Not That Kind of Guy

by ANDIE J. CHRISTOPHER

  “I quit law school, so I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.” Best to get the thing that might piss her off the most out on the table first.

  “You quit?” Her eyes bugged out of her head, but she didn’t choke, which was less of a reaction than he expected. “Why?”

  “I didn’t really like it, and—thanks to you marrying me—I’m rich now and I don’t have to do pretty much anything I don’t like.” And the only thing he’d really like to fill his time with was making Bridget Nolan happy.

  “But you were almost done.”

  “That’s not a reason to do anything.” He poured her more wine. “Besides, I paid Brent’s tuition, so I felt good about it. He won’t have student loans for his third year.”

  “One of the other interns?” Bridget seemed a little shell-shocked. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” She hadn’t walked out, and that was enough.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Not sure yet.” He took a bite of chicken. “That all depends on you.”

  “How so?” She took his cue and ate another bite. “I didn’t know you hated it that much.”

  “I didn’t hate it; it just wasn’t for me.” That was the truth. He had the freedom to decide, and he’d decided that he wanted something else—something with Bridget.

  Bridget snorted. “Not all of us can be quite that capricious.”

  “You can.” Now that she wasn’t so shocked that she couldn’t use sarcasm, he needed to drop the second bomb. “Your loans are paid off, so you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do ever again.”

  Bridget stood up then. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

  “And I did it anyway.” He sat back in his chair. Even if she didn’t want to be with him, he wasn’t going to take this back. “What are you going to do?”

  “After I kill you?” She looked like she was ready to, with balled-up fists and a red cast to her face that made her look like fire. He liked fire, though.

  “My parents should have given you the fellowship last year. I’m just doing my part now.”

  She shook her head. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “But I wanted to.” He stood up and walked over to her. “I want to do things for you. Because I love you, and I want you to be happy.”

  Palpably, her anger dissipated from the room when she laughed. “I’d never thought about love as something that would make me happy before.”

  He cupped her face with both hands, needing to be as close to her as possible. He touched their foreheads together, and her hands came around his waist. “That’s what love is for. You make me happy just by being who you are.”

  “You’re going to make me cry.” Sure enough, a tear rolled down her face. He kissed it away.

  “I never want to make you cry.”

  “You’re going to fail at that if you keep being so sweet.” He’d gladly fail at it every single day. “This is Ina’s chicken, isn’t it? The engagement chicken?”

  His hope was suspended in between them like a physical thing—the fact that she got what he was trying to say through his actions feeding it. “It is.”

  “Did you file the papers?” She raised his hands and clutched his wrists.

  “I did.” He risked a kiss on her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  When she said that, his blood ran cold. Maybe this wasn’t going as well as he’d thought. “You don’t want to be married to me anymore?”

  “That’s not it.” She pulled back to lock gazes with him. “I just think that we should start fresh, so it’s not so messy. Besides, I’m coming around to the idea that the second time might work out better than the first.”

  “You want me to ask you if you want to get married?”

  She shook her head, and that left her neck open to kiss, but he waited. “Not yet.”

  He cupped her jaw, running one of his thumbs over her lower lip. “What are we going to do?”

  “Love each other.” She pushed up on her toes and kissed him. He caught her up in his arms and they forgot about the chicken dinner.

  EPILOGUE

  ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID, NEVER a bride” would be a fitting epitaph for Bridget Nolan if it didn’t have the wistful connotation of an old maid wishing that she could still be married. There needed to be a colloquialism for the woman merrily schtupping her ex-husband, with whom she was very happily in love, while serving as maid of honor in her parents’ second wedding.

  Molly and Sean Nolan got remarried in the backyard of the house where their children had grown up. Their daughter-in-law, Hannah Mayfield, had transformed the space into a fairyland, if one could ignore the sounds of traffic wafting over the assembly from the freeway a few blocks away. Father Patrick Dooley performed the ceremony, even though he could get in trouble because you technically can’t perform a marriage ceremony for two people who were divorced—even from each other—in the Catholic church. But he seemed totally copacetic about it.

  “You look beautiful, Mom,” Bridget said as she grabbed more smoked salmon from the buffet table.

  Her mother stopped and dropped her new/old husband’s arm, so he stopped, too. “How much champagne have you had, Bridget Mary Nolan?”

  Bridget looked at her half-empty glass and did some quick subtraction in her head. “Two and a half glasses. Why do you ask?”

