AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She shrugged. “I’ll be okay without you, in the literal sense. I won’t be okay without you in a more emotional sense. I don’t want you to go. The minute you step outside this door, I’ll miss you and start pouting, and it willnotbe pretty.”
“To me, nothing about you cannotbe pretty.” He pulled her into his arms and leaned back against the front door. “Man, Ayesha. I think we’ve stumbled into a relationship.”
“I think we’ve been stumbling for a minute,” she said. “I’m just glad we finally managed to find our footing.”
“You like being my girlfriend?”
“Lattimore, I’m your fiancée.”
He worked his bottom lip with his teeth, wondering how much longer he could wait to make her thighs hug the side of his head. “For the purpose of our marriage pop quiz,” he began, “when did we officially start dating?”
She eased out of his embrace, took his hand, and pulled him toward the stairs. “Um, let’s see. It has to be sometime before you chewed that guy out for ‘flirting’ with me in Whole Foods.”
“I stepped away for two seconds, and I know he saw the ring on your finger.”
“He asked me for a recipe.”
“He’s never heard of Google? And who the fuck asks someone else for a salmon recipe? Season it, throw it in a pan, and boom, it’s done. Add soy sauce if you want to get fancy.”
She tipped her head in agreement.
“So, before then,” he urged.
“I’d say…remember when you, Josiah, and Theo were dancing to some song, and you tried to get me to dance, but I didn’t want to? So, you twirled me into your arms and didn’t give up until I joined the three of you? That night.”
“Again, we’d get thrown in prison.”
“Then when did we officially start dating, Mr. Lattimore?”
“When I came to Maui after my shoulder surgery.”
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re joking.”
“Nope. Think about it. I’d barely flushed the anesthesia from my system before I got onto a plane because I couldn’t wait to see my girl and our boys. You picked me up from the airport and had lunch ready for me. Then we went home together.”
“You stayed in the guest house.”
“Boundaries, Eesh. I believe in boundaries.”
She circled her index finger. “Wait, wait. But that’s after Gage and Tay’s wedding. Isn’t that when you said our first date was?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t officially start dating until months later. We had some stuff to work out.”
He’d been convinced that what didn’t work for Sydney wouldn’t work for Ayesha. Ayesha wanted a husband and a father figure, and as far as he’d been concerned, since he’d failed Sydney as a husband, Ayesha would never be able to see him as either. Then, when he finally did muster up the courage to tell her how he felt, she shut him down.
A knife to the heart would have been painless compared to what that had felt like, and that was when he realized his feelings for Ayesha were nothing at all like he’d ever experienced.
They were intense.
Potent.
Substantially unhinged.
Ayesha would have never gotten him to sign divorce papers, and if she insisted they end their marriage, he would go from Joel Lattimore to Giorgio Pozza in a heartbeat.
More and more, it felt like Ayesha Savea could be the love of his life, and that knowledge saddled him with a ridiculous amount of guilt when he thought about what had been taken from her for them to get here.
“I also had to deal with you not having feelings for me,” he said. “With you shutting me down when we had our ‘fight’ after I found out about Sydney and Kofi.”
