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“The fact that you remembered at all …” I flip the shirt over, reading off all the tour dates until I get to Sarasota—the night I was conceived. “Thank you. This is probably the most thoughtful gift anyone’s ever given me.”
With the shirt clenched in my hand, I throw my arms around his shoulders.
“I know this isn’t some love story out of one of your books,” he says, “and I can’t promise you that any of this will be predictable, ever, but Jovie, I’ve been in love with you for over eight years. And I promise you, I’ll love you the way you deserve to be loved—the way you always should have been loved.”
He kisses me, deep and hard. A kiss Clark Gable would have been proud of—a kiss I feel in the unexcavated depths of my soul.
“I love you,” he says, his mouth grazing mine.
“I love you too,” I say. “I always have.”
Stone isn’t cold anymore.
He’s fire.
And now? He’s finally mine.
Epilogue
Stone
* * *
2 years later
* * *
They say when you know, you know.
Granted, I’ve known Jovie was the one for me from the minute I laid eyes on her from across the room at that party ten years ago. But it’s time to make it official.
The ring box damn near burns a hole in my pocket as I wait in line. Several yards ahead, she’s set up at a card table, surrounded by stacks of paperbacks that she’s signing for readers who lined up at 6 AM for a chance to have thirty seconds with her.
“Are you a big Jovie Vincent fan?” the middle-aged woman behind me asks. She wheels a cart of books behind her, all of them bearing Jovie’s name.
“You could say that.”
“You don’t strike me as a Regency romance guy.” She giggles as she looks me up and down. “Did your girlfriend or boyfriend put you onto these books?”
“My girlfriend did, yes.”
“I always tried to get my husband to read them,” she says. “I used to dog ear the good scenes and leave the books on his nightstand. You’d have thought I was asking him to donate a kidney or something.” She swats a hand. “He just hates to read, is all.”
The line moves ahead at a snail’s pace.
I peek around the crowd, sneaking glimpses of Jovie doing her thing. Her hair is curled, bouncing at her shoulders as she speaks emphatically with her hands, her lips are slicked in red gloss, and she’s wearing her favorite gold reading glasses—the ones with the cat-eye frames. A baby blue sundress hugs her curves, but she promised I could rip it off of her tonight.
“Won’t be much longer now,” the woman behind me says as she watches Jovie from our post back here.
I’ve been waiting ninety minutes so far, and by the looks of things, it could be another ninety before I get anywhere near her table.
Still, I waited years for this woman—what’s another hour or so?
“Where are you from?” the woman asks.
“Here in Portland,” I say. “You?”
“Montpelier.” She scrunches her nose and shrinks her shoulders as she offers a proud smile.
“Wow. You drove all the way here to meet Jovie?”
“I’m her number one fan,” she says, nodding to her cart of books.
“It appears that way.”
“A few years ago, I had surgery on my foot, and I was laid up for weeks. My daughter-in-law brought me a stack of books from the library, and one of Jovie’s was in there. I’ve been hooked ever since,” she says.
The line trudges ahead once more.
“What do you do in Portland?” she asks.
“I’m an attorney.”
“Oh, how lovely. My niece is an attorney too. She does corporate law. I don’t pretend to understand any of it. It’s all Greek to me,” she says. “What does your girlfriend do? I assume she lives here as well?”
“She’s an author, actually.” I nod toward the front of the line, and the woman offers a confused half-smile as she tries to understand my gesture. “Jovie is my girlfriend … Jovie Vincent.”
Her jaw falls and she fans her face. “You’re kidding me. Oh, my—wow. That’s … what are you doing in line? Shouldn’t you be up there with her?”
I lift my finger to my lips. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”
Sliding the red ring box from my pocket, I show just enough for her to comprehend what’s going on.
With tears in her eyes, she claps her hands over her mouth.
“I won’t say a word,” she says.
“Appreciate it.” I give her a smile and a nod before glancing toward the front of the line again.
For the past eighteen months, we’ve been holed up in my townhome. I converted the guest room to an office, where she can write day or night with a view of the bay out one window and the downtown skyline out of the other.
Most of the time I can find her there, our rescue pup, Duke, keeping her feet warm as her fingers clack away at her keyboard until all hours of the night. It never gets old—Jovie crawling into bed in the middle of the night after a long stretch of writing. She always feels bad for waking me, but I don’t mind. I usually take her tired hands in mine, give them a gentle massage, and listen for her breath to grow slow and steady as she falls asleep in my arms.
