by L. A. Witt
“You’re gonna get a stiff neck like this,” I murmured against his lips. “Let’s go in the bedroom.”
He didn’t argue.
As we sank onto the bed, though, Darren sighed, and it wasn’t a horny sound so much as a dog-tired one.
“You all right?” I slid up beside him, draping my arm over him. We’d both stripped off our shirts on the way into the bedroom, but hadn’t gotten any further than that.
“I’m good.” He smiled but looked even more exhausted than he sounded. He ran his hand up my chest, his fingers warm against my skin. “I guess this has all been wearing me out more than I realized.”
I sucked at these conversations. I never quite knew what to say without making it worse. If I’d learned anything about Darren, though, it was that sometimes he didn’t need me to talk. Hoping this was one of those times, I pulled him closer, and he relaxed against me as I stroked his hair. This wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind when I’d brought him in here, but I went with it. And damn, as funny and cute as it was to watch Darren getting flustered over flowers and cake decorations, I didn’t like seeing him like this.
“I love you,” he whispered. “And I’m glad we’re doing this. I’m just . . . stressed.”
“I know.” I kissed the top of his head. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
He grinned. “It already is.”
I snorted. “Sap.”
“Uh-huh.” He lifted his head, perfect hair mussed and just ridiculously adorable along with that smirk. “Says Mr. Romantic-Proposal-in-a-Fancy-Restaurant.”
“I don’t know how romantic it was, considering—”
Darren cut me off with a kiss, but then laughed. “It was perfect and you know it. It wouldn’t be ‘us’ if there wasn’t some sort of chaos attached to it.”
I laughed too. “Chaos does kind of follow us around, doesn’t it?”
“It really does.”
I touched his face and sobered as I really saw the fatigue in his eyes. “You know, there is a little bit of a silver lining to all the prewedding stress.”
He eyed me with a mix of uncertainty and hopefulness. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s like putting up wallpaper with your partner—if you can get through it without killing each other, and you still like each other when it’s over, you’re probably in for the long haul.”
The uncertainty faded away. “We’ve been doing okay, haven’t we?”
I nodded, caressing his cheek. “More than okay, I think. We’ve only fought over this shit, what, twice?”
Some color bloomed in his cheeks, and his sheepish smile melted my heart. “To be fair, we probably shouldn’t have been trying to settle on a photographer after eighteen hours at work.”
“No,” I said with a quiet laugh. “But if that’s as bad as we get when we’re both tired and bitchy and stressed, I think we’ll be all right.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He smiled, but it quickly turned into a frown. “Does it at least get easier after the engagement party?”
I groaned. That was coming up this weekend. We’d held off on doing it right away because my parents had wanted to be there, and they’d needed some time to make travel arrangements.
“You don’t sound very hopeful.” Darren’s voice was tight with uneasiness.
“It’ll get better. It really will.” I ran my fingers through his hair. “I’m just dreading having my mother and my ex-wife in the same room.”
He grimaced. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Should we bring popcorn?”
I laughed and pulled him closer. “Yeah. Good idea.”
He gave another quiet chuckle and cuddled against me. He’d long ago given up on worrying that I’d get tired of his clinginess in bed. Okay, it sometimes got too warm, but we both slept naked these days, we had halfway decent air-conditioning, and I could always kick off the covers if need be.
Cling away, sweetheart. Cling away.
Darren sighed after a while and pushed himself up on his elbow. “I could’ve sworn we didn’t come in here to talk about being stressed about wedding planning.”
“We haven’t been talking about that for a good ten minutes.”
“No.” He trailed his fingers up the middle of my chest. “But we’re not doing what we came in here to do, either.”
“Is that a subtle hint?”
He pressed his hips against mine. “I’m not sure how subtle it was.”
I grinned and drew him in for a long kiss. The way his fingers were sliding up into my hair gave me goose bumps, and I ran a hand down his side before curving it over his ass and pulling him closer. Ah, now this was why we’d come in here. Between work and the wedding, we hadn’t been doing nearly enough of this lately.
