He arches a warning brow at me as he tugs on his shoes. “Don’t start.”
We’ve had this conversation a dozen times; things between us were too uncertain to move in together eight months ago, so I’d suggested Dean rent instead of buy, thinking that if things went well, he could move into my place. Despite the sheer logic tipping the odds in my favor, he’d insisted on buying something of his own anyway, and I reluctantly recognized it for what it was: a contingency plan. A what-if-Rachel-disappears-again plan.
“Have you considered renting it out?”
“Uh-huh.” He holds the door and indicates with a jerk of his head that I should exit first.
“It doesn’t make sense to pay the mortgage on a place you’re not using. You could put the extra money toward a car.”
“Can we not talk about this, please?”
I cross my arms and lean against the wall, refusing to leave until he acknowledges me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He sighs and looks me over—hair pulled into a chignon, awesome suit, killer heels. A lot about my life has changed in the past eight months, but not this. And not Dean’s heated reaction to it. “You mean right this instant, or ever?”
“Ever.”
“Good. Let’s go. We have to stop at the garden center before we get home.”
“If it was really your home, you would live there.”
He swats my ass and pushes me out the door. “Eventually.”
“Eventually when?”
“I don’t know. When we’re married.” He jabs the down arrow for the elevator and studies the fire alarm.
“You think we’re going to get married?”
“If you play your cards right.”
I roll my eyes as we get back into the elevator. “I’ll be on my best behavior.”
As soon as we’re inside he pins me to the wall and kisses me, wet and dirty, catching me completely by surprise. He pulls away before the doors open in the lobby, then strolls innocently past an older couple whose eyes narrow as they watch him leave.
“What was that for?” I ask, catching up with him in the parking lot.
He holds up the car keys he’d stolen from my pocket.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He keeps trying to add to his list of rules: he pays for things, he screws me, he teaches me to beat up coworkers, he drives the—my—car. “Your neighbors are right to be wary of you.”
He laughs as he opens the passenger door for me, as though that makes his petty theft any better. “Good to know I still got it.”
I abandon the apartment discussion as we drive to the garden center, telling him about Parker being convinced our new office—housed in a renovated old Victorian—is haunted. Adrian, who came with us when we jumped ship to form Finch, Moser & Associate, was initially dismissive, but now swears he’s starting to hear things too, and today I had to talk them out of calling in an exorcist.
“You need a couple of crucifixes,” Dean says, crossing himself, as though the ghost may have followed me here from work in order to possess him. “That’ll take care of it.”
“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts.” When he remains silent, I snort. “Terrific. I’ll hang up some garlic too, just in case.”
“It’s a ghost, Rachel. Not a vampire.” Dean pulls up behind the garden center, where they have larger potted plants and enormous bags of fertilizer arranged in the parking lot. He’d preordered the tree, and now he climbs out with his receipt and flags down an employee to help locate the sapling and bring it to the car. It’s about two feet tall, wrapped in burlap, and Dean arranges it in the foot well in the backseat with so much care I think he expects the nursery worker to judge our suitability as plant parents.
“All right,” he says, climbing back in and steering us toward my house. “You ready for this?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
We reach my bungalow, a tidy, quaint house on an older, tree-lined street on the outskirts of the city. Dean’s got the tree under one arm and the groceries in the other, and I open the front door to usher him inside, snagging Leroy, the dog we’d gotten six months ago, before he can dash into the street.
Leroy, an unidentifiable breed with shaggy hair, enormous feet and a passionate love for Dean, howls joyfully to herald our arrival. “Okay,” I say, releasing him when he turns to scamper after his idol. “Go see your one true love.”
Dean smirks at me as he returns from the kitchen in time to overhear, and tugs me in by my shirt collar, kissing me thoroughly. “You got one true love, Rachel?”
“Uh-huh.”
He unbuttons my suit jacket and pushes it down my shoulders, then starts on my shirt. “Yeah? Who is it?”
A loud crash comes from the kitchen, followed by the unmistakable sound of dog nails on hardwood as Leroy abandons the scene of his crime. “It’s not Leroy.”
Dean releases me to head for the kitchen. “Leroy! Get away from those steaks. And leave the tree alone too.”
