“On behalf of the Emma Brandt Foundation, we are pleased to present you with the reopening of Joe’s Gladiator’s!” Dominic announces. Flashbulbs pop, and for once Dom isn’t bothered by his picture being taken.
He shakes Joe’s hand, and Joe looks pleased as he can be by the big turnout. I know that in large part, the press showed up because of Dominic, but regardless. They’re here, and any attention we can get for the underprivileged kids is worth it.
“Why did your foundation choose this particular project, Dominic?” one of the reporters calls out.
Dominic smiles. Jake waves to the cameras off to the side and everyone laughs.
“We chose this project because there was a need. There are good kids here, and all they need is a chance. Sometimes, bad things happen, unfair things… and all we can do is handle it the best we can. Most of the time, with a little help, we come through it just fine. A smart person once told me, ‘Before we fall, we fly.’ We just wanted to help these kids fly.”
Everyone applauds, and I’m so proud of Dominic I could burst.
We head into the reception where we chat with the boys, eat, and drink punch. I’m utterly filled with happiness when we finally walk out to our car.
“Are you sure you don’t mind that we named the foundation after Emma?” Dom asks as we climb inside. I stare at him.
“You know me better than that. I think it was the only thing to do. She never had a chance to live her dream. We’ve got to give other kids the chance to live theirs.”
Dominic fires the engine up, then turns to me. “You know what I love? How you always say we. You never say I. Or you. It’s always we.”
I shrug. “That’s how I think. In my head, we’re a team. We’re always going to be we, Dom. Get used to it.”
He kisses me, long and thoroughly. When he pulls away, I’m breathless.
“I have a surprise for you,” he announces. “You’re going to love it. I hope.”
“Oh, I love surprises,” I tell him, even though he knows that already. “Don’t give me any hints. I want to be really surprised.”
I have to admit, I’m completely stumped as we drive toward the country, out of the city. But then we approach Palos Park, his childhood home.
“We’re going to Castle Kinkaide?” I ask in confusion. He smirks, but doesn’t answer.
When we pull up to his parents’ house, there’s a red, yellow, and black hot air balloon set up on their lawn. It’s huge and majestic as it billows against the sky.
“Your chariot, my lady,” Dom bows low.
I roll my eyes. “Lord. Is this what I’ve got to look forward to all during filming? I know you like to get into character, but you realize that you’re not really a knight, right?”
Dom’s been rehearsing for a sixteenth-century period movie, and it’s made life interesting, to say the least. I fully intend to see him in a suit of armor around the house soon.
He shakes his head. “Can you just go with it?”
I giggle. “Fine. Yes, my squire. I’d love a ride in your fine chariot.”
“Squire?” Dom’s the one rolling his eyes now. “Try sir. I’m a knight, Jace.”
But he takes my hand and helps me into the balloon, introducing me to the pilot. Within minutes, we’re floating up and above Palos Park, above Chicago. The city is amazing from up here, with the evening sun reflecting off all of the glass.
“It’s breathtaking.” I breathe, looking down. “Thank you, Dom. But what’s the occasion?”
Dominic turns to me, his dark gaze serious. It’s a gaze that causes butterflies to flutter in my chest.
“Jacey, before I met you, I thought all I deserved was the darkness in life. The dark corners, the taboo, the unspeakable. But you’ve given me a new start. A fresh life. A new outlook. I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I’ll be forever grateful that you saw potential in me. That you saw what no one else did. You looked past the asshole, past the actor, past the name. You saw me. I love you for that. I love you for always grounding me, always reminding me of what’s important. I love you for always being my breath of fresh air, the challenge to my question.”
He pauses and my heart pounds in my chest.
Is he…? Is this…?
And then Dominic bends down, on one knee.
It is.
OHMYGOD.
“My lady,” he begins, in an exaggerated English accent, the one he’s been working on for a week. “I have but one question to ask of you. One favor that I wish for you to bestow, if but only you desire.”
I stare at him, laughter in my eyes and the utmost of happiness in my heart.
“Yes, good knight. Anything you wish to ask.”
Dom looks at me, his eyes smoldering, and he drops the accent.
“Will you marry me? Yes or no?”
He holds out a ring, a gorgeous princess cut diamond, and I feel like swooning. It’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen, held by the sexiest man in the world.
I look up at him, losing myself in his dark, dark eyes.
“Yes.”
