The One

by Danielle Allen

  I threw my head back and laughed, pulling him to his feet. “I knew an engagement was the end game for you!”

  Laughing, Julian’s lips found mine sweetly as he wrapped his arms around me, lifting me off of my feet. The kiss was short, but the effects were longer lasting.

  “Ladies and gentleman, put your hands together for the newly…committed couple,” Bryce announced with an uncertain laugh as he tried to explain what had just happened. He shrugged and turned his attention to the audience. “Those of you at home and in our studio audience, thank you for being here. Ladies, thank you for being here. We had a wild ride this season. So many twists and turns to bring us to this point. And after four weeks and out of thousands of women, Julian has made his decision. And Zoe Jordan, you are…”

  “The One!” The crowd called back in unison, clapping and screaming.

  *****

  Chapter 21

  After yelling ‘cut,’ a producer dispersed the crowd while another told all of us that our party bus would be leaving in thirty minutes. Most of the women on stage hugged both Julian and I before departing. Tori stormed off set, rolling her eyes and muttering under her breath without acknowledging us at all. Mya admitted to being a little jealous, but she said that it would pass and that she would call me in a few days. Nicole and Emma congratulated both of us and told Julian that he made the right choice. The rest politely said goodbye and left.

  Hand-in-hand, Julian and I made our way off of the soundstage, thanking people as they passed on well wishes to us and our future. Stopping every few feet made the trip to the Green Room that much longer. Only Ana remained when we walked in.

  “You better hurry,” Ana warned, stuffing her makeup into a bag. “The bus is leaving in less than five minutes!”

  “She’s coming with me,” Julian replied, slipping his hand out of mine in order to put his arm around my shoulders. “I’m not letting her out of my sight.” He kissed the top of my head.

  I couldn’t see my face, but my cheeks hurt from how hard I was smiling.

  Ana rolled her eyes as she walked by us, heading toward the door. She turned, looking around the room once more. “Okay, looks like I have everything.” She met our eyes and gave us a small smile. “Zoe, thanks for the advice. I think it went well. Julian, if you get tired of her, you know how to find me.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Ana!”

  She gave me a wink. “Just putting it out there. See you guys around.”

  She walked out, closing the door behind her.

  “I can’t believe she just said that.” I looked up at him and he was gazing down at me. I melted. “You can’t keep looking at me like that.”

  “I can and I will.” Julian turned me so that my body was flush against his. He ran his hands down my fully exposed back sending chills down my spine.

  I pushed away from him gradually. “Well I need to talk to you and you know you make me swoon when you look at me like that.”

  He gave me a smoldering look, licking his lips excessively. “You mean like this.”

  My eyebrows came together and I frowned. I backed away from him dramatically. “Don’t do that again.”

  He started laughing. Reaching out to grab me, he pulled me into him and kissed me. “Is this better?”

  “I don’t know. I think I need another.”

  He put his hands around my neck, using his thumbs to keep my head in place. His eyes bore into mine as his nose just barely touched mine. His lips were a mere inch away and I could feel his minty breath tickling my skin.

  “Thank you,” he uttered softly.

  “For what?” I sighed, getting lost in his eyes.

  “For taking the risk,” he whispered against my lips.

  Capturing my mouth with his, Julian kissed me with a tenderness that caused me to feel faint. I gripped the front of his tuxedo as he took his time exploring my mouth with his own. The kiss was tender and worshipful. He deepened the kiss, causing me to moan lightly into his mouth.

  I let go of his tux and moved my hands up until they were mussing his hair.

  The sound of a man clearing his throat caused us to startle away from one another, ending the kiss abruptly. Our arms were still around each other as we shifted our bodies to see who had interrupted us.

  Robert Brady closed the door behind him and looked between us. “Julian Winters and Zoe Jordan.” He laughed, but it sounded off. “Well, I did not see that coming.”

  “Listen, Robert… I know you wanted it to be Leah, but—”

  The older man lifted his hand and interrupted. “Yes, I did. I was very clear with you.” He slowly started crossing the room. “The polls showed Leah being the crowd favorite, but Bailey kept inching on her. Leah was the mean one that was pretty enough to get away with it. Bailey was the dumb one that was pretty enough to get away with it. Both had such compelling storylines over the course of the show. But when Zoe left…”

  Robert stopped in his tracks and shifted his gaze to me. He lifted his arms in the air. “When you left, the way you left…it was a ratings dream. You two had such chemistry and then—poof!—you up and leave. It had drama! It had suspense! It had romance! The final interview when you both were on the brink of tears and…” He scratched his head. “The ratings poured in.”

  “What’s this about?” Julian asked, clearly annoyed.

  “This is about me needing to know the direction that my own show is taking.” He put his hands on his hips. “I worked around your demands. Viewers like sex. Sex sells. But you told me you weren’t having sex with anyone so I let creative editing and angles tell the story. You barely wanted to kiss anyone, but when you had to sell it, you sold it.”

