Page 28 of Wait For Me

“What do you think?” Tristan asks once he’s broken the kiss. I realize he’s not talking to me. He’s talking over my shoulder, to my best friends. “Did I do okay?”

“The kiss wasn’t quite as passionate as I told you to be,” Shirley admonished.

“Don’t listen to her,” Doreen tsks. “You got Neil looking sentimental. I’d say you nailed it.”

I hug both my friends, then turn back to Tristan. “How long’s the assignment?” I ask. “After New Year’s.”

“Three months,” he says, wiping at my tears with his thumb. “It’ll go fast though, I promise. I could even get a social account or something if you want?—”

I laugh. “You don’t even know what they’re called, do you?”

“Tweetster?” He winks.

I laugh, but then I throw my arms around Tristan, needing to feel he’s really there, that this whole thing wasn’t a terrible dream. When I pull back, I meet Tristan’s eyes.

“What if I come with you?”

Tristan’s eyebrows fly up. “To Borneo?”

“Yes. To Borneo, and to wherever else you work where you might want company.”

“Cora—”

For the briefest second, he doesn’t say anything, and my heart seizes with panic.Too much. Coming on too fast, too strong.

Then I remember how he was in Nicaragua yesterday, repairing the broken bridge between him and my brother. Maybe even getting his blessing to be here. I notice only now the shadows under Tristan’s eyes. Maybe someone else would consider that to be too much.

Not me. To me, it’s perfect. He’s perfect.

I let out the tightness in my chest.He loves me. Just the way I am.

“Cora, you’d make me the happiest man on earth,” Tristan says. “Actually, scratch that. I already am.”

Then, Tristan Galloway kisses me again. And I know, this time, it’s for keeps.

Epilogue

CORA

My stomach rumbles at the scent of food coming from L’Aubergine, the Rolling Hills resort’s flagship restaurant.

“What did the article say again?” I asked, threading my fingers through Tristan’s.

Tristan pulls our entwined hand up to his lips and kisses my knuckle. “That the cassoulet is ‘like a preponderance of angels alighting on one’s tongue.’”

I laugh again at the description the food critic wrote. We killed ourselves laughing over it when we saw it in the glossy travel magazine on the airplane.

Of course, when I close my mouth around my first bite of cassoulet half an hour later at our table, my eyes go wide, my mouth watering even as it’s already full of food.

“Oh my God,” I say, over the food. “He’s bang on!”

Tristan grins. “Told you they’ve cleaned up nice.”

“I’ll tell you what’s nice,” I say. “Being here as a customer for the first time. I can't wait to wake up in one of those beds and not be the person to make it.”

“I’m going to miss the rosemary though.”

I laugh, hooking my foot around Tristan’s under the table. We’re here tonight celebrating my new job as receptionist at Reilly Contracting. It’s the perfect gig for me—Jaime Reilly, the owner, and his son Seamus, are the sweetest, kindest guys. When I told them about my brother’s obsession with their company, and how as a matter of course I knew all about their business, they’d been tickled.

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