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It would never stop being a source of wonder to me that Neil routinely talked about moving eight figures from account to account. I was pretty sure my private savings account only held the five dollars required to keep it open.
“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” I shook my head. “Neil. We’re getting a house.”
“Oh, yes, we are.”
“We’re becoming like, a family.”
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His expression softened into the disarming half-smile I loved, and he dipped his head to meet my upturned mouth. I parted my lips under his, my tongue darting out to taste him as I gripped the front of his coat and rose on my tiptoes to get a better angle. When I was breathless and whimpering, he pulled back. “We’re already family, Sophie.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and brought him down for another kiss.
“Wait, wait.” He laughed, pulling back. “I haven’t even taken my coat off yet.”
“Well, take it off,” I ordered playfully. “Something about a guy buying me a seventy-eight-million dollar house is an incredible turn on.”
“I didn’t buy it just for you,” he reminded me, pulling his gloves off and shrugging out of his coat. He tossed both on the large round table in the center of the foyer. “I expect to live there, myself, if that’s all right.”
I sighed, a hand pressed to my chest in mock offense. “Well, if you must.”
Following him into the bedroom, I leaned against the door frame. “You know, Sue isn’t here right now.”
“Isn’t she?” Je frowned and tossed his jacket over the sofa in front of the fireplace. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She said she needed the evening off, so I gave it to her. It’s not like we can’t fend for ourselves.” I chewed my lip. “In fact…how would you feel if we didn’t have a housekeeper once we move?”
“How do you feel about vacuuming thirty-five-thousand square feet?” He grinned at me and sat on the couch to take off his shoes.
“Why would I be doing the vacuuming?” I shot back. “You’re the one who’s going to be retired. You’ll be free to do all the housecleaning for me.”
“Forgive me, for this will seem unbearably posh, but I’ve never used a vacuum cleaner in my life.”
Okay, throwing around huge sums of money, I had gotten somewhat used to that. The fact that he’d met the Queen of freaking England, and there was a photo of said meeting framed and hanging in the hallway? I could cope. But these small, everyday things he had no acquaintance with still freaked me out.
I changed the direction of the conversation. Considering the week I was having, I didn’t have the fortitude to overthink something so weird as living to be fifty years old without ever touching a vacuum.
“I never said we couldn’t have a cleaning lady come in a few times a month,” I began reasonably. “Thirty-five-thousand square feet is a lot of house. We’re not going to use it all every single day. And like I said, you’re going to be retired. And you love to cook.”
“I do love to cook,” he conceded.
“And it will be awful nice to have super loud sex whenever we want.” I walked slowly toward him. “That was kind of what I was getting at when I told you Sue wasn’t here.”
Emma was in England as of this morning, wrapping things up at Global Defense Fund’s London office. We were truly alone, a rare occasion that had to be savored.
I straddled his lap and leaned in close. He hadn’t taken his tie off yet, so I gripped it and tugged. “What do you say? Wanna do rude things to each other?”
“Always,” he said with a slight smile. “I only… I didn’t know when you’d be in the mood. After what happened.”
It was true that I was still devastated by my fight with Holli. Six years of friendship didn’t magically disappear in two days. I’d spent most of the morning watching Bowfinger and crying, but by afternoon, I’d gotten bored with my sadness. Just because Holli hadn’t called me didn’t mean she wouldn’t; we needed cool off time. I wasn’t about to spend mine constantly moping, though. Not when Neil and I had a chance to be a normal couple.
“Why don’t I change, and then I’ll start on dinner. We have all night,” he reminded me. “Besides, the sound of my empty stomach won’t make for a very sexy encounter. I worked through my lunch today.”
I’d seen Neil’s “working lunches.” He usually just sat next to a plate of something until it was too cold and congealed to be eaten, then came home famished.
“All right.” I climbed off his lap. “I could do with a shower first, anyway.”
While Neil went about his plan, I set to mine. A quick, hot shower lifted me from my funk—both depressive and odor wise—enough that I wasn’t content to just throw on some sweats or pajamas. Working from home had severely enabled style-laziness.
