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“Beer,” Dad said as he took a seat in my favorite spot.
“I’ll take the water,” Sadie said, not surprising me with her choice. She was a doctor and a health freak. She’d let the juice touch her taste buds over her dead body.
I rolled my eyes at my dad’s choice and went to the recliner that Etienne usually took.
He came toward me with the juice box and handed it to me without me having to ask him.
I took it, punched the straw through the small hole, and waited for him to take his seat before squashing it between his hip and the recliner arm.
He grunted out a curse as I all but forced him to move over in what small space that he could give me, which admittedly wasn’t much.
“Fiancé.” Sadie smiled. “Y’all are cute together. When’s the wedding?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
• • •
“She’s different,” Etienne said
“She’s normal,” I disagreed. “Now that you’ve met the one normal person in my family, when do I get to meet yours?”
His parents I’d yet to meet. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever meet them with how little that Etienne talked about them.
I knew that they loved him and that they cared about him from what little he’d shared, but I felt like I was completely out of the loop.
“They’d have to come back from Italy to do that.” He chuckled. “That was my mother’s one and only lifetime dream, to go visit her family in Italy. Dad gave it to her about ten days before I unexpectedly got out of prison. She’ll come back eventually, since I’m fairly sure they’re not moving over there permanently. But until then, I don’t have time to go over there, and they have a lot of things they want to get done over there before they come back.”
I sighed. “I’d love to go visit Italy. But you’re right. There are a lot of things that need doing here.” I hesitated. “I think we’re ready to open the clinic up. At least partially. We’re waiting on the shipment of meds and the shipment of paper products of all things. Then we’re golden. That’s what we were supposed to be doing when y’all were gone. Figuring out a time line on opening. Maybe we’ll just do it. Open. And then not officially set a date. We’ll just announce it on our social media, and then let our clients know when they call that the house call thing isn’t happening anymore.”
He pulled me to the porch swing that we’d never sat in until today, and then together, we sat and swung while we discussed what should and shouldn’t happen next.
By the time the sun began to set and our entire day was wasted on a whole bunch of nothing, we had a solid plan.
One that I sent to Diana to see if she agreed with.
She did.
“Do you believe your dad when he says that he’ll take care of your stepmom?” he asked out of the blue.
That was the real question.
“I’ve seen him get upset three times in my life. I’ve called him with problems multiple times, all of which he’s solved. However, when it comes to my stepmother, I just really don’t see him fixing it,” I admitted. “I’ll stick with my lawyer’s suggestions. If she thinks that we need to fix it, I’m gonna do it. He’s had his fair share of chances to fix things when it comes to her.”
He pressed his nose to my hair and sighed. The breath leaving his mouth caused the tiny hairs along my nape to stir.
Which caused a different sort of feeling to start overtaking me.
I looked up and down the street.
There were houses, but due to the way that they were designed around the canal we surrounded, not many of them had a clear view of our front porch unless they were coming into the neighborhood.
I’d counted at least four of them arriving home from work. The only one left was the older gentleman that owned two casinos out of state. And sometimes that one didn’t come home at all.
Which was why, when I shifted positions and crawled into Etienne’s lap, I wasn’t too worried about who would see me.
His brows rose at my bold move, and I grinned wickedly at him.
“We need to talk about this fake marriage thing we have going on,” I said as I lifted my arm and trailed my fingers along the column of his throat. “We need to stop telling people we’re engaged.”
He caught my chin with two fingers and tilted my head up so my gaze could meet his.
Then, shocking the holy hell out of me, he said, “I want to marry you.”
I blinked at him in surprise. “What?”
“I want to marry you,” he repeated. “I want your sleepy snuggles and your dick squishes permanently. I want someone to commiserate with about work. I want you to be here two hours after you said you’d be. I want you to change my sheets every other day because you found a speck of sand in them. I want you to change out of your shirt and into mine because they’re softer. I want you to surprise me on the jobsites, and give me a hard time when you catch me eating like shit. I want you to bring home every single animal that you want, and me to complain about how much feed I have to haul in. I just plain want you in my life. All your quirks. All your kisses. All your Sunday morning snuggles. I want them all. And I want it in the most permanent way possible.”