  That’s when she noticed that her mother’s eyes were glossy with unshed tears. “You called me ‘Mom’ again. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.”

  Although she really didn’t want to get into a teary scene now, she couldn’t think of a better time to tell her mother, “I’ve been thinking it consistently for a while now.”

  She didn’t have to look at her father to feel that he was pleased with her, but that’s not why she’d said it. After almost losing Matt, Bridget had forgiven her mother. She’d realized that she’d had a blind spot when it came to empathy with her for years and years. She didn’t have to forgive her—after all, Molly had made some grievous errors in how she’d lived her life—but it made her father happy.

  Over the past year, since she’d gotten back together with Matt, she’d actually opened her heart to her mother again. She decided that she’d rather have the woman who’d given birth to her in her life than hold her choices against her forever.

  If Molly bugged out again, though she doubted that would happen, it would hurt a lot. But she would still have her father and brothers to fall back on—and now she had a partner.

  Her mother still looked as though she was going to start crying, and that simply wouldn’t do. There was no way that their makeup could withstand another onslaught of tears. “Don’t cry, Mom.”

  Her mother reached out for her hand. “There’s one thing we definitely do have in common,” Molly said on a sob. “Neither of us likes people telling us what we can and cannot do.”

  Bridget was only saved from crying by Matt wrapping his arms around her from behind. “Music’s going to start soon, and I need to dance with my best girl.”

  “I like ‘my best girl,’” Bridget said.

  “It’s sort of a mouthful.” Her parents wandered off to talk to other guests, but she barely noticed. She didn’t clock much besides the man who turned her in his arms and smiled down at her.

  “Well, it sort of fits because I’m kind of a handful.”

  Matt laughed and moved them both toward the dance floor. “You can say that again.” He then squeezed her butt, which made her squeal and look around for where his parents were hanging out.

  “Your mother is going to tell me that I’m eroding your morals.” She didn’t slap his hand away, though. “Again.”

  She and Jane had come to an understanding after joining forces to convince Matt to go back to law school. After Bridget ha
d screeched about how wasteful it was not to go back when he wouldn’t have any student loans, Matt had capitulated.

  And after they’d discovered a shared interest in elaborate skin-care regimes Jane had stopped calling her a gold digger under her breath. A few months after that, Jane had shocked the shit out of Bridget in suggesting her as a candidate for a legal position at a national reproductive rights organization.

  Since her family’s foundation bankrolled a lot of that organization’s initiatives, it was a very friendly interview process.

  Even with all the progress they’d made, Bridget didn’t want to tempt fate with lewd displays in front of the woman. Matt was undeterred, though. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “If I can’t play grabby hands with my ex-wife without getting yelled at by my mom, what am I even doing with my life?”

  That, they hadn’t figured out. He’d graduated from law school and taken the bar exam, but he hadn’t said what he was going to do with his life. “I think we’re all waiting to find that out.”

  “Are you worried that you’ll end up with an unemployed slob sleeping on your couch?” Matt teased.

  “Well, we don’t live together, so you can be a slob on your own couch.” After fast-forwarding the beginning of their romantic relationship, they’d elected to take things slow. But for the past month, since he’d finished the bar exam, there had been a feeling like they’d been dancing around the next step in their relationship. She could kind of see why Matt didn’t want to suggest anything drastic. After all, she’d broken up with someone for buying her a house once.

  He took her in his arms and pulled her onto the dance floor that had been constructed over the grass. Bridget breathed in, comforted and aroused by his scent. She let her hands creep down his back and squeezed his ass.

  “Now my mother is definitely going to tell us both off.”

  As they swayed to the sounds of the band playing Sinatra, she kind of didn’t care. “If I can’t grab my ex-husband’s ass at my parents’ second wedding, what am I even doing with my life?”

  “That’s the spirit.” He was quiet for a few more moments, and everything felt perfect. Except for the question that his parents—and increasingly her parents—had started asking them: What were they doing with their lives?

  They were committed to a future together, but they’d been in a sort of stasis since Matt had gone back to school. And it was all great. They loved each other. But, still. Unlike when she’d been expecting a proposal before, she felt the anticipation of Matt asking her to move in or get married like an itch that she couldn’t quite scratch.

  If she reached for it first, would he pull away? She didn’t think so, but what she had with him felt too important to risk.

