Page 49 of Right With You
“No, like, I can’t wear this. It’s huge. And just like, wow. Likethere it is.” She held it out to me like I hadn’t seen it.
“I know, and I hope you’ll wear it proudly to let everyone know you’re mine.”
Her eyes snapped up to meet my gaze, and something shifted in me at either her expression or the feeling of her hand still in mine.
Or maybe it was calling her mine while she stood there looking so beautiful and wearing a ring I’d just put on her finger.
But she’s only yours for a few more days.
I heard the voice and instead of running from it and the feeling lacing through me that screamed, “Let’s do this for real!” I decided to lean into it. Something had shifted when I bought that ring. I couldn’t explain exactly what, but it slackened twine that’d been pulled tight around a part of me and now it was loosening. Easing.
While we were here, we might as well fully play the parts, right?
Dropping my head low so no one could overhear, I spoke softly. “I know it’s a lot, but would you wear it for me? It will help them all know you’re taken, and I’m taken, and soon, you can take it off and never look at it again if you want.”
I wouldn’t tell her I hoped she’d keep it. Maybe not wear it as my fiancée because I wasn’t fool enough to want let alone hope for such a thing, but certainly keep it for herself. Sell it, even, if she wanted to.
She nodded, glancing at her now-shaking hand, and sighed. “Okay. I mean, yes, of course I will. I—I’ll probably have to take it off when I’m at work, though.”
“Ah. Of course. I did wonder how cumbersome this might be.” As a man who had spent years working with his hands in one way or another, I’d wondered if it would bother her while she shaped her donuts or… whatever that process looked like. From the inside breast pocket of my suit jacket, I pulled out a delicate platinum chain. “I thought maybe you could wear it on this when at work.”
“You thought of everything.” Her words were slow and surprised.
“I thought of you,” I admitted, because I had. Selecting an engagement ring hadn’t been something I’d imagined doing, but the process of it had been fun. I’d bought one girlfriend a necklace when I was a teen and still basking in the ease of my identity as a Devereaux, before my mother passed, and having a romantic connection felt like a risk I couldn’t bring myself to take.
This was different.
She turned and held her hair off her neck.
“You don’t have to wear this if it’s not?—”
“Please put it on me, Luc.”
I wouldn’t deny her the request since an odd drive in me wanted to drape her in all kinds of jewelry from me like it made her more mine than if she didn’t wear any at all.
I slipped the tiny chain around her neck and fastened it, then rested it against her skin and indulged the impulse to drag my fingers away a little more overtly than I would’ve if she hadn’t captured me so completely tonight.
Right. Just tonight, huh?
She turned back around and her dark gaze found mine again, her expression simultaneously soft and full of need.
My stomach bottomed out and I swallowed, watching her lips as she said, “I think… Before we go in there, I need to say, I think I’d like you to kiss me.”
I straightened, the words a bolt of lightning to my system. “Here? Now?”
She huffed out a laugh and smiled. “No, not now standing a few paces away from your family. I don’t really want an audience for our first time.”
Our first time.
Our first time.
Our first time…
Grasping, clutching, aching need hit me, and a world of possibilities rippled out from her words.
“Maybe after? When you take me home?”
When I took her home. To the house we’d share, and the bed we’d share now that Michele and Aurelie had moved their bags to the house and settled into the guest room while Elise and I had both been working.
