Beach Reads Boxed Set

by Marie Force

  “Jer—”

  “Enjoy the bath. Call me if you need anything.” He bent to kiss her forehead and then left the room.

  Groaning, she slipped underwater.

  Juliana wore a long black skirt with high-heeled black boots and a sheer ivory silk blouse over an ivory camisole. She got dressed with a heavy heart, dreading what he most likely had planned for tonight and wondering how she would ever say no to him.

  Out of habit, she touched perfume to her neck and smoothed on lipstick. “Well, here goes,” she whispered to her reflection in the mirror.

  Jeremy came to the foot of the stairs when he heard her coming down. “Oh, Jule, look at you.” He offered her his hand. “God, you’re so gorgeous. So unbelievably beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, moved by the raw look of love and desire on his face.

  “Will you kiss me?” His hands on her face, he bent to touch his lips to hers. “Just once?” he whispered, tilting her head to gain better access.

  As his tongue caressed hers, Juliana’s stomach knotted with nerves.

  His kiss quickly became hungry and needy.

  “Jeremy,” she gasped. “Don’t. Please.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t resist you. I never could.”

  She reached up to wipe a trace of lipstick off his mouth. “We need to get going, don’t we?”

  He ran his finger over her cheek. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  “Mr. Dixon, Ms. Gregorio,” the maitre d’ at Chiapparellis said. “Welcome. Right this way, please.”

  Following him through the busy restaurant, Juliana remembered all the occasions they had celebrated here—anniversaries, birthdays, Jeremy’s big job. They came here long before they could afford it and continued to come even after they could afford better.

  The maitre d’ opened a door and gestured them into a cozy private room filled with pink roses and a violinist playing just for them.

  “Oh,” Juliana said, taking in the romantic setting. Again her stomach lurched with nerves mixed now with fear and regret—tremendous regret that he hadn’t done this a very long time ago.

  “Jule?” Jeremy startled her out of her thoughts. He gestured for her to have a seat at the table.

  Numb, Juliana slid into the chair he held for her.

  He poured her a glass of champagne and handed it to her. After he filled a glass for himself, he raised it in toast to her. “I love you, Jule. Thank you for spending tonight with me.” He touched his glass to hers and took a long sip.

  Juliana saw his glass tremble ever so slightly as he returned it to the table. In that moment she realized he was nervous, and her stomach took another sickening dip.

  They were served fried calamari, which Jeremy knew was one of Juliana’s favorite foods, and a delicious shrimp Nicola, another of their longtime favorites. Even though she’d had almost nothing to eat all day, Juliana pushed the food around on her plate and had trouble actually swallowing anything. Dessert was a chocolate soufflé that she picked at without her usual enthusiasm for all things chocolate.

  “Is everything okay, babe?”

  “It’s wonderful. Thank you for doing all this. I’m overwhelmed.”

  He put down his fork and pulled his chair closer to hers.

  Oh God. Here it comes. She wanted to whimper. She wanted to beg. Please don’t, Jer. Just don’t.

  He took her hand and brought it to his lips. “You know how much I love you, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “There’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t do for you. There’s nothing you could want that I wouldn’t find a way to get for you. I hope you know that.”

  The lump in Juliana’s throat became so huge she didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded.

  “There’s something I want to show you. Will you come with me?”

  That wasn’t the question she expected. Thrown off balance and more than a little confused, Juliana let him help her up. He thanked the violinist and led her through the jam-packed restaurant, the noise of the Saturday night crowd jarring after the quiet of their private room.

  He retrieved their coats from the coatroom and helped Juliana into hers. While they waited outside for the valet to bring his car, he kept his arm around her.

  “Are you warm enough?” he asked as they headed south on Interstate 95.

  “I’m fine.” Baffled by the odd change in direction their night had taken, she asked, “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see,” he said with a mysterious smile. “Just relax and enjoy the ride.”

  The miles rolled by as they left the city behind. After about twenty minutes, Jeremy took the exit for Ellicott City and made a series of turns that seemed quite familiar to him. At last, he turned into a development Juliana recognized.

  “Do you remember this place?”

  “It’s where we came that day for the open house. What are we doing here?”

  “Give me a minute, and I’ll show you.”

  They traveled another half mile into the development of sprawling new homes before he pulled into a driveway and turned off the car.

  “Where are we, Jer?”

  “Come see.”

  He met her on the sidewalk and took her hand. At the front door, Juliana watched astounded as he inserted a key and pushed the door open. “What’s going on? Where did you get a key to this house?”

  He flipped on the lights, and she gasped when she saw more pink roses on the massive staircase, in the empty dining room, in the huge family room, on the hearth in front of the marble fireplace, and on the granite countertop in the kitchen.

  “Jeremy.” Her hands came together over her racing heart. “I don’t understand.”

  “The dream house. Isn’t that what you called it?”

