Page 53 of Big & Bossy

“Maybe.”

“Then yes. Anything.”

“Say you hadn’t left, and you’d proposed, and I’d said yes, and we’d gotten married,” I said, snuggling in closer to the side of his chest. “Where do you think we’d be now?”

One of his fingers wrapped itself in a curl of my hair, spinning it in his hand. “Boulder. I’d have still moved for you,” he said. “Two kids, a dog or two. A cat. Maybe we’d even be in the house I have now. I never wanted anything as tacky and big as my parents have.”

My lips twitched at the mention of two kids. I’d told him back in the day that I wanted two—a boy and a girl.

“We’d have named our daughter Jess. She’d probably end up a bit of a tomboy like her mom. And our son…” he hesitated only briefly, his chin resting on the top of my head… “We’d have named him Arthur.”

The backs of my eyes burned as he said it. Arthur, after my dad.

“We’d have filled one of the rooms with pinball machines,” he continued, a little smile to his voice that I wished I could see. “And you’d be running your business, I’d be running mine. I would have opened my headquarters in Boulder instead of back in Chicago. You would have helped me design every inch of it, from the ground up. I’d work from home most days so I could be with the kids while you went off to your meetings and consultations.”

I wanted that. I wanted that more than I could say.

“We’d spend Christmas with your mom. Tiana would fly in. Then we’d do New Year's with my parents, and alternate Thanksgiving. You’d probably start a garden and everything would die,” he laughed, “but I’d sneak out there in the middle of the night and replant everything, make you think they’d come back to life. I’d take you on trips while your mom watched the kids, anywhere you wanted to go.”

“We’d be happy,” I choked, my voice cracking as a tear broke free.

“Yes, princess. We’d be happy.”

The silence we fell into was more comfortable than any I’d ever experienced. Just him, his breathing, the cold air, the low hum of the music. The setting sun and the mountains. The buzzing in my purse. The quiet whisper of the wind through the aspen trees, the slow trickle in the stream below. The buzzing against my breast in the pocket of Jack’s blazer.

The buzzing.

I sat up as it clicked, fishing my phone from my bag as I handed him his. Text after text from Amanda littered my screen and Jackson’s, and as I went to swipe it open, a call came through.

“Hello?” I asked warily, turning to Jack and watching his face pale as he scrolled through the texts.

“Fucking finally,” Amanda rasped. The sound of sirens filtered in through the phone, accompanied by the wonderful arrangement of flash photography. My stomach dropped. “You need to come home.”

“What’s happened?”

“Your house. It’s trashed, Mands.”

And there it was, the other shoe that had to drop.

Chapter 25

Jackson

“Ijust… I don’t understand.”

“How can I help you understand?” Mandy asked, her sigh palpable as she leaned back against the passenger seat. “I mean, I know we’re a thing, now. But I’m also used to living on my own.”

“You lived with Amanda in college,” I pointed out. I twisted in the driver's seat at a red light, locking my eyes on her. “I’m not trying to make you move any faster through this than you’re ready. I’m coming at this from a safety perspective, that’s all.”

“And I appreciate that.”

“Then move in with me. At least for the time being.”

We’d spent the last five days together since the wedding. She’d stayed at my house as the police gathered what they needed from hers, but the second they’d finished, she’d said she wanted to go home. It was confounding. She was safer with me, even if I littered her house with security, and somehow that didn’t sway her. Although nothing was stolen and all she had to do was replace a few windows and clean up, I found my thoughts wandering to putting bars on the windows or replacing them with bulletproof glass. Someone as special as her needed to be kept safe, and even though our presence in the news cycle was waning, she was clearly still a target for someone.

“Please, princess. For my own peace of mind.”

She grunted as she pushed her door open, kicking her feet out and planting her fur-lined boots in the snow. “I’ll think about it, okay?” She said over her shoulder, her lips pursed, her fingers tightening around the frame of the door.

---