  “Robert, I’ve fulfilled my contract. I fully participated in the show. I kissed and dated the women you wanted me to be with and then when it was time for me to choose, I chose the woman I wanted to be with. I wasn’t in breach of anything. I’ve had my lawyers go over the paperwork several times to ensure that when I came for my girl, there was nothing you could do about it,” Julian replied evenly.

  I looked up at him and I was almost positive my eyes bulged out of my skull in the shape of hearts. Since I was a child, my mother always told me that it is disrespectful to call a woman ‘girl’ unless you are being informal with friends. So being called ‘girl’ never failed to get under my skin. But hearing Julian call me his girl made my heart flutter.

  When Julian’s jaw clenched, I looked back at Robert who stared at Julian hard. He nodded slowly, licking his teeth. His face was pinched and he seemed to be holding something back. “You are very lucky that this turned out so well, ratings wise.” He grimaced as he backed away. “I’ll leave you lovebirds to it.”

  He seems happy that the ratings were good, but mad because it wasn’t a storyline he created.

  Robert was almost out of the door when he turned to look at us with a smirk. “Julian, you may want to take a look at your contract again. If you find love on the show, we still own the rights to the relationship for two years.” He let out a hollow laugh. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The door closed behind him and my eyebrows flew up. “He’s an ass.”

  Julian gritted his teeth and let out a harsh breath. His eyes were focused on the closed door.

  I turned into him and placed my hands on his face. “Hey.” I tilted my head to the side. “That only applies if we were to get married. We are a newly not engaged couple. We don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I know.” His eyes met mine and he sighed. The tension rolled from his body as my fingertips skated over his jawline, down his neck, and across his chest. “It just pisses me off that he thinks he can control me. I haven’t had a boss for a long time and I don’t deal well with him trying to tell me what to do.”

  I smiled up at him. “I think he’s just mad because you didn’t do what he said and things turned out even better than he anticipated.”

  He raked his bottom lip between his teeth, analyzing my face. “How are you s
o calm about this? You hated being on this show.”

  “As long as we don’t get married in two years, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  He kissed my forehead. “My lawyers and I are still going to have a little talk with him.”

  “Are you going to try to renegotiate parts of your contract? Because you might not have to since he didn’t do his due diligence by making sure I was contractually obligated to do anything outside of the show.”

  Julian’s eyebrows came together in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “The paperwork I signed when I left the show only stipulated I had to appear on this reunion. I’m not required to do anything else.”

  Seeming to understanding, a slow smile crept onto his face.

  I lifted up onto my toes, pressing my lips against his smiling mouth. “So when I tell you not to worry about it, don’t worry about it.”

  He ran one of his hands down my spine. “Is that right?”

  “Yes.” I put my head on his chest, directly over his heart. Feeling the strong thumps comforted me and I wrapped my arms around him. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too. I meant it when I said I thought about you all the time. I even tried to get your phone number.”

  “We weren’t allowed to have phones or computers…or a way out.”

  A chuckle rumbled from deep in his chest. “Did you have a TV?”

  I pulled my head up so I could look at him. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “And as much as I didn’t want to, I watched the dates.” I paused, waiting for him to fill in the blanks so I didn’t have to ask.

  He didn’t.

  “You and Leah looked pretty close,” I started, pausing again.

  “None of that was real.”

  “But those kisses were and the chemistry or whatever you had with her was apparent. There was something there. I just want to know…”

  What did I want to know? He chose me. He picked me.

  If I was honest with myself, I would’ve admitted that I worried that Julian would just change his mind arbitrarily. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. It wasn’t even that I thought Julian was anything like Tate. But to have someone who claimed to love me so much that they wanted to marry me turn around and throw it all away because of the possibility of new ass messed with my mind. It occurred to me that I just wanted assurance; even though I knew nothing was ever guaranteed. Matters of the heart were risky.

  “Come here.” Julian took my hand into his and tugged me behind him as he went to the loveseat. Sitting down, he brought me down with him, into his lap. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I don’t want any of this between us.”

  I swallowed hard as one of his hands tickled my bare back. “When you kissed her, it looked like you were into it.”

  “It was easy to fake it with Leah because she reminded me a lot of Lillian. So my mind went into autopilot with her. It was hard to fake it with the other women because there was no automatic recall for me to try to attach it to, no person in my past for me try to fake a feeling with. I could go through the motions with Leah. But everyone else just reminded me of the show…and the show just reminded me of you…and thinking of you made it impossible for me to try with anyone else.”

  “And you didn’t have sex with her or Bailey?”

  “Not at all. The farthest it’s ever gone was kissing. What you saw on camera was all there was to it. I just did what I needed to do in order to get the shots they wanted.” Julian’s eyes explored mine.

  “I bet they tried.”

  “Leah, yes. Bailey and I had an agreement of sorts. She didn’t try anything. She wasn’t interested.”

  I smiled. Thank you Bailey.

  “But it didn’t matter what anyone else did or said. I didn’t want to be with anyone, but you. I still don’t want to be with anyone, but you.” His fingers flexed on the outside of my thigh. “And it’s not just because sex with you is insane or because you did that thing with your tongue.”

