“I love playing music, and that’s exactly why I can’t do it for money,” he told me. “But I do want to bum around the English countryside, and I do need to give my family another shot, because I don’t think your dad is going to be welcoming me back for Thanksgiving anytime soon.”
His words were light, but I knew what he wasn’t saying—he needed to try, one last time, to make amends with his father.
Their relationship is still contentious at the best of times, but our weekly dinners have started to thaw some of the tension. Liam is a lot like Luke—brilliant, stubborn, and insistent on covering up his emotions with a layer of ice. I made him laugh twice last week, so I think we’re making progress. Also, he was so glad that Luke finally showed an interest in the family business that he decided to reward him with the corner office and complete control of the publishing arm of Dixon Industries.
I think he probably expected his son to fail miserably, but if that’s the case, he must be sorely disappointed. Although it’s only been three months, the company is making more money and running more efficiently than it’s ever done in the past.
It has also made his son utterly incorrigible. Blissfully happy, but utterly incorrigible.
“The power’s gone straight to your head.” I’m so proud of you.
That second part I keep to myself—I’d prefer not to have it thrown back in my face the next time he wants to cancel a meeting to stay in bed.
His arm creeps towards the elastic band of my shorts, but I pull away just in time and wag a finger at him. When he starts to pout, I stifle a laugh.
He sulks. “The only person I ever wanted power over is you, and you refuse to give an inch. Even when you threaten my comfort by renting the crappiest apartment in all of Oxford. For a rich kid, you’re not very good at spending money.”
“You cannot still be angry about that.”
He is probably still angry. We had a terrific fight over my choice of living arrangements, which he immediately deemed unsuitable. We made a deal; we needed two places, since his work is mostly in London and I need to be in Oxford during the week. It was pretty simple—he got to pick the London apartment and I got to pick the Oxford one.
His choice was a glass monstrosity overlooking the Thames. I went for a simple attic with a cute brass bed. After two months of morning coffee on the terrace with spectacular views, I’ve seriously reordered my priorities. Every girl needs a little opulence once in a while. Or all the time.
However, I would never give him the satisfaction of being right, so, during the week, we will live in an attic. It’ll be fine. I can pretend that we’re taking a vacation when we come to London. It will be a nice treat.
Yeah. Even I don’t believe that.
His mouth twitches in laughter. Given our past history with misunderstandings, he really shouldn’t be able to read my mind like this. It isn’t fair.
“I am definitely still angry. But you’re changing the subject. Back to counterpoints B and C, which are that yes, you would be a housewife, but certainly not lazy, and no, we would never leave this bed.”
He reaches out a hand to me, and while I hate to give in so easily, the gravitational pull is too strong for me to resist. He kisses me senseless, each touch of his lips creating a miniature explosion of color and sound.
“You have a meeting,” I murmur.
“Canceled already.” He shoots me an impish grin. “We only have two days left before you have a real excuse for fending off my advances. Did you really think I was going to let those days go to waste?”
My stupid sense of responsibility won’t quit. “Luke…”
“Stella…”
I groan. He wins. He always wins. I slide my body on top of his and look down into his eyes. The ice in them has melted into a crystalline ocean. I’m still trying to get used to the fact that it’s a permanent change.
I run my fingers through his hair and kiss the stubble on his jaw, but I draw back and raise my eyebrows as he sneaks a hand under the bottom of my shirt. I try to give him a stern look, but really, it’s pointless to try. I can’t keep the laughter out of my eyes.
“What about fending off my advances?”
“I can assure you that I will not ever fend off any one of your advances,” he promises earnestly.
“Are you sure about that?” I tease, gliding my fingers over his golden chest and giving him a wicked smile.
“Absolutely positive,” he says, covering his lips with mine. “Unless you get any more bright ideas about attics.”
“You promised that you would quit your whining about that,” I warn.
“Then, I’ll have to find some other way to occupy my mouth,” he says, reaching over to do just that.
An hour later, after he’s done a thoroughly pathetic job of fending off my advances, I lay comfortably in his arms.
“I have to get up,” I moan, knowing full well that I will do no such thing. “I have to buy linens for the bed, and maybe a lamp or two, and then I need to make sure I have all of my books for my classes.”
“Done.”
“What do you mean, done?”
“I took care of all that,” he says casually. “If you insist on living in an attic, then we live in an attic. However, you have terrible taste in sheets, so I took matters into my own hands. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the sheet patrol.”
“You bought me a present?”
“You say that like it’s an atomic bomb. It’s just sheets, Stella.” Suddenly, his face lights up and he curls his lip into a smile. “Technically, this flat is a present from me to you. I don’t see you trying to return it.”
He’s got me there.
I frown. “You set me up. You canceled your meetings and you took care of all of my errands, just so…Just so…”
“Just so we could spend the next two days alone, without any obligations, with only each other for company?” he suggests.
When he puts it that way, it doesn’t sound quite so nefarious.
“I have another present for you,” he says softly.