  “Yes, but… Jeremy. What—”

  He took her coat, hung it with his over the banister, and reached for her hand. “Come with me.”

  Leading her in to sit on the hearth in front of the fireplace, he kneeled down and took her hands. “I’ve told you this hundreds of times, maybe even thousands over the last ten years, but I’ve never meant it more than I do right now. I love you, Juliana. I love you more than anything in this world.” He touched his lips to both her hands and struggled to collect himself.

  She found it hard to breathe as she waited to hear what else he had to say.

  “Earlier, I told you there was nothing I wouldn’t do for you. To prove that, I have this for you.” He nudged the door to the fireplace open and withdrew a piece of paper, which he handed to her.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the deed to your mother’s house. I paid off the mortgage so you won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “What? Jer, oh my God. You can’t stand her. Why would you do this?”

  “Because you’re worried all the time that you’ll miss a payment and she’ll end up homeless. Now you don’t have to think about it anymore.”

  Tears pooled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. “You can’t do this.”

  He wiped the tears from her face. “It’s already done, babe.”

  “I can’t accept it, Jer. I just can’t.”

  “You have to, or you’ll hurt my feelings.”

  She tried to absorb the enormity of it. “I just can’t believe you’d do something like this.”

  “I told you, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You’re my family, Jule. You’ve been my family and I’ve been yours for so long that I could more easily live without food or oxygen than I could without you.”

  He leaned in to kiss her gently. “The other thing I told you before is there’s nothing you could want that I wouldn’t find a way to get for you, right?”

  Wiping her tears, she nodded.

  “I never forgot how much you loved these houses or the look you had in your eyes that day—like you’d seen something you knew you’d never have, so you didn’t even let yourself hope for it. I promised myself right then and there that
if I could ever swing it, we’d live here.” He held up the key, which now had a diamond ring hooked around it. “We have the dream house, now we just need the dream. Will you marry me, Jule? Will you make me the luckiest guy in the world and be my wife?”

  Sitting in stunned silence trying to absorb it all, Juliana suddenly thought of Michael’s proposal.

  Don’t forget who asked first.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Jule?”

  “I, uh, I just don’t know what to say.”

  “‘Yes’ would work for me.”

  Juliana tugged her hands free from his and stood up. She looked around the huge room and struggled to comprehend the magnitude of his grand gesture. He’d made it all but impossible for her to say no to him. “When did you do all this?”

  He turned to sit on the hearth. “I bought the house the weekend I was home when I couldn’t find you, and I closed on it yesterday. I was hoping I’d chosen the right one. We looked at quite a few that day, but I thought this was the one you liked best.”

  “It was.” Chilled, she crossed her arms and went to look out the window. There was just enough moonlight to make out the large backyard and the wooded area behind the property. It now seemed so unimaginable that she had expected to just walk away from Jeremy after everything they’d been through together. How could she have ever thought he would step aside when she told him she had outgrown their relationship? Of course that hardly mattered since he had made sure she’d never get the chance to say any such thing. “How can you afford all this? My mother’s mortgage? This house?”

  “We’ll have to sell the place in the city—pretty quickly,” he said with a grin. “But I told you, I made a bundle when I was in Florida, and I was working so much that I hardly spent a dime of it. Your mother’s mortgage wasn’t much really. There was just a year or so left on it, but I knew it would give you peace of mind to have that taken care of.”

  Juliana turned away from the window to face him. “I just can’t get over you doing that.”

  When he stood up and walked over to her she knew she couldn’t stall any longer.

  “Are you going to marry me, Jule? Are we going to live here together and fill this big house with kids? Are we going to have what we were always meant to have, from the time we were seventeen?”

  She bit her lip and ventured a glance up at him. “What if, in a year or two…”

  “What?”

  “What if you get itchy feet again?” she asked, using Mrs. R’s words.

  He took a step back as if she had struck him. “I can’t believe you’d ask me that.”

  “Why can’t you believe it? What if you do all this to win me back only to discover down the road that you still have wild oats to sow? What if I’m pregnant with our first child, or even our second, and you begin taking me for granted again and start wishing for anything but the life you have with me? What will I do then?”

  A muscle in his cheek twitching with tension, he fixed his eyes on the window behind her. “That’s not going to happen. I’ve learned a big lesson in the last two months, and it’s one I’m never, ever going to forget.” He shifted his eyes back to her. “All I can do is tell you I love you. I’ve always loved you, and I always will. I’m asking you to marry me. If you want me to beg, I will. I have absolutely no pride left when it comes to you.” His eyes filled, and the helpless despair she saw on his face finally did her in.

  She took a deep breath and blocked all thoughts of Michael. “Okay.”

  Jeremy’s face went slack with shock. “Yes?”

  It was inevitable. It always had been, and for her to deny that was to deny what he had meant to her for the most important years of her life—the years when no one else had loved her or cared about her or been there for her. He was right. He was her family, and she was his. Taking a deep breath, she said, “Yes.”

