Page 63 of Never Too Late

“You think I’ll get enough time to miss her without her being on the other end of the phone or a video call?”

“It won’t be the same,” I pointed out. “I just want you to have thought everything through. I can’t afford for you to do this and then regret it a couple of months down the line.”

Cillian reached over and tucked a rogue lock of hair behind my ear. “I can’t afford that either. Not unless I want to end up with my balls in a vise courtesy of your protective mother hen.”

I laughed. “I bet Laurent didn’t say that.”

“I bet he did.” Cillian was silent for a few moments. “So I’m moving to Paris. What about the rest of it?”

“The rest of it?”

“A new place together? A bigger one. Maybe one more central.”

“I wouldn’t be able to pay half the rent.”

“You could pay what you pay here. Or nothing at all. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“You don’t think we should take things more slowly?”

“Do you?” The intensity of Cillian’s gaze said he was trying to guess my answer from micro-expressions before I said it.

I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. There came a time when you had to stop guarding your heart against future heartbreak and just go for it. That didn’t mean letting go was easy. Cillian might have wormed his way back into my life through slow degrees, but only one person decided how firmly planted he was in it.

“I love you, Finn, and all I want to do is make you happy. So… just name your expectations and I’ll endeavor to meet them. Want to live together… great. Don’t want to live together… not so great, but I’ll cope, and I’ll still move here and work on getting you to change your mind, whether that takes months or years.”

I rolled back onto my side and pulled him in for a kiss. “I don’t think I can handle a Cillian King move in together campaign. I’m not strong enough for it. So…” I announced, letting it hang there for just long enough that I could savor the hope in his eyes. “We better move in together straightaway, and I don’t care whether that’s a palace or a hovel.”

Epilogue

One year later

How’s Greece? Is Cillian behaving himself?

The text from Laurent had me tearing my gaze away from where my boyfriend, dressed only in the briefest pair of swimming trunks, entertained a small crowd by the pool. Curiosity to find out what they were talking about hadn’t yet overridden the languor brought on by the heat of the day, so I’d stayed put, letting Cillian do his thing.

I shifted myself into a more comfortable position on the sun lounger before replying.Define behaving himself.

Not workingcame through only a few seconds later. I snapped a quick photo of Cillian and sent it to Laurent as a response. The movement had Cillian pausing his conversation and looking my way with an eyebrow raised in question. I knew what that eyebrow meant. If I waved him over, he’d drop whatever he was doing and come over to check I was alright.

When I shook my head, he relaxed. I blew him a very showy kiss, just to sock it to the busty brunette in a skimpy red bikiniwho’d spent the last five minutes positioning herself carefully to show my boyfriend all her best assets, two of which would be in Cillian’s face if she leaned any closer. She frowned as he blew one back, her dreams of being the future Mrs. King no doubt left in tatters.

Oh, for… Can you tell him to put it away?I returned my attention to my phone, the cursor still flashing as Laurent typed something else.But before he does, ask him to turn round so I can see him from the front? Purely for research purposes. Not because I find him remotely attractive.

I snorted.Of course not.

I suppose physically he’s okay. He needs to be to make up for the personality.

Shaking my head, I put my phone down. Cillian and Laurent were both determined to pretend a feud still existed between the two of them, even though I knew for a fact that they were perfectly capable of having a civil conversation when I left the room. I knew, because I’d eavesdropped a time or two, and as soon as I was no longer there, they chatted amicably. It just seemed to entertain them too much to drop their antagonism completely, and as a result, I had to suffer their veiled—and sometimes not so veiled—digs.

The sun lounger next to me creaked as Cillian eased himself into it, all bronzed, glistening skin and masculine beauty. Sometimes I still found it difficult to believe that from such a poor start, we’d turned things around to where I had zero complaints. Well, maybe not zero. But any complaints I had were nothing that didn’t plague the average relationship.

There were still days where I had to lure Cillian away from his computer, but I’d discovered a tried and tested method of achieving that in record time. A slow strip, and a trail of breadcrumbs—or in this case clothes—leading to the bedroom currently having a success rate of at least ninety-nine percent. Ijust had to make sure I didn’t appear on camera when I did it. There had been that one time, but Amrita hadn’t seemed to mind that she’d gotten an eyeful.

Cillian had been right about the two of them remaining in close contact, Amrita already having visited Paris three times in the past year, our spare bedroom in our much more spacious new place meaning she didn’t have to stay at a hotel and that the two of them could talk shop to their heart’s content while I was at work.

There’d been business trips along the way, Cillian returning to London a handful of times over the past year, as well as visiting Italy and Spain. But, like this one, there’d also been holidays. Times where I got him completely to myself and he even left his work phone back in Paris, relying on Amrita or Gage, his new assistant, to tell him if anything urgent required his attention. So far on this trip, his phone had stayed blissfully silent on that front. If something cropped up, I’d learned not to take it personally and to make the most of having some time to myself.

Our close families had met, Cillian paying for them all to come to Paris for a long weekend. Given my parents were aware of this being a second attempt at making things work, they’d been naturally cautious. They’d mellowed though as Cillian had worked his magic. As for his parents, they couldn’t have been lovelier, his mother relieved that in her words, “someone had finally shown Cillian that work wasn’t the be all and end all of life.”

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