grinned proudly, and nodded. “I did.”
“I feel the same about you. I belong with you, and you belong with me. You and I are fire. We always have been. And sometimes we burn with how much we love. Sometimes we hurt each other. But I will do whatever it takes for you. Just as you will for me. I lost you once, and there’s no way I’m going to let that happen again. Got it?” She poked him in the chest. “You are mine.”
He smiled wide and broad like the sun. “And you’re mine.”
She cast her eyes to the bouquet. “I see you brought me something.”
He bent down and picked up the flowers. “I had this plan to get a skywriter and say King Shmuck says he’s sorry and please take him back, and then have a Mariachi band play ‘You’re the One That I Want’ after you came through security. It was that, or the flowers.” He made a nervous face, one that was clearly deliberate. “Did I pick okay?” he asked.
She laughed and grabbed his arm again, not wanting to let go of him. “I think you did okay, Nichols. You did more than okay. You noticed I like sunflowers, and yellow, and sunshine.”
He held his hands out wide. “Help a man out. I have no idea what your sunflower obsession is, but I know they matter to you, and you matter to me, so I want to know.”
Her laughter erased itself and so did the smile on her face. She turned serious. “You want to know? Even if hurts? Even if you won’t know what to say?”
“Yes. I do.”
She tipped her forehead to her car. “Take me for a ride. I’ll show you.” She handed him the keys, and let him drive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The grass was spongy under his feet, and the early evening sun cast golden shadows across the headstones.
The oaks and elms rose stately and green, their lush leaves forming canopies. Flowers burst to life everywhere, some wild, many in bouquets laid on the ground. It was an odd juxtaposition—all that verdant life in the midst of those markers of death. But that was what cemeteries were for—for the living to remember the dead. With her hand in his, they neared her father’s grave.
As the simple stone came into view, he saw yellow. So much yellow.
“My grandma was here this week. She brought those,” Shannon said gesturing to the sunflowers along the headstone.
He read the etching. Thomas Darren Paige. Loving father. His throat hitched, and he swallowed it away as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder.
“I bring them here, too,” she continued.
“They’re beautiful,” Brent said softly, as they stopped a few feet from the grave. “It’s a beautiful way to remember him.”
“They’re not only for him,” Shannon said, looking up, meeting his eyes.
“Who are they for?” he asked, but he knew the answer. In a flash, everything made sense. He inhaled sharply, walloped once again by something unexpected.
“I like to think he’s with my dad. Somehow. That my dad is looking out for him. That they keep each other company in the great beyond.”
He swallowed roughly, and spoke softly. “I believe that.”
“I started to bring the flowers when I came back from London. I was struggling and I needed to find a way through all that sadness. I’d been pregnant and utterly confused, and then in mere hours, I became not pregnant and completely empty. I wasn’t just sad. I was hollow, and aching. I felt the loss every day for the first few months. I felt it like it was this hole inside me. I didn’t know what to do,” she said, holding her hands out wide, showing the helplessness she must have felt. “I talked to my grandma about it, and it’s not as if I was trying to compare what I lost to what she lost—she lost a son she’d raised and loved for thirty-six years. I lost a son I never knew. But she told me that remembering the person who was no longer here was what helped her the most to heal,” Shannon said. Huge tears welled up in her green eyes, and he couldn’t help himself. He bent his head to hers and kissed them away.
“And so I did the same,” she said, sharing more of the story. “I thought it would just help me deal with the initial awfulness. That kind of grief upends your daily routine. It makes it hard to get out of bed. This helped though,” she said, and her voice was soft, but steady. He could hear her strength in it. He could sense all her resilience, all her survival. “And soon, the pain lessened. Time did what time is supposed to do. The pain didn’t feel so raw or so new or so fresh anymore. I was able to do my job, and live my life, and not be seized with sadness every second. But I’d still come here when I was in town, and I’d leave more sunflowers, and soon I realized I wasn’t leaving them for the baby anymore.”
“You weren’t?”
She shook her head. “They were for you,” she said, and a new shock reverberated in his system. But it wasn’t the horribleness
of last night; it was something else. It was shock mixed with a strange sense of hope. “They reminded me of you and how I felt for you. I was leaving them here as a way to remember that I wasn’t alone. That even though you didn’t know, you were a part of it, too. Sunflowers always reminded me of you.”
“Why?” he said, his throat dry as the desert, choked with emotion.
