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He strokes my hair. “Yes.” He smiles. “Weare.”
I sit up and look around to find we’re parked in the driveway of my house. And instead of the warmth and happiness “home” should create, there is an instant ball of nerves in my belly made better by only one thing: Nick. “We,” I say, glancing over at him, “because we’re really doing this thing, right?”
“We’ve been really doing this since the moment we met.”
He leans over and cups my head in that way he does and kisses my forehead. “Come on. Let’s go inside and get settled. And I vote for taking you out to lunch and a trip to the grocery store, or I’ll starve this weekend.” He grabs his jacket from the back seat and then exits the car. I grab my purse from the floorboard, where I’d left it when we’d gone into the courthouse. Slipping it over my shoulder, I exit the car and join Nick at the trunk, and the minute I’m beside him, the intimacy between us seems to take on a living, breathing life of its own. It wraps around us like a warm, soft blanket that I want to snuggle inside of and never leave.
He opens the trunk and pulls the two suitcases out before shutting it again. And then, together we roll the suitcases toward the house. “I’ll get them the rest of the way,” Nick says when we reach the stairs leading to the porch.
I hurry up the steps, key in the code to the door, and push it open. Nick joins me, and that charge between us intensifies the instant we are both over the threshold. He sets the suitcases inside the foyer and drops his jacket on top of one of them. I shut the door. And suddenly we are facing each other, our eyes colliding, that word “home” radiating between us.
The air thickens, crackles, and I move. Or maybe he moves. Maybe it’s both of us, but suddenly my purse is on the ground, and we are kissing, a deep, drugging, intimate kiss. His hand is on the back of my head, and God, how I’ve come to love the way he does that. I breathe into the kiss, sink into it and him, and it only seems to ignite us further. And of course, my phone rings. I ignore it. Nick ignores it. I reach for his tie. This time I’m getting it off, along with every inch of clothing he’s wearing. My phone stops ringing. I pull the silk from his neck, letting it fall to the ground. My phone starts ringing again.
Nick and I both groan. “You better get that, sweetheart,” he says.
“It’s not important.” It stops ringing again and starts again. “Okay. It might be.” I squat down to open my purse and remove my cellphone, frowning when I see the number. “Kasey,” I say, standing up and answering. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? The bills are paid. All is well.”
“You called three times.”
“No. I just called once.”
“Oh. The other calls must have been someone else. Hold on one second.” I glance at the caller ID. “Josh,” I mouth to Nick, and I don’t miss the tiny smirk on his face at the reference to my agent, who he clearly does not like.
“Rita was fantastic,” Kasey adds, pulling me back into our conversation. Nick’s own phone buzzes, and he pulls it from his pocket, looking at the caller ID. “I gave her the accounts payable list,” Kasey continues, “and within two hours everything was paid to date.”
Nick points to his phone and motions down the hallway off the foyer. “No more bill collectors,” I reply to Kasey, following Nick, but as he continues to the living room, I cut right into the kitchen, rounding the island to sit on a barstool.
“Are we sure?” he asks. “This isn’t a one-and-done kind of thing?”
“Not at all,” I assure him, settling onto a barstool. “We’re past the challenges that started when we lost my father.”
“Then you finally got into the bank accounts.”
“Everything is now in my name,” I say, avoiding the topic of my mother and the bank accounts I won’t have access to until Monday but already know are empty. “That means I’m free to discuss the future with you, because I know we have a future and one worth your time.”
“Hiring Nick Rogers really made a difference, it seems.”
“Nick has made an incredible difference,” I say as he appears in the doorway, his eyes meeting mine, and I add, “in every possible way.”
Nick’s lips curve slightly, and he walks to the island, sitting down on the barstool across from me. Meanwhile, Kasey delivers a stilted, “That’s great news,” followed by an awkward pause.
Dread fills me. “Oh God. You’re quitting.”
“No. Of course not. This place is my life.”
Relief washes over me. “Then what is it that I’m sensing?”
“Full disclosure. I just had coffee with your uncle. And since I know how you feel about him—”
My gaze rockets to Nick’s. “Why did you have coffee with my uncle, Kasey?”
Nick doesn’t react, and I have a sense that he knew before I did, perhaps from his phone call. “He bought a thousand bottles of wine for a weekend event,” Kasey says. “And not the cheap stuff. Once the transaction was complete, he cornered me about you. He wanted me to try to convince you to talk to him. Apparently, he’s left you several messages you haven’t answered.”
“He hasn’t left me any messages,” I say. “Okay. Not recently. And I talked to him two days ago and have no desire to talk to him again.”
“I know that your father had issues with him as well, but they did make peace in the end. And now Bill wants to make peace with you.”
