Page 97 of Pick Me
“Ohhh.” My eyes widened, and I straightened up. “Fuck, yes. Baby, I like the way you think. You’re on,” I agreed. “Let’s go.”
Knox wrapped his arms around my waist and spun me in a circle. “Christ, I love you. In thirty-nine years, you are the single best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Just wait and see how the next thirty-nine go.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Chapter Eighteen
Knox
“We’ll call for a tow truck as soon as we get home,” I promised Gage as he buckled himself into my truck and set his duffel bag at his feet. He looked damp and bedraggled and pink-cheeked and perfect, and it was all I could do not to haul him against me right then and there. “As soon as we get you home and warm,” I amended, tucking his car keys in my pocket.
“Home,” Gage repeated slowly. “Home?”
I was so in love, so besotted, so drunk on relief and high on the feeling of being the luckiest bastard in the universe that even Gage’s repeating thing was adorable.
“Home,” I agreed. “To Sunday Orchard? Where we live?”
“Riiiight.” Gage licked his lips. “Except… that’s far away. And the weather is bad.”
Ah, I hadn’t even thought about that. I took his hand in my own larger one and brought it to my lips for a kiss. “I promise, baby, I’ve driven in snow for decades. I know what I’m doing.”
“Riiiight,” Gage said again. “But the Apple of My Eye Bed and Breakfast is just there.” He pointed out the windshield up ahead. “Exponentially closer. And, you know, if we go home, Webb is gonna wanna know where my car is, and Drew is gonna be all worried about me being in wet clothes, and Marco’s gonna make us a hot toddy, and Aiden is going to want to build a snowman, and… Ilovethat. I cannot tell you how much I love that. But, um, at this exact moment, I was sort of thinking…”
I flipped on my blinker and pulled into the parking lot without another word.
“Who is this reasonable man who looks like my Knox Sunday?” Gage wondered.
“Your Knox Sunday, huh?” Little carbonation bubbles of joy were fizzing up in my stomach, and I thought that if this was what true happiness felt like, I’d never actually experienced it before that moment. And I still wouldn’t have, if not for Gage.
“My Knox Sunday,” he confirmed, and just looking at him, I knew he felt the same joy I did.
When we parked, I grabbed his bag before he could, then went around the truck to help him down, partly because he was still a little jittery and mostly because I was. We giggled our way up the front steps of the old Victorian house like a pair of drunks and walked into…
“Oh. Wow. That’s…” Gage stammered. “Apples.”
There were apple clocks on the apple wallpaper and apple figurines on apple-shaped shelves. On the table in front of the apple-printed sofa sat an apple-shaped teapot.
“I forgot it was like this,” I told him with a snicker. “I haven’t been here since I was a kid.”
“I don’t think it’s changed much since then,” he whispered back. “Or at all.”
“Gage!” Helena Fortnum called from behind the front desk. “Full moon tonight. Come to drink some hooch and get naked with me?”
Gage’s eyes widened, and he looked from me to Helena and back again. I saw the moment he realized that the bed-and-breakfast had been a strategic error, and we’d have been better off taking our chances with my family.
Fortunately, I wasn’t nearly as polite as Gage was.
“We need a room, Ms. Fortnum,” I said firmly, stepping in front of him. “Gage’s car slid off the road a few yards down, and we need to escape the storm for a little while. We’ll also need to call Hiram about coming to tow the car—”
She raised an eyebrow. “Just the one room?”
Suddenly, I felt about eight years old, which was the last time I’d been on the receiving end of that eyebrow. “Er. Yes, ma’am?”
“Mmmhmm. So you’ve decided to make an honest man of our Gage?” She pursed her lips.
Gage snickered and pressed his face against my back.
“I have. I very definitely have. Which is why we need a room,” I persisted, loving the feel of Gage’s laughter vibrating through my skin. “Before Gage catches a chill in his wet clothes.”