This is an old battle between the two of us, and my defenses rise automatically. “Luke, we’ve talked about this. You know my father never really learned how to say no, so I was spoiled rotten as a kid and I’m trying to atone for my bad behavior. No presents. Ever. We made a deal.”
“Deals are made to be broken, too.”
He’s probably bought me a unicorn. A pony dressed up as a unicorn. Something. I told him that I wanted a real, live unicorn when I was seven, and it would be just like him to remember something like that. What the hell am I supposed to do with a pony when we’re planning to live in an attic that is most definitely too small to house two people, let alone a freaking pony?
He’ll just have to take it back. Can you take back a pony?
His eyes twinkle as he waits for my retort. I try not to disappoint him.
“This deal was not made to be broken. You promised me, Luke. You promised, no presents. I thought I made myself perfectly clear. If I agreed to do the laundry for six months, and you know how much I really, really hate laundry duty, you would not buy me one single present, even for my birthday. We excluded one vacation a year, but we already had a vacation this summer, so you are breaking the deal!”
“I love you, Stella, but please, for the love of God, shut up.”
I have no intention of shutting up, and I’m about to tell him that, but his eyes are intent on mine, and he utters one, simple word.
“Please.”
There’s a tiny tremor in his voice that makes my stomach a little queasy.
I promptly shut up.
He removes a small box from the nightstand, and for a second, I feel something almost like relief. At least he didn’t get me a pony.
A small box. That means jewelry.
That idiot. Jewelry is worse than a pony. I start to open my mouth to unleash another torrent of protests, but the barely contained panic in his eyes stops me cold.
It’s much too fast and much too slow. He lets out a shaky breath, and his smile is gentle, soft, and laced with unmistakable fear.
I want to wipe it away with a thousand soft kisses, but I force myself to hear his beautiful voice saying beautiful words.
“Marry me, Stella bella. Spend the rest of your life fighting with me and kissing me and making love with me and drinking coffee in the morning and champagne in the afternoon. Be my wife. Be the mother of my children and the companion of my heart. Say yes, and I will spend the rest of my life breaking deals and canceling meetings and making you furious and then trying to make it up to you without buying any presents. I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you as perfectly happy as you make me.”
Fat, happy balls of wetness slide down my cheeks, but his smile is still tentative. I try to coerce words from my throat, but none come, save for a garbled noise that has no relation to human speech.
His smile spreads, slowly, from the corner of his mouth to his cheeks and eyes and skin, blinding me with its brilliance.
“I’m going to assume that’s a yes,” he murmurs, lacing his fingers through mine.
“It’s a yes,” I whisper finally. “Yes to everything. Yes to you, yes to us, yes to the rest of our lives.”
His lips are joyful, seeking, searching, and my body responds, even though my brain has been temporarily rendered useless.
He pulls back, breathless, and runs his hands through my hair. “Yes? You don’t want to take it back? Are you sure?”
I cannot believe that he really needs me to answer that.
So, I don’t. I glance down at the unopened box and slip my fingers under the lid. When I manage to quit my fumbling and open it, I find one enormous, perfect diamond surrounded by a row of tiny, but no less beautiful, stones.
He takes it from the box and slides it onto my finger, and it’s useless to keep fighting the fat, happy tears. When he wipes one away with the tip of his finger, I see that his eyes are glistening, too.
He’s in the midst of kissing me out of my mind when a terrible thought crosses my mind. Oh, no.
I jerk back violently and pound on his chest with my fists. Concern is written all over his face, but I can’t help it. My new fiancé is never going to make it to the wedding.
“My dad is going to kill you.”
That is not a metaphorical statement.
When my father’s twice-daily phone calls really started to freak Izzy out, I had to stage an intervention to tell him that I had pretty much moved into Luke’s apartment and that’s why I wasn’t coming home at night. It took my mother’s professor voice and my tears to rip his body from Luke’s when he flew to Greenview in a rage and we asked him to please stop stealing the surveillance footage from the dorm.
Things got significantly worse when I informed him that I wasn’t the only one moving to England. He shattered a one-of-a-kind prototype phone by crushing it between his fingers. Right before knocking Luke unconscious.
Predictably, my mother wasn’t surprised by either announcement. By the second one, she had already prepared the first-aid kit.
Luke grins at me. Suicidal, I decide. Definitely suicidal.
He points to the purplish spot over his left temple. “Where do you think I got this from? You didn’t really believe that nonsense about the TSA, did you? I thought for sure you had figured out what happened.”
I thought it was perfectly reasonable for that agent to tackle him when he got mouthy about taking an electronic razor through security. I would have done the same thing.
I sigh and touch the bruise softly with my fingers. “Gullible is my middle name. What happened? Did he hurt you?”