I let my fingertips dip beneath the back of his waistband, and he moaned into my kiss. Oh yeah. Forget the wedding. Forget work. Forget everything that wasn’t getting Darren to make those needy little sounds he made when he was turned on.
He pushed me onto my back and straddled me. I hated that we had all these clothes in the way, but damn if there wasn’t something excruciatingly sexy about this—about a half-dressed Darren pinning me down and claiming a hot, hungry kiss while two layers of denim kept our dicks apart. He could be almost timid at times, but in the bedroom, he was an animal. Dominant. Demanding. Toppy as fuck. When the switch flipped between puppy-dog-eyed Darren and “get those pants off before I tear them off” Darren, I was putty in his hands.
I squeezed his ass and broke the kiss enough to—
Muffled music made us both freeze.
Muffled, coming from somewhere on the floor . . . “Bad Boys.” The goddamned COPS theme.
Darren groaned. I swore.
We could—and did—ignore a lot of calls, but not when that particular ringtone came from Darren’s phone. “Bad Boys” meant a call from the captain, and a call from the captain meant we needed to get our asses to work. Stat.
Because of course it did.
The engagement party was my mother’s idea. Naturally. She brought it up over coffee one morning while I was sitting with her in her home kitchen, going through the place setting options. She’d thumbed through a catalog of china and stemware before stopping on one particular page and sighing. “Oh, this is almost like what your brother and Melissa had at their wedding! It was so elegant.”
I glanced at the catalog. “I don’t think we can handle that kind of elegance.” I could just imagine paying to replace broken plates that were literally edged with gold.
“No, it’s not your style, I know. But Melissa’s mother loved it. She bought them an entire dining set in the same pattern for their wedding. We still talk, you know.” My mother absently flipped the page. “I send her recipes. She’s kind of hopeless in the kitchen, but she keeps trying, bless her heart.”
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my mother was still in touch with her ex-in-laws. She’d kept up with my fifth-grade teacher and the woman who’d lived next to us all through my childhood but moved away a decade ago. Her address book was a thing of legend. “That’s nice of you.”
She shrugged. “It’s what you do for family. I have to say, I was a little nervous to meet Melissa’s parents, but the engagement party helped a lot. It got the introductions out of the way so that when the wedding came, we could focus on making sure everything went smoothly and wouldn’t have to worry so much about whether or not we’d get along.” She glanced over at me. “You and Andreas are having one, aren’t you?”
“Well, we weren’t . . . planning on . . .”
“Oh, honey.” She reached out and touched the back of my hand. “Trust me on this one, you don’t want to meet all of his family for the first time right before your wedding. That’s a surefire way to get you day drinking.” She frowned a little. “When you kids were younger, I used to be sorry that we didn’t have a big group of aunts and uncles and cousins to spend time with. These days though, I’m just as happy that we’ve got fewer people to deal with. It m
akes things easier to focus on you and Andreas and the kids and not give a damn what anybody else wants.”
I dramatically touched her forehead. “You, swearing? Are you day drinking already?”
She blushed and batted my hand away. “Of course not. I’m just . . . happy things are going to be a little easier this time around. Your brother’s wedding was lovely, but Melissa’s parents were pretty hard to please.”
If my mother thought that someone else was hard to please when it came to wedding planning, that said something. She had a point about the engagement party, though. I really didn’t want to spend the night before my wedding wondering if Andreas’s parents wanted to shank me or if poisoning was more their style.
I tried to argue we couldn’t afford the party, though. Because seriously, if the wedding planner suggested one more must-have detail—or OMG Must have!!!! in Shayna-speak—our credit card debt was going to start rivaling the GDP of a small country. Only in the red instead of in the black.
“Your dad and I will pay for it,” Mom said. “Consider it a wedding gift. Or, well, another wedding gift since we already bought—” She waved a hand. “We’ve got you covered, sweetie.”
And who was I to tell my mother no?