He breathes in sharply. “Yes? You’re sure you want me? You know all of my monsters, Jace. You want me anyway?”
I nod, choking up. “I want you because of your monsters,” I tell him. “They’ve made you who you are, and I can’t imagine loving you any more than I do. I’ll want you every day of my life. That’s a promise.”
Dominic smiles a gentle smile as he slips the ring onto my finger and pulls me into his side. He kisses me slowly and gently before he wraps his arm around my shoulders, and we watch the city passing beneath us.
As we watch it, I think of everything that’s happened… to both of us. We’re both messed up in our own ways, but we’re both overcoming it. It’s a process, but we’re doing it. Everything that’s happened has made us stronger, individually and together.
Looking up at Dominic, I brush my fingers along his cheek.
“Are you happy? Yes or no?”
Dominic looks down at me and I see a million promises in his eyes, a million forevers.
“Hell, yes.”
I smile.
That’s all I needed to hear.
Epilogue
Jacey
I race through the tropical flowers, through the plants, and over the twisted path that leads to our little rented cottage off of the most beautiful beach in Hawaii. It’s the perfect place for a honeymoon, a true garden of Eden.
“Are you coming?” I call over my shoulder to my husband.
My husband.
The words ring through my head, and even though they sound foreign, they don’t feel that way. Dominic and Jacey Kinkaide. Bound together forever. By love and by lust and by everything in between. That’s what Duncan announced earlier at our ceremony on the beach. He’d gotten his license to perform marriages specifically for this occasion.
Dominic catches up to me and scoops me into his arms.
“You thought you’d walk over the threshold yourself?” he asks impishly. “Not gonna happen.”
“But this isn’t our house,” I start to say. But then I drop it. If the man wants to carry me, he can carry me. He scoops me up into his arms and carries me to the bed, a four-poster-covered-in-filmy-gauze bed.
Sitting me down, he peels me out of my dress, kissing every inch of me as he does. When he’s done, by the time I stand in front of him naked, I’m dying for him.
“I need you,” I tell him simply. “Fill me up, Dominic. Make me yours.”
He smiles, the smile I love, the private one… the one just for me. “You’ve always been mine,” he whispers. “You just didn’t know it.”
He pushes me back onto the bed and kisses me again, his tongue so hot and wet and perfect against mine.
“And I’ve always been yours,” he adds. “I just didn’t know it. But I know it now, and that’s the important thing.”
He straddles me, bending over me, owning me.
He knows just what to do to ma
ke my body sing, to crest me toward the precipice of orgasm as he slides his fingers in all the right places.
Emotion wells up in me, overwhelming and hot. Love, lust, and everything in between.
I grip Dom’s shoulders, pulling him into me, closer and closer. I wrap my leg around his hip, pulling him deeper inside.
He groans, then drags his tongue along my nipples. He circles them, then sucks, driving me to the brink of madness.
I arch upward, pressing against his strong chest, and he groans again as he thrusts, the muscles in his back flexing. I call out and scratch into him, breathing in the smell of his skin as I bury my face in his shoulder.
“I love you, Mrs. Kinkaide,” he breathes as he slides in and out of me, slower now, gentle. “Always.”
I want to roll my eyes and tell him that he’s so dramatic, that this isn’t a movie script. But I don’t. Because like always, scripted or not, his words are perfect.
I arch into him and come, the waves of my orgasm carrying me up and away, far from here. And then he throws his head back and follows me. It’s a few minutes before I return to the present, before I can once again think logical thought.
“I love you, too,” I answer finally, when I can catch my breath. “Always.”
I fall asleep in his arms.
I’m awakened by a sound. The world is dark outside the cottage and the gauzy curtains flutter in the breeze. I sit up and look around, only to be startled by a woman sitting in the chair next to the bed.
She’s humming “Brown Eyed Girl” ever so softly.
Her aquamarine eyes meet mine, and I know who she is. Oddly enough, I’m not afraid.
“Emma,” I whisper. She nods, her face young and beautiful in the night. “Am I dreaming?”
She smiles. “Are you?”
I don’t know. I must be.
“I needed you to know something,” she tells me softly, and her voice is like a song, gentle and melodic. She looks down at Dominic, her gaze full of love. “I chose you for him,” she says quietly.
I stare at her in confusion. “What?”
“You don’t remember me? I met you. Years ago on Goose Beach. I was there with my mom, you were there with your grandma. You got my ice cream money back from a horrible little girl.”
