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“I told you not to wait up for me.”
Amelia stumbled in the door around two-thirty in the morning, her eyes glazed with fatigue and her purse weighing so heavily on her shoulder it could’ve been filled with concrete.
Tyler frowned and got up from his laptop, where he’d been working. He hadn’t intended to stay up, but work had beckoned and the later it got, the more he worried about her. He knew her job was important to her, but she worked too hard. He had seen that same expression on his mother’s face when she’d come home from a double shift at the manufacturing plant—bone tired. Too tired to sleep, sometimes. He would make her a cup of tea and sit up talking with his mother until she finally relaxed enough to go to bed.
“You should’ve called me to pick you up,” he chastised gently. “You look exhausted enough to wrap your car around a light pole. Who will cater for them then?”
She shrugged and dropped her purse on a stool in the kitchen. “It’s not a long drive home now. I’m fine.”
Tyler came up behind her to help her slip out of her jacket. “I thought you had help on Saturday nights.”
“I do. There’s the waitstaff and a couple people that help cook, like Stella. She was a godsend tonight. Normally it’s not a problem. I thrive on the adrenaline rush of the kitchen chaos.” She climbed onto the next stool and slumped against the counter. “But lately, I just don’t have it in me. A couple hours in and I have to sit down and take a break.”
“You’re pregnant, Ames.”
“So? The baby is the size of a blueberry at best. It shouldn’t be giving me this much grief so soon.”
“That’s not how it works. My sisters complained about the exhaustion far more than anything else. It starts earlier than you’d think.”
“I need to get a baby book—The Moron’s Guide to Procreation or one of those What to Expect When Your Body Is Taken Over by a Tiny Alien books.”
“I think we can manage that,” he said with a smile. Amelia was really tired if she was getting this crotchety. “Would you like some chamomile tea?”
Amelia sighed, shaking her head and then stopping. She looked up at him with hope beaming in her big doe eyes. “Do we have any hot chocolate?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll look.” Tyler went into the pantry, scanning for the tiny packets of instant mix, but came up empty-handed. He spied a bar of milk chocolate on the shelf and decided to improvise. It had been a long time since he’d made hot chocolate for his little brothers after school. Once his older sisters had gotten part-time jobs, Tyler had been the one at the apartment when the school bus dropped off the little ones. He’d been the one who had made sure they’d done their homework and given them snacks. Hot chocolate had been one of their favorites. Back then he’d made it with bottled syrup, but this would work.
“From scratch?” she asked as she watched him put a small pot of milk on to boil.
“Only the best for you,” he said with a grin. He broke up small pieces of the chocolate and dropped them into the heating mixture of milk, vanilla and cinnamon. A few minutes later, it had come together into a frothy brew that he poured into a mug for her. “Here you go. Be careful, it’s hot.”
“Looks yummy. Thank you.”
Tyler rested his hands on the granite countertop and watched her sip the cocoa with a blissful expression on her face. In that moment, he realized just how much he enjoyed making her happy. Over the years, he’d always liked sending her pretty gifts for her birthday or Christmas. That was fun because he knew she would never buy anything like that for herself, and jewels were his business. Seeing her wearing something sparkly and decadent seemed like the perfect treat.
But lately, even before the reunion, their relationship had started to feel different. With their hectic schedules, they rarely saw each other in person, but as life had started encroaching on their technological interchanges, he’d found the idea of it was bothering him more than it used to. He missed talking to Amelia on the phone. Finding emails and texts from her. When he’d arrived in Vegas for the reunion, he couldn’t believe how much he’d missed the sight of her. He hadn’t even wanted to go to the party. Tyler would’ve been just as happy ordering room service and spending hours talking in his hotel room.
Now that they were spending almost all their time together, he certainly couldn’t miss her. But he still found himself feeling the same little thrill every time she walked into the room. Doing little things like making her breakfast and helping her cut up beef tenderloin gave him a warm feeling in the center of his chest that was more satisfying than giving her some expensive bauble.
She looked at it as being fawned over or taken care of, but that wasn’t how he thought about it. He wanted to do things for her because he...cared about her. She was his Amelia. Of course he wanted to do what he could to make her life better. If cocoa made her happy, he’d make it. If this kitchen and a private movie theater that seated eight made her smile, he’d rent this house at twice the price. If marrying her would make her feel better about being single at the reunion...apparently he’d do that, too.
She was the most important person in his life. He’d never expected that she would also be his wife. But now that she was, and the clock was ticking, he was having a hard time envisioning his life without her. He didn’t want to go back to just seeing Amelia every now and then. The baby would bring them together more often, but somehow even that wasn’t enough. He wanted her here. With him. Every day. This was one challenge he couldn’t fail at.
“This was very good,” Amelia said, draining the last of her cup. “You’re better in the kitchen than you give yourself credit for.”
Tyler shrugged and rinsed her mug in the sink. “I am just painting by numbers when in the presence of Michelangelo.”
At that, Amelia snorted and burst into exhausted giggles. “I’m more like Bob Ross painting happy little trees, but thank you.”
“You should give yourself more credit, too.”
“Maybe later,” she said with a yawn. “I’m about to fall out with all that warm, chocolaty milk in my tummy.”
Tyler wrapped his arm around her shoulder and walked her toward the bedroom. “All right. Come on, let’s get you into bed before you collapse on the kitchen floor.”
They walked down the hallway to the master suite. There, he sat Amelia down on the bed and knelt in front
of her to take off her shoes. He unlaced her little sneakers and slipped them off with her socks, revealing dainty, pink-painted toenails.