  She was going to pull back and say something because tonight felt like the right time to ask, and then they could tell everyone and really mess up her mother’s makeup. But he beat her to the punch.

  “I’ve got a question for you, Muffin.”

  “I still hate that.” She tried to look serious but failed.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, in a stern voice that wasn’t really all that stern. And he was right. She just had to say she didn’t like it because it was their thing. They had couple things. She never thought she’d have couple things with anyone ever again. “But seriously, I have a question.”

  “You didn’t buy me a house, did you?” It never hurt to make sure.

  “No, we’re going to pick that out together.” His wry grin said that he was deeply satisfied to be smarter than her ex-douche, even if that didn’t take much. “Can I proceed?”

  “You may.”

  He laughed, because she sounded testy, but he didn’t miss a step. “I think I want to be your ex-ex-husband.”

  Even though excitement bubbled up inside, she wanted him to ask her instead of making a vague suggestion. It was important. “That’s not in the form of a question, Counselor.”

  Then he missed a step to get down on one knee. “Will you marry me?”

  “Again?” She didn’t know why she asked that, but it was probably out of embarrassment because everyone at the wedding reception was staring at them. She broke eye contact with Matt to seek out her mother and mouth, “I’m sorry.”

  Luckily, Matt didn’t rescind the question right then and there. “Yes, again.”

  Bridget’s heart stopped beating for a split second before it started up again. She was surprised that she loved this so much, that she wanted to be married to Matt Kido so much. So much that she didn’t care that it was a cheesy move to propose at someone else’s wedding.

  “Yes.”

  He stood up then as he slid the ring she didn’t even look at on her finger. He kissed her and picked her up off her heels. She didn’t care what anyone thought. Didn’t care if his parents or her parents approved or if Chris was there or jealous. All she cared about was the man swinging her around the dance floor.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First of all, I need to thank Kristine Swartz for helping me turn a collection of scenes and characters into an actual book. I also need to thank my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan, for fielding all of my frantic e-mails and calls. I am so grateful to work with the entire Berkley team on this book—Jessica Brock, Jessica Mangicaro, Erin Galloway, and the sales team. Thank you to Colleen Reinhart for creating the work of art that is this cover. And thank you to Alyssa Furukawa for their nuanced read of the characterization.

  Writing books isn’t easy, but it’s made much more pleasant when you have romance-writing Valkyries in your corner, cheering you on. Sarah MacLean, Kate Clayborn, Adriana Anders, Katee Robert, Sierra Simone, Kennedy Ryan, Nisha Sharma, Charlotte Stein, Talia Hibbert, Jen DeLuca, Kerry Winfrey, Alexa Martin, and Kristen Callihan are all A-plus friends. Thank you to Kristan Higgans for dispensing advice and making me cry every time you talk about my work. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Jenny Nordbak, Sarah Hawley, and the entire Wicked Wallflowers Club. I am happy to be the podcast’s Joan Rivers. Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings—thank you for being you. Jasmine Guillory—I hope we get to share many stages and many tapas together.

  Thank you to Nicole Cliffe; your friendship has become invaluable to me. The only thing I regret about not going to Harvard is that we could have been friends for almost twenty years by now. Laurel Simmons, you are a supermom, a super friend, and every time I hear your voice, I feel as though I’ve been to church. Michael Angelo, Nick Christianson, and Kim Miller, thank you for all the wine and Real Housewives.

  Thank you to my number one fan, my mom, who would run over anyone who hurt me with a car. (But probably wouldn’t try to bribe anyone out of marrying me?) Thank you for sharing your best friend, Kyoko, with me. I like to think that Jane contains a little of both of you.

  And, finally, thank you to my readers. To everyone who connected with my complicated, salty heroines and everyone who is waiting for a Jack or Matt of their own. <3

  USA Today bestselling author Andie J. Christopher writes edgy, funny, and sexy contemporary romance featuring heat, humor, and dirty-talking heroes that make readers sweat. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Stanford Law School, she grew up in a family of voracious readers, and picked up her first romance novel at age twelve when she’d finished reading everything else in her grandmother’s house. It was love at first read. It wasn’t too long before she started writing her own stories—her first heroine drank Campari and drove an Alfa Romeo up a winding road to a minor royal’s estate in Spain. Andie lives in the nation’s capital with her French bulldog, Gus, a stockpile of Campari, and way too many books.

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