“It’s a small price for his blessing.” He kisses the tip of my nose and, with a sigh, responds to the question. “Once he punched me, he made me swear to do a lot of things that you probably wouldn’t like, so I’m not going to tell you about any of them, and then he said we might as well get married if I was going to continue to violate your honor. Your mother, despite her seeming hatred for parties, has hired a wedding planner. She may have invited half of San Francisco already, so you may need to call her before things get really out of hand. I also asked Izzy’s permission, since she seems to have obtained a permanent, and unnecessary, appointment as your guard dog. After buying her love with a few beers and getting down on my knees to beg, she relented, under two conditions: you have to make her maid-of-honor gown and you’re hers for no fewer than two girls’ trips per year for the rest of your lives.”
I can’t believe he asked Iz. It makes me want to cry again. Or kiss him. Or die of happiness. But I need to know how much time I have before being inundated by phone calls about place settings and tablecloths.
“When did you go to see them?”
“Last weekend.”
“You said you had a business meeting.”
“I did. I had the serious business of figuring out how to escape if your father decided that he actually did want to kill me.”
I laugh. “You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“I’m sure of you.” A flicker of pain crosses his face, and he kisses each one of my fingers before looking back up at me. “I’m just sorry it took me so long to get here.”
“We got here. That’s all that matters.”
There’s only one more burning question. The most important one.
“Do you think…would Jack be happy for us?” I ask.
Luke doesn’t stiffen the way he used to at the sound of my brother’s name, probably because we say it almost every day. We tell stories, good and bad and ugly and everything in between, and it feels a little bit less like he’s missing and a little bit more like he’s still here.
He grins and points to his right temple. “I’m pretty sure I would have gotten a matching set of punches, but yeah, I really think he’d be happy for us.”
It’s the answer I wanted to hear. I snuggle into his arms, perfectly content to stay there forever. But then I remember the rule-breaking. Letting him off the hook sets a bad precedent for marriage. He’ll win the battle eventually, but life’s a hell of a lot more fun when I make him work for it.
“You bought me jewelry. That is a massive overstepping of the no presents rule. We might need to do some renegotiation.”
His eyes, more joyful than exasperated, meet mine. “What is it that you want, my love?”
“Laundry duty should be on the table. Also, I know how much you hate the attic apartment, so I’m willing to reconsider if you’re willing to make some minor concessions…”
He rears his head back and laughs. “Unrestricted access to my body and unlimited kisses?”
“Starting right now?”
“Starting whenever you want.”
He starts to fulfill his end of the new bargain, but he stops abruptly and pulls back, his lips only inches from mine. “I didn’t know I could be this happy,” he whispers, his breath tickling my ear. “I love you, Stella bella.”
When I look at his face, so peaceful, so content, so vastly different from the face of the man I had once known, I remember the question scribbled in Sharpie on the back of the chair.
What can change the nature of a man?
The answer, complete with stupid, silly, romantic heart doodles, was staring me in the face. I dismissed it then, but I won’t make that mistake again, not when I’ve tasted true love, the shifting of molecules and souls to fill in the cracks so that you both become whole.
I grin and pull him closer. “I love you, too.”
The words are swallowed up in his spectacular kiss, but I know he hears me.
Bonus Chapter: Luke
The throaty laughter, mixes with mischief and glee, falls heavily over the room, hanging like a fucking thundercloud.
Ah, shit. It’s happening again.
I was a crazed madman for months. Years, probably. I thought that putting an ocean betw
een her and me would create enough distance, but I was a bloody idiot if I really believed that. There’s not a corner of the world remote enough to hide from her.
I can’t count the number of strangers with shimmering blond hair and cat-like green eyes that I’ve mauled. Can’t count the number of times that I expected the resounding clap of thunder just before I touched their flesh with my own. Can’t count the number of times that I was disappointed by the emptiness.
My eyes have finally cleared and my madness has transferred itself to new senses. Maybe I’ll hear her sexy little voice, bitching at me for something or another. That’s one of the few advantages of utter insanity.
It’s been at least a year since I’ve mowed down an anonymous stranger, but I broke that streak today, with that goth chick. She bore no resemblance to Stella, but there was some hint of our otherworldly attraction in the air that I couldn’t resist, and so, like an idiot, I rammed her into the ground. The eyes were the right color, too, a rich emerald green, but everything else was wrong.
Fantastic. My fucking eyes are fixed, but my hearing and spidey senses are shot.
Peals of that same, unbridled laughter strike the air.
My world tilts. The past catches up with the present. In an instant, I know that I am not losing my goddamn mind. That laugh belongs to her and her alone.
I feel her presence, the unmistakable clenching of muscles that indicates that we’re sharing the same air, that same uncontrollable reaction that I’ve been ignoring it for years.
Jack, normally genial and laughing, turned into a monster the instant any guy gave his baby sister a sidelong look. Giving in to my desire would have meant losing my best friend and losing the only family I ever had. If it hadn’t meant losing her, too, I would have capitulated ages ago.
Base human instinct can only be repressed for so long.
She’s here. I know she’s here.
“Luke. I need a drink. Can you be a doll and go to the bar for me?” a voice whines.
Stella’s never whined in her life, except when I’m being my most asshole-like self and taunting her.
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