I step out of my heels and follow the two men I love into the cozy kitchen, finding Dean crouched on the floor, scratching Leroy’s ears as he pretends to scold him. I pick up the scattered packages of steak and arrange them out of dog-reach on the counter. “It’s no wonder he still misbehaves, Dean, if this is your idea of discipline.”
“I’ll beat him later,” he assures me, “once the guests are gone.”
I smile in spite of myself. “What time are they coming?”
“Seven.”
“Then let’s get this tree planted, shall we?”
Since mowing down the first one, Dean has been meticulously planning this day. He’d researched the variety that would grow well in our area, sited the best place in the yard for it and has already dug the hole. Leroy and I trail after him to the corner he’d selected in the small, fenced-in backyard.
I hold Leroy back as Dean carefully unwraps the tree and lifts it from the pot, arranging the root ball in the hole and patting down the dirt around it. We watch as he waters the area, then sticks a series of posts in the ground, wrapping them with mesh to make a flimsy fence.
“There you go,” he says, wiping his hands together once he’s finished. “An apple tree.”
It looks like a large, dead twig. “Amazing.”
“House, dog, apple tree,” he says, ticking up his fingers one at a time. “Everything you ever wanted.”
“What about you?” I ask. “Do you have everything you want?”
“I wouldn’t mind a blow job,” he replies, “but that can wait ’til the steaks are on.”
I snort and turn back toward the house to change and start dinner. “You’re a romantic, Dean.”
He snags the waistband of my skirt and tugs me back against his hard chest. “If I rent out my place and move in here, are you gonna marry me?”
“Are you going to ask properly?”
“One day, yeah.”
“I guess I could make an honest man out of you.”
He laughs into my hair, his hot breath making me shiver in the cool spring evening. “You got a lot of work to do.”
“I’m up for it.”
His teeth find the sensitive skin at my nape and bite down lightly. “You think?”
“I know.”
“We’ll see.”
His doubt when it comes to my commitment to our relationship bothers me, but only time will prove that I mean what I say. Until then, I remain silent as we stare at our scrawny new plant. “You’re sure it’s an apple tree?” I check. “Not just...a branch?”
“I’m pretty sure. If it grows apples, it’s an apple tree. If it just grows branches, it’s a branch.”
I reach back to wrap my hands around his waist, holding him snug against me. “Second time’s the charm.”
“Damn right it is.” He reaches over to tap the fence, as though I need reminding. “I learn from my mistakes.”
“We’ll get it right,” I tell him. “We have to. If we go back to the nursery a third time, they’ll ban us fo
r life.”
“Uh-oh.” Dean kisses my neck. “What would we do instead?”
I turn so I can kiss him back. “Buy apples at the grocery store,” I murmur against his lips. “And screw all the time.”
Dean laughs again. “I knew I loved you, Rachel.”
I tip my head back to look up at him. “Do you know I love you?”
The corner of his mouth quirks. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I know. You’re a smart girl. All those degrees prove it.”
“I love you, Dean.”
He slaps my ass and nudges me toward the house. “Don’t get sappy. You’ve gotta put the steaks on, then you promised me a blow job.”
“I did no such thing.”
He slings an arm around my shoulders and walks alongside me. “Let me change your mind.”
“That might take a while.”
He glances down at me, his dark eyes filtering a million thoughts as he tries to settle on the right one. Eventually he presses a kiss to my temple and says the simplest, truest thing. “We’ve got time.”
* * * * *
About the Author
Julianna Keyes is a Canadian writer who has lived on both coasts and several places in between. She’s been skydiving, bungee jumping and white-water rafting, but nothing thrills—or terrifies—her as much as the blank page. She loves Chinese food, foreign languages, baseball and television, though not necessarily in that order. In addition to Time Served, she is the author of two contemporary romances: Just Once, the story of a world-weary socialite and a stubborn ranch foreman, and Going the Distance, a love story set in China between a kindergarten ESL teacher and a former army interrogator. She writes sizzling stories with strong characters, plenty of conflict, and lots of making up.
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ISBN-13: 9781426899621
Time Served
Copyright © 2015 by Julianna Keyes
Edited by Kerri Buckley
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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