She didn’t answer with words at first. She answered through touch. She pushed up the sleeve on his right arm, revealing his ink—the black sunburst he’d had done with her in Boston, when she’d told him it fit his sunny disposition. “Because you were like the sun to me. You made my days better. You were my warmth and my happiness. And I wanted to remember that the baby was as much you as he was me. That we were in it together, even if we weren’t together.”
His heart stopped. His breath fled his chest. His life narrowed to a before and an after. To that moment in time. It marked the man he was, and the man he was becoming. The man he could be for her. That second, those words became the epicenter of his life. “I never knew how far and deep it went when you said I was like the sun to you.”
She ran her fingertip over his sunburst, her touch electrifying him, even in the intensity of this kind of admission. “You were all my sunny days, Brent. You were always so happy, and so upbeat, and you never let anything get you down. And you gave all that to me. You turned my days around when I met you.”
He closed his eyes and swayed closer to her, trying to take that all in, to digest the enormity of what she was saying. Of how she’d never let go of him through all the years. Of how she’d included him in her life, the good and the bad, even when he’d had no clue where she was and vice versa.
“I thought you hated me,” he said softly, trying to process this.
She shrugged, happily. “I thought I did, too. But I never stopped loving you.”
“I never stopped either. Not once. Not once through all the years.”
Then it hit him, with the clarity of a thousand suns. There was life and death, and the thinnest thread separated the two, by the edge of a razor. Life was for the living, and for the loving.
He dropped down to one knee for the second time ever. He had no ring. No plan. No speech. He grasped her hand in his. “Marry me.”
She blinked, a look of utter disbelief on her face. “Are you proposing to me in a cemetery?”
“I am,” he said. Hoping. Praying. Wanting that yes.
“You’re crazy,” she said, but she was grinning wildly.
“Am I?”
“You might be. You did put your phone in a dishwasher. Was it dirty?”
“Yes. It was full of my filthy, dirty messages to you. It was about to combust from the hotness.”
She laughed loudly, clasping her free hand on her belly. “Brent, you’re ridiculous.”
“And that’s what you always say when I make you laugh. You say I’m ridiculous. That’s another reason why you should marry me now. Because I make you laugh, and I always will. Because I make you happy, and I promise to make that my greatest mission for the rest of my life. Because you make me so damn happy. Loving you is the best thing I’ve ever done. I love everything about you—your body, your heart, and your mind. I have been in love with you for more than a decade and I’ve barely spent any of those years with you. Let’s pick up where we left off and spend our whole lives together. Let's do what we were supposed to do ten years ago. Let's do it now.”
“Now?”
His eyes lit up with mischief. “Vegas, baby.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Think about it,” he urged. “Everyone comes here to get married. We live here. This is our town, babe. This is our place. Let’s make it ours.”
She held out her hand and tugged him up. “Vegas, baby.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
There were no flowers. There were no rings. And the bride didn’t wear white.
Neither one of them changed from what they already had on—her green dress, his blue shirt and jeans. It was a hell of a lot more fun to race over to the marriage license bureau and snag the paperwork. The bureau was open until midnight every day, and plunking down IDs was nothing short of thrilling.
He pulled up in her car to a drive-thru chapel, its orange neon sign lit and flashing. The officiant came to the window. Brent had called earlier to book a quickie ceremony, and that’s exactly what they got. No Elvis impersonator, no Johnny Cash stand-in, no Vegas theme package of mobsters, or starlets, or showgirls. At the end of the two-minute ceremony, the officiant said the words Brent had longed to hear years ago. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
No one needed to tell him that twice. He laced his fingers through Shannon’s hair, and dropped his mouth to hers, kissing her softly at first, savoring the sweet taste of her lips, memorizing every second of the first kiss with his wife.
Mrs. Shannon Nichols.
The name played in his head, and it was so fucking perfect, so damn sexy, and so everything he’d ever wanted in his life. In mere moments, the kiss climbed the heat scale as he kissed her furiously, and she tangled a hand in his hair, consuming his lips with her fire too.
He kissed her harder, even as the officiant clapped and cheered and wedding music played from the chapel.
Click.
Click.
Click.
He opened his eyes to see her cell phone held in one outstretched hand. He broke the kiss.
“I know you love selfies of us, so this is your first wedding present from your bride. Our first picture as husband and wife.”
