“Just listen. I’m not saying this would be forever. I’m saying it would be… for as long as we want to try.”
I took her hand and clasped it between mine, running my thumb over her knuckles. She had put her ring back on before the wedding last night and hadn’t taken it off. I still had mine, too. I liked the way they looked together. Like they were supposed to be there.
“I know you think I’m a joker, Ari. And maybe I am. But I won’t mess around. Not with you. Not with your heart. I promise.”
We stared at each other for what had to be minutes. I forced myself to summon the patience that typically escaped me, to wait out the answer that had to be coming.
Because the truth, therealtruth, was that I wasn’t leaving Seattle without her.
I didn’t know when Laney Fisher had become indispensable, but in the space of a few days, the idea of returning to Boston alone had become untenable. Even more than the idea of not becoming Blackguard’s next CEO.
She was coming with me.
She was going to be my wife.
That was all there was to it.
And yet… it wasn’t just up to me, was it?
That was the real kicker.
I was just considering the idea of getting on my knees and begging when she took a deep breath and whispered, “Okay.”
I leaned closer, unsure if I’d heard her correctly or just imagined it. “Okay?”
With eyes as big as the Aegean Sea, she nodded. “Yes. Let’s do it. Let’s go to Boston. You can be my husband. And I’ll… I’ll be your wife.”
17
DEARER THAN GOLD
LANEY
“Warm enough for you here, Mom? I know you like the heat.”
A rush of wind through the lacelike cedar boughs answered me. Despite nearing the end of June, it was still barely seventy in the shade of the big tree, where my mother’s grave marker lay next to a container holding the sunflowers I’d brought.
“Well, it’s never going to be Paros,” I said as if she’d replied in the negative. “You moved to the Pacific Northwest, Mom. You should be used to it by now.”
It was one of the reasons she ended up starting a fashion company that focused on sweaters, she said. No matter what the season in Seattle, she was always cold.
As the sun dropped a bit farther to the west, a few rays slipped under the boughs and over the marker. I turned my face toward them, as if to soak them in on behalf of my mother, who no longer could. Overhead, there was a distant call of gulls making their way down to the Sound, and beyond them, the low thrum of a ferry horn.
“It’s almost ninety in Boston right now,” I informed her. “I don’t know how I’m going to deal. I have Dad’s skin, so I burn no matter what.” I wore SPF 50 on a cloudy day.
I sat for a few more moments in the sunshine, brushing a few fallen cedar needles from the marker and picking at a dandelion that had sprouted next to it. Even now, I could feel my mother tapping her foot beside. Get on with it, Laney. Say what you need to say.
I sighed, even though my heart rate quickened, as it always did whenever I considered what I was about to do.
Two weeks ago, Ronan Black had shown up at my best friend’s wedding just days after we had woken up married, and instead of producing the annulment we had both agreed upon, he had surprised us both by asking me to remain his wife.
And I had shocked us both, I thought, when I agreed.
Since then, things had been a blur.
Ronan Black was not a patient man. While he had wanted me to fly with him to Boston literally the day after the wedding, I had insisted on at least a few weeks.
Megan was still on her honeymoon, which meant I’d just have to talk to her about everything when she got back. Meanwhile, I had been hard at work using some of the money Ronan had sent to hire new staff for Meráki, finding a new teacher to take my place at the yoga studio, assigning my feral cat a new neighbor to feed him, and packing up the rest of my life to spend the next six months in Boston.
