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Frankie beamed up at me in approval.
I’d visited Marcie and Denton that morning. I brought a gift with me—a teddy bear and some clothes for my grandchild, still so tiny and new that Marcie didn’t really show at all—and asked for their patience. Their forgiveness. Their love. And they gave me all three, and I was humbled by their clemency after all I’d put them through emotionally.
I knew I needed to tell Marcie about Frankie and me, but with our truce still being a bit fragile, and things calm and somewhat settled once more, I hadn’t been able to spill my own secret this morning and send everything into a tailspin again.
But I also knew that I couldn’t keep my relationship with Frankie hidden much longer. It wasn’t fair to Frankie to string her along, and I wanted things out in the open, to see where my future with her might lead.
I left Marcie and Denton’s before too long and went back to my hotel room to kiss a sleeping Frankie awake and ask her to help me with the other task I had in mind for the weekend: Looking for a new home in Seattle.
One for both of us, when she was ready.
“Silver Lake is nice, too,” Frankie mused. She opened the realtor’s folder again and flipped through the neatly organized sheaf of papers. “I’ve never helped anyone pick a place to buy before. This is kind of blowing my mind.”
I slung an arm around her and pulled her in close. “You’ll be tired of this pretty soon, especially when I make you do shit like pick paint colors and other decor. I hate doing that.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Oh, you’ll be sorry you signed that permission slip, Clive.” She sounded almost gleeful.
I reached over and tapped the paper she had on top. A moderately-sized house in a quiet residential neighborhood, close enough to my daughter’s store and my building. It was an older home, and would require some creativity and love—things that Frankie had in abundance.
“I want that one.” I looked over at Frankie’s face to gauge her reaction. Slowly, carefully, she picked up the sheet and ran a finger over the printed image. She looked thoughtful, but for maybe the first time in her life, Frankie Pallas was completely quiet.
“Well?” I finally prompted, trying not to sound anxious. I would never live it down if she hated my choice.
When she turned back to me, her smile was radiant. “That’s your house, Clive.”
“No,” I said, and leaned over to press a kiss to her temple. “It’s ours.”
When I pulled back and looked into her eyes, there was a wealth of hope and longing glimmering in their depths, and it was all I needed to see to know that this was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
And I’d do whatever it took to make that happen.
* * *
“You did it,” Frankie said breathlessly. She sprawled naked on the pillow next to me, both of us damp and limp from a wild round of sex after I’d put an offer in on the house we both loved. “You fucked my actual brains out. There’s probably gray matter under the pillow.”
I pretended to check. “Just mine, I think. That thing you did with your—”
She giggled and placed her fingers over my smiling mouth. “Shush, Clive. It’s embarrassing when you describe it.”
I grabbed her fingers and kissed them. “I’m just saying that if you want to explore back there again, go nuts. I really liked it.”
Her cheeks flamed—she didn’t blush much, she told me once, so I delighted in making her do it as often as I could. Which, it turned out, was a regular occurrence.
“Well,” she said after the bright red had faded to an appealing pink, “real estate is very arousing, it turns out.”
I looked around the bedroom of Frankie’s modest apartment. “Speaking of, I really like your place. It’s very you.”
She blushed all over again and rolled in close, cuddling her naked body against mine. I breathed in deep and savored the feel of her soft curves pressed against me. My cock thickened inquiringly against her thigh, and she laughed as she reached down to graze her fingers against my length.
I rolled her underneath me and took her mouth in a long, wild kiss.
“The phone,” she panted as my lips slid down to her collarbone.
My lips closed around a nipple. “Ignore it,” I said, and then sucked hard.
She gasped, but gently pushed me away. “It’s late,” she said. “It could be an emergency.”
I smoothed a hand over her round, naked ass as she rolled away to grab her phone from the nightstand, and she giggled as she swatted my hand away.
“Not while I’m on the phone,” she hissed, but she still smiled as she tapped on the screen to accept the call.
“Hey, Mom,” she said. “Is this about—wait, slow down. What?”
In the space of just a few seconds, Frankie’s beautiful face fell and her eyes swam with panic. Still gripping the phone against her ear with one hand, she reached out and grabbed mine with the other, gripping me so tightly that it almost hurt. I wrapped her petite hand in my much larger ones and stroked her knuckles as reassuringly as I could while her mom spoke quickly. So quickly that I couldn’t make out a single word, but whatever it was, I could tell the news was bad.
“Okay, and then what?” Frankie said, her voice sounding almost wooden.
She ended the call and dropped the phone back onto the nightstand. When she turned to me, her expression was shocked. Stricken.
“It’s my grandmother.” Her eyes pooled with tears. “My nana. She had a stroke. She…Clive, she died.”