So . . . engagement party. My part was easy: all I had to do was invite my parents and—done. For Andreas, it got a little more complicated. Emily, Lisa, and Erin were here, but Ben and Casey lived a few states away, closer to their mother and stepdad. All four of them were flying in together and staying at a hotel downtown. Andreas’s parents were coming in for the weekend and leaving on a Monday red-eye—keeping their trip mercifully short, according to him. Erin, because she was fucking awesome, was picking them up from the airport.
Andreas teased her about taking the heat off us by introducing them to her boyfriend Zach while they were out here. “I bet even your grandmother can find something wrong with him, even if he is a handsome surgeon.”
To our surprise, Erin didn’t play along. “There’s plenty wrong with him,” she announced. “Like his inability to remember to tell you when he gets emergency-called into work and you end up spending an hour waiting for him in a restaurant, eating breadsticks by yourself like an idiot and wondering why he isn’t texting back, until one of the nurses—not Zach, it was one of his nurses who heard his phone buzzing and recognized my name—calls you up and tells you he’s going to be in the OR for at least the next five hours. And then you go back to your apartment by yourself and eat a pint of his favorite ice cream instead because fuck him if he gets to enjoy that goddamn mint chocolate chip when he left you hanging like that!”
Andreas looked dumbfounded. I laughed, which got me a dirty look before I explained that I wasn’t laughing at her, I was laughing because she sounded just like her dad. “You usually don’t, that’s all.”
“Being nice and sweet comes in second to getting respect from my boyfriend.”
Trouble in paradise, but I had faith that Erin and Zach would work through it. It was all part of getting the hang of living together. Especially since people of Ruffner lineage weren’t always the easiest people to live with.
Didn’t I know it.
Anyway, Zach and Erin would figure things out. Meanwhile, I had an engagement party to attend, and despite my begging several deities to make time go by slower or stop altogether, the clock kept ticking, and the party was tomorrow. Fuck.
And tonight?
Tonight I was meeting my soon-to-be-in-laws for the first time. And yeah, I was scared shitless, especially since I’d had it drilled into my head my whole life that first impressions were critical. I wasn’t even at the restaurant yet, and I was pretty sure I’d already blown it.
After all, it was just my luck that a long and chaotic week at work had come to a head yesterday when Andreas and I had gone to question a person of interest. It went to shit, of course. The details didn’t really matter except for the part where the dipshit had decided to run, and since I was the half of this partnership who hadn’t recently had my ankle reassembled, I got to chase his dumb ass.
I caught him—duh, I caught him—but he put up a fight. By the time Andreas showed up with the car, his service weapon, and that very hot—er, intimidating—cop voice, I had a bloody nose and a distinct throb around my left eye that said, Guess what’s gonna be purple this weekend?
“Perfect,” I muttered, staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Andreas was in the shower, and I had to wipe away the condensation every few seconds to keep myself in sight. I could open my eye, which was a plus, but it was still swollen and cradled by a purple-black crescent that probably wouldn’t hurt as much if I stopped prodding at it. It was hard not to, though. Like I had to make sure there was still feeling—Yes, oh my God! Ow!—and needed to inspect it constantly to make sure it wasn’t getting worse. Not like it could look much worse.
A little louder, I said, “This fucking shiner is really going to impress your mom.”
“You shouldn’t worry too much about that, Darren.” He sounded so casual. Like it really didn’t matter, even though, hello, it so did.
“I shouldn’t?” I glared at the shower door. “Why not?”
“Because they’re going to find a reason to complain no matter what. It might as well be for something obvious like a black eye.”
I glumly watched my face fog over again. “That doesn’t really make me feel better.”
“Wait until you meet them before you decide how much you want their approval,” he said, cryptic enough unless you knew Andreas. I could hear the fatigue in his voice, and knew that as tiring as our long week had been, it had nothing on the prospect of dealing with his folks.
I opened the shower door and pulled him into a kiss, ignoring the hot spray and the way it stung my face. “I don’t want their approval nearly as much as I need yours.”
