Page 50 of Married to Number 22
Considering we’re in a busy airport about to catch a taxi down to The Strip, I don’t push it. This isn’t the time or place. We can talk later. Right now, she’s here. “How are the feet?”
The furrow deepens, head tilting to the side as she studies me. “What do you mean?”
“We’re getting hitched tonight, Luns,” I say, drawing her toward the exit. “Are those tootsies getting cold?”
She glances up at me, lips twitching. “Tootsies?”
But the last of the ice melts away as I squeeze her hand, say, “Yup.Tootsies.”
A snort. “They’re toasty warm.” She lifts a sneaker-clad foot. “And warmer still because we’re in the desert.”
Laughter in my chest. “Thankfully, the autumn nights are pleasant?”
“Exactly.”
We pause at the end of the taxi queue, inching forward as the crowd snakes around the metal barriers up to the line of waiting cabs. It’s noisy, everyone excited to start their weekend, to party and drink and fuck themselves into oblivion.
All the Vegas things.
Blow money. Get lucky.
And leave it all in Sin City.
“I feel like I need to say again that you don’t have to do this,” she murmurs and the excitement surrounding us almost drowns out her voice.
I stifle a sigh—stubborn woman. I thought we’d already talked this shit through.
Or that I’d promised to fix it, battled her stubborn streak, and came out on top.
Because she agreed.
Because she’s here.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Luns,” I say quietly.
She takes a long time to look up at me.
But eventually those gray storm-cloud eyes come to mine, hold.
And I see it’s not stubbornness. Her gaze is filled with worry, with guilt, with fear, with hurt—and beneath all of that, I realize, my heart skipping a beat—with longing. It’s the same longing inside me, the same longing that was a constant ache after I left, that never really went away even when life took us on separate journeys.
Because I didn’t have her.
Now I do.
Now she’s in my life.
She thinks this is something temporary, a hurdle to clear to get those stocks, a means to an end before we’ll part again.
But I have no intention ofeverletting her go.
I fell in love with her as a thirteen-year-old boy. And that love has always been there, always floating right beneath the surface.
Now I have the chance to turn that into something more.
Something that can grow, can mature, can feed us in the years to come.