  He let out a whoop and swept her off her feet and into his arms. His tears of joy left damp spots on her face. “You won’t be sorry, Jule. I’ll spend every day making you happy. I promise I’ll never let you down.” He reached into his pocket for the ring and slipped it on her finger. “Oh, no,” he groaned. “It’s too big.”

  Juliana tried not to think about how perfectly Michael’s ring fit her. If she allowed herself to think of him for even one second, she would never make it through this. “That’s okay. We can get it sized down. It’s a beautiful ring.” Smaller diamonds framed a large, square-cut diamond.

  His face fell with disappointment. “I took that ruby in your jewelry box to get the size right.”

  She smiled. “That was my grandmother’s. She had much bigger hands than I do.”

  “Sorry.”

  Taking it off, she handed it to him. “You’d better hold on to it until we get it sized. I don’t want to lose it.”

  “I wanted it to be perfect.”

  “It’s a beautiful ring, Jer,” she said, reaching up to kiss him.

  He looked at her with his heart in his eyes. “Do you still love me, Jule? After everything that’s happened, do you still love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me? I need to hear it.”

  “I love you, Jeremy.”

  “You’re really going to marry me?”

  “Yes,” she whispered as his lips took fierce possession of hers in a hot kiss filled with the promise of things to come.

  “Let’s go home, to our current home,” he said in a voice hoarse with desire and emotion. “I want to make love to my future wife.”

  “Um, about that, Jer…”

  He pulled back to look at her. “What?”

  “Two things. First, I don’t want a long engagement. I want us to go somewhere and get married. No big deal, okay?”

  “I don’t want to just sneak off and get married like we’ve got something to hide. I want to do it up. I know the deal with your family, and we don’t have to make it a big production.”

  “No production, Jer. I mean it. I don’t want it.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “A guy I met in Florida told me he and his wife went to St. John with a couple of friends and got married over a weekend. How about something like that in the next few weeks? We could take Pam and David and my mom and Gary,” he said, referring to his stepfather. “Would that work?”

  “That’d be great. I could tell my family after the fact that we eloped.”

  “Okay, so that takes care of one of your two things. What’s the other?”

  “I won’t sleep with you until we’re married.”

  He snorted. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No.”

  Realizing she was serious, he said, “Why? We’ve been having sex for ten years, Juliana. I don’t get it.”

  “I feel like we let sex become too important in our relationship. I want us to stay focused on what really matters over the next few weeks. Please?”

  He groaned. “I’ve been dreaming of making love with you for two months already.”

  “Then a couple more weeks won’t kill you.”

  “I really think it might.”

  “You can do it.”

  “You drive a tough bargain, babe, but okay. If it means that much to you, we can wait.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you for saying yes.” He hugged her again. “You’ve made me the happiest guy in the world.”

  As Juliana remembered Michael telling her that she made him happier than he had ever been in his life, the numbness wore off and she began to ache.

  After Jeremy served Juliana breakfast in bed in the guestroom the next morning, they called his mother and stepfather to share the news of their engagement. His mother whooped with joy and promised to be there for the big day. They also called Pam and David, who were equally thrilled to be included and agreed to serve as their matron of honor and best man. Jeremy got busy on the Internet, and an hour later he booked their wedding at a resort on St. John.

  He came downstairs to find Julia
na when he finished. “We got really lucky. They had a cancellation on New Year’s weekend just this morning.” Embracing her, he sighed with contentment. “Three weeks, babe. I can’t believe we’ll be married in three weeks.”

  Drawn in by his contagious delight, she smiled up at him.

  He slid his hand around her neck and kissed her. After he spent several minutes letting her know just how badly he wanted her, his breathing was heavy and labored. “You’re really sure about this no sex thing?”

  “Think about how great the wedding night will be.”

  He moaned. “I can’t. If I think about it, I’ll need another cold shower.” He had already told her all about the one he took the night before after their hot make-out session at the guest room door.

  She laughed. “You’re pathetic.”

  “Babe? Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “When we were apart, did you, you know…”

  She struggled out of his embrace. “We’re not talking about that.”

  “I need to know, Jule. It makes me crazy to think about you with someone else. Tell me I don’t need to be worried about that, and I’ll never mention it again.”

  “I’m only going to say this once, and I really want you to listen, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m never going to talk to you about the two months we spent apart. We said we wouldn’t do that. I’ve agreed to marry you. If you’re going to badger me about this then we’ve got a problem.”

  He studied her for a long time before he answered. “Okay. I’ll let it go.”

  “Good.”

  Late on Sunday afternoon she told Jeremy she needed to do a few errands and left him unpacking the boxes and suitcases he brought home from Florida.

  “Hurry back, babe,” he said, kissing her good-bye. “I miss you already.”

  Juliana went to her mother’s house for the first time in three weeks.

  “Well, look at what the cat dragged in,” Paullina said.