“You’ve got that,” he said, tucking a hand behind my head and holding me close for another kiss. I was about to get in the shower with him, clothes and all, when he pulled back and tapped my cheekbone, just below my growing bruise. “Ice this.”
“Really? You want me to pick ice over a hot shower with you?”
“If it means the difference between you being able to see or being half-blind, then yeah, I do.”
Damn it, I hated it when he had a point. “Fine.” At least he softened the blow with another kiss before closing the door again.
I iced my stupid eye while I finished putting myself together for dinner. By the time we left, I was on my second ice pack, and I didn’t feel any better. The throbbing in my face still sucked, and my brain was still running in circles over how I was going to make it out of this dinner alive.
“You’re quiet,” Andreas noted after a while.
“Wow, you should be a detective.”
“Why are you so quiet, smart-ass?”
“Just . . .” Anxious, worried, wondering how I’ll measure up, hoping everybody gets along, wishing I was more like what your mom wants for you so everyone could be happy instead of dreading tonight and the damn party and the wedding and— “Thinking. About dinner and the party tomorrow.”
He squeezed my thigh. “Worrying about it?”
“A bit.” Ha ha, understatement.
“Why? Isn’t like you’ve never met my ex-wife.”
I snorted. “Yeah, that’s it.” Please. Marcy was just about the most fantastic ex-wife anyone could ask for. It hadn’t worked out between her and Andreas, but they’d stayed close because of the kids and turned into pretty good friends. They were tight enough that it didn’t seem weird at all for her to come to our engagement party, which was nice. I figured we could use the support. “Just . . . um . . . your mom.”
Andreas sighed. “Yeah. I feel ya.”
I twisted around a bit. “You’re supposed to have some sort of sarcastic encouragement so I can relax.”
“Sorry. Now I’ll be wringing my hands right there with you.”
“Oh.” I closed my eyes. Yeah, th
is whole weekend was going to be a blast.
“That’s her, isn’t it?”
Andreas glanced at the dozen or so people milling in front of the restaurant, then at me. “You can pick my mom out of a crowd at twenty paces?”
“When she’s the only woman in the crowd who’s both old enough to be your mom—”
“Hey!”
“—and looks like she’s trying to kill one of us with her mind?” I nodded sharply. “Yeah. I can.”
He gave a quiet grunt that might’ve been a laugh. “Which one of us do you think she’s trying to kill?”
“You tell me.”
This time it was definitely a laugh, but a half-hearted one. As we started up the steps leading to the restaurant, Andreas cleared his throat, and when he spoke, he sounded way more cheerful than he usually did. “Hey, Mom. Where’s Dad?”
“He’s inside,” she said tersely. “Talking to the manager so we can get seated on time.” The silver-haired woman clicked her tongue. “Our reservation is at seven, and the hostess insists we won’t be able to sit down until a quarter after.”
Any other time, I would have fought back a laugh. Righteous indignation over first-world problems amused the hell out of me . . . except when it was the future mother-in-law I was trying not to disappoint. That she already had her nose out of joint before we’d even arrived didn’t bode well for me. Good thing Andreas had driven tonight, because I was so drinking.
He and his mother shared a stiff hug, complete with an awkward pat on his back, and as he let her go, he gestured at me. “Mom, this is Darren. My fiancé. Darren, this is Louise. My mom.”
Louise shifted her attention to me, gave me a down-up so critical I almost started squirming, and then zeroed in on my left eye. “What happened to your face?”
And hello to you too.
I didn’t bother extending my hand since she obviously wasn’t interested in formalities. “Occupational hazard.”
Her eyes narrowed and darted toward her son. Andreas rolled his. Neither of them said anything, but it seemed like they were speaking volumes with just their eyes. I was glad I wasn’t privy to that mother-son telepathy. And with the visible tension building in Andreas’s neck and shoulders, not to mention the perma-scowl crevices deepening between his eyebrows, I decided I could forgo the booze tonight. He probably needed it more than I did, even if it didn’t mix well with his meds.