“I love it, Mrs. Shannon Nichols,” he said in a low dirty growl in her ear. “Now, I need to fuck my wife for the first time.”
“Then put on your seatbelt, handsome. I see a parking spot over there that’s got our name written all over it.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Nichols?”
“Yes. Those names,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
“Love those names.”
A minute later, he pulled into the farthest spot in the lot, away from other cars and lights. In a quick tango they’d practiced years ago in college, he moved to the passenger seat, lowered it, and lay back, bringing her on top of him.
He reached into his back pocket and proffered a condom. “Now I get why you’re so particular about them.”
“Some day I won’t ask you to use one.”
“Maybe someday soon. But for now, you should really ride your husband hard. Because we have ten years of lost sex to make up for.”
“We’re going to be pretty busy,” she said, her eyes sparkling with equal parts naughtiness and love, then with heat and want, as he hiked her skirt to her waist.
“My beautiful wife,” he said, as he brushed his fingertips along the front of her white panties. She trembled into his touch. He traveled lower, his fingers on a luxurious path to her center. Her mouth fell open in a sexy gasp as he felt the first evidence of her desire. “Hmmm. Seems marrying me turns you on.”
“Nothing has turned me on more,” she said, her breath already coming fast.
He unzipped his jeans, yanked her panties to the side and handed her the condom. “Put it on me,” he told her, as he held tight to her hips.
She opened the condom and rolled it onto his erection. He couldn’t believe it had only been twenty-four hours since he’d been inside her. It felt like forever. But as he lowered her, he savored both the intensity of sliding into her gorgeous body, and the sweet, blissful knowledge, that he had a lifetime ahead of him to be with her like this.
His wife.
She took her time, rising up and down, and swiveling her hips in a way that drove him wild. He watched her, raking his gaze over her face, her body, her hips. She was his now, completely his. He reached for her hair, threading his fingers into her strands, pulling her on top of him.
“Closer,” he said on a groan. “I need more of you.”
He dropped his hands to her ass, and gripped her tight as he moved
her up and down, the friction, the heat, bringing them both to the edge. She rocked faster, harder, her hands grappling with his hair, her breathing turning frantic.
She said his name in the most desperate, ecstatic voice he’d ever heard, and it sent them both over the edge.
After, he wrapped his arms around her, her heart beating fast against his chest, her cheeks flushed. “Come home with me tonight, Mrs. Nichols.”
“Tonight? Just tonight?”
“Every night,” he said, as he smacked her ass. “Get your stuff. You’re moving in with me.”
She shot him a pouty look. “Why your home?”
“Why not my home?” he countered.
“Actually, I don’t care if it’s your home or mine. I just want to be with you. Plus, I hear you have a pretty good dishwasher.”
She went home with him. It had only taken him more than a decade to carry her over the threshold, but all those years of missing her were worth it that night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
One week later
Shannon kissed Brent goodbye at the door to his house. Now, it was their house. “I’ll see you late, late, late tonight in the Big Apple,” she told him.
“I’ll be counting down the hours till you knock on the door dressed as a sexy room service French maid.”
She furrowed her brow. “Just exactly what kind of hotels do you stay at, Brent?”
He winked. “The kind where my wife shows up at midnight.” Then he kissed her. “Have a great rehearsal.” He swooped in for one more kiss. “See you tonight.”
She shooed him out the door. “Go. You’ll miss your plane. You need to be fresh and ready to impress the ladies of Tribeca tomorrow.”
“With you by my side, it’ll be a piece of cake,” he said, then left for the airport.
She finished getting ready for work, pulling on a pair of black leggings, a tunic tank top, and high heels, then tossing her favorite scarf around her neck—the silk, blush pink scarf that Brent had given her. A thin, wispy thing, it was perfect for the summer heat. She had a final on-site rehearsal today with her dancers at Edge. The San Francisco debut had been a smashing success, and with the show set to launch at Edge in Vegas next week, Shannon wanted to make sure everything was perfect. She’d catch a late afternoon flight to New York and land in the Big Apple at midnight. That would still give her plenty of time to go to the picnic with Brent tomorrow, and support him in this key business deal. Tribeca was making him jump through some crazy hoops, and though she might not agree with the neighborhood association, she was ready to stand by her man, and to show, too, that his wife supported him. More importantly, she wanted him to know that his job mattered to her. That it wasn’t a source of friction as it had once been, and that they were in this together now.
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