The hazy memory comes back, but I struggle to put the pieces together. “Heather Edel. She was the meanest girl in the sixth grade. You were wearing a red swimsuit.”
Emma nods.
“She terrified me, but you stood up to her like it was nothing and got my money back.”
“You gave me a seashell,” I say slowly, remembering how the little girl had handed it to me and then ran off with her mom. “A white one.”
Emma smiles. “I used to collect them.”
A memory of the tiny shells in Dominic’s black velvet box comes to mind and the shell on her pendant… I stare at her soundlessly, my breath lingering on my lips.
“I was so in awe of you,” she continues. “Of how you were so brave and stood up for someone you didn’t even know. It seemed like you weren’t afraid of anything. You swam out to the buoy line a hundred times that day, while I was afraid to go past the sandbar. After I went home, I never saw you again. But when Dominic needed saving, I knew it had to be you. He needed someone brave and strong, so I brought you to him.”
I stare at her, transfixed. “This is a strange dream.”
Emma laughs, a tinkling sound in the night.
“It’s okay to think that,” she assures me. “There are some things that can’t be explained, so you probably shouldn’t try.”
“But how did you ‘bring me to Dominic’?” I ask doubtfully. “Surely that can be explained.”
She smiles patiently. “Wasn’t it strange how drugs ended up in Dominic’s car… when you both swore they weren’t yours? It’s almost as if they just appeared there.”
My eyes widen.
“You.” I breathe. “Why?” She smiles and the room seems to glow with it.
“Because love eclipses death, Jacey. It’s forever. And because I love him, I want him to be happy. I knew you could make him happy, so I brought you together the only way I knew how. I’m at peace now. Tell him that. Tell him I’m glad that he’s moving on, that he’s forgetting me. Tell him good-bye.”
“He’s not forgetting you,” I protest. “He’ll never forget you. You’re a healthy memory now, instead of a painful one. That’s all. And that’s good.”
She smiles and nods. “I know. That’s all I ever wanted. Thank you, Jacey. Thank you for saving him. I knew you would.”
She trails her fingers along his leg as she walks to the door. Once she gets there, she looks back, her face luminescent in the night.
“Oh, and Jacey? Take care of him.”
I nod, transfixed and in awe. “I will.”
She walks away, humming.
Do you remember when, we used to sing… sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-te-da… You’re my… brown eyed girl.
I try to wake up, but then realize that I’m not sleeping. I have no conscious recollection of waking up. Or if I was ever actually asleep. Everything’s a haze. A blur. Except for the memory of Emma’s striking blue eyes staring at me from two feet away.
I sit up in bed, trying to wrap my mind around it.
It couldn’t have… it didn’t… it didn’t happen.
I turn to Dominic to wake him up, to share the crazy dream with him, when something catches my eye on the bedside table. Something that glistens pearly white in the light of the moon.
A seashell.
While the curtains rustle with the breeze and the ocean crashes against the beach, my heart pounds. And as the soft wind blows my hair away from my face, I hear it.
Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-te-da…
The faint strain of “Brown Eyed Girl,” floating in from the water.
Author’s Notes
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”
That’s my favorite quote from Ernest Hemingway, and it perfectly sums up why I’m writing this series.
The older I get, the more it seems that everyone in the world is broken in some way, whether it is from divorce, death, drugs, etc. I wanted to write stories that people could relate to, stories where my characters were far from perfect, but had readers rooting for them to succeed, to overcome their personal demons.
While my characters’ problems are sometimes more exaggerated than real-life problems for the sake of fictional entertainment, the roots of their issues are firmly planted in real life.
The fact of the matter is, real life can be a bitch sometimes. It can slap you, shove you around, and then kick you while you’re down.
But the important thing to remember is always this:
Life is hard sometimes, but it can only break you if you let it.
No matter what, you have to always stick your chin out and keep going. You have to keep going through the motions even if you don’t feel like it. Flip your problems the bird and keep fighting to make your life how you want it.
Your life is your own. If you don’t like it, if it makes you sad, if it makes you discouraged on a daily basis, change it. Change everything about it until you’re in love with your life and it’s exactly how you want it.
If Dominic, Jacey, Madison, Gabriel, Pax, and Mila have shown you anything, I hope it is that. That you can be dealt a really crappy hand in life, but the power to change everything rests within you. You hold the key to your own happiness.
Before We Fall Page 33