  My head fell to the side as I let out a short, unexpected giggle.

  He watched me laugh with a smile as his fingers traced circles into the skin of my thigh. His gaze dropped, watching in apparent amazement that the pads of his fingertips created goosebumps in their wake.

  He has no idea how he affects me.

  As silence surrounded us, he appeared to be lost in thought. I kissed his temple.

  He turned his head so that our foreheads touched and I was immediately drawn into his gaze. “Before I met you, I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. I knew I wanted someone I could be myself with, someone I could be better than myself with. And when I told my dad about coming on the show, he told me to just enjoy myself and don’t worry too much about it because the moment I know I’m with the right one, everything changes.”

  His hand relocated to the back of my neck, bringing my lips closer to his as he continued. “I don’t want anyone else because just being with you, in your presence, makes me a better man. I was mad that you left because I didn’t want to be away from you, but just thinking about having to watch you kiss other men pissed me off, so I get it. But I want you to know that there was never any chance of anything happening with anyone after we met. Everything changed when I met you.”

  My belly quivered as something in his assurances resonated with me deeply. I believed him. I believed him in a way that was so absolute that I knew that I was all in.

  Staring into his eyes, my heart had never felt so full. I took one shaky breath after another as I tried to slow the flood of emotions I felt. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Pressing his lips against mine, Julian kissed me softly. His mouth moved over mine gently, luring me in before his tongue parted my lips and he kissed me possessively.

  My body reacted to the sharp contrast of soft and hard, sweet and sexy, love and lust. I moaned into his kiss and twisted my fingers in his hair. The kiss ended in a series of lingering pecks.

  “I want to take you home,” Julian whispered between kisses.

  “Let’s go.”

  We had just stood up and were intertwining our fingers when the door opened and shut, pulling our attention away from one another. In a flurry of hair and limbs, we saw a man carrying a woman as they aggressively clawed at each other’s clothes. The woman’s ass was completely exposed to us.

  “Well, this is awkward,” I commented, slightly amused.

  Koko and Bryce froze. She unwrapped her legs from around his waist and adjusted her dress before turning around.

  “Bryce was…helping me find my makeup brushes,” Koko offered in her hilarious way.

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “Did you lose them at the same time you lost your panties?”

  She made her way toward me, leaving Bryce looking shocked and embarrassed at the door. “Touché. From the way Julian’s hair looks, I’d say you have no room to talk,” Koko replied with a smirk.

  I looked over at Julian who immediately started fixing his hair. I moved to meet her halfway. “I won’t confirm or deny anything.”

  When we met in the middle, only three or four seconds were able to tick by before we both burst out laughing. I wrapped my arms around my best friend and she squeezed me tightly.

  “You look happy,” she remarked, touching my face.

  “So do you,” I returned.

  “I’m glad you got your happy ending.”

  “I’m sorry we interrupted yours.”

  We both snickered.

  “Okay, what’s going on here?” Julian questioned, looking around suspiciously.

  “Do you two know each other outside of the show?” Bryce asked, looking just as confused.

  “Well…” Koko and I said in unison.

  *****

  Epilogue

  “What’s wrong?” Julian asked as I unlocked the front door of my apartment.

  Tucking the stack of mail under my arm, I held the door open for him as he carried our bags inside. “Not
hing. I’m just exhausted. That was exhausting.”

  Dropping the bags in the middle of the walkway that separated the kitchen from the living room, he turned around and smiled. “Yes, it was. It’s been a long week. But we survived.”

  “Woo hoo!” I cheered playfully as I made my way into his open arms. “First big holiday as a couple.”

  “And the first time our families were able to all come together,” Julian added, kissing the top of my head.

  We spent Thanksgiving in Maryland because Julian’s mom’s mom, Grandma Pearl, couldn’t travel due to a hip replacement. In order to really up the ante and test our relationship, Julian’s parents flew with us to Virginia where we met my parents, my brother and his girlfriend and then drove to Grandma Pearl’s Chesapeake Bay home for a big family dinner. Although I’d met his immediate family soon after the finale wrapped and he’d met mine a couple months after that, our families hadn’t had the opportunity to all meet each other until Thanksgiving.

  Even though Thanksgiving was traditionally known as the holiday where family came together to fight, our families got along really well.

  A little too well.

  Grandma Pearl did not have a filter, so she kept things interesting. The widowed hostess broke the ice and before the first course was served, everyone was getting along marvelously. Somewhere during the second course though the tide had turned and by the third course our families had decided to make us the butt of every joke. Allegedly it was all light-hearted fun, but by the time we left, a wedding date was set and countdown to Baby Jordan-Winters had started—both without our consent or encouragement.

  “It went well. I think they all had a little more fun than we did. But it went well and Thanksgiving is officially over,” I murmured, lifting my head off of his chest and smiling up at him.

  He kissed my lips softly, sending a chill down my spine and lighting a fire everywhere else. “And we are no longer surrounded by family.” He flicked my top lip with his tongue and then smirked.