Page 74 of Tail, Dark and Handsome: Celestial Mates
“Coming!” Mari shouted. She stepped away, but Winter held her hand, pulling her back.
“You carry my heart,” he said.
Suddenly she understood what he had been telling her, over and over again, in different words and different ways. He cared for her and wanted to help ease her burdens. His son was his world and she the stars and the sun. He did not pick her because she was a convenient choice. He chose her because he wanted her, liked her, and loved her.
That last little bit of stubbornness, the disbelief that anything good could happen to her, melted.
“I love you, too,” she answered. She leaned forward, intent on giving a quick, affectionate kiss. Only the kiss deepened, and Mari found herself on her back on the bed with Winter looming over her. “People are waiting on us,” she managed.
“They can wait.”
A year.
A year to be certain. A year to pay Winter back. In that time, Winter would get a fiancé to make the investors happy, and Mari would get her one face for the rest of her life.
A year was no time at all for her happily ever after.
Right?
Chapter 16
Back in the studio, but does anyone care? Pop music has a short memory, and the name Rebel Cayne has long been forgotten.
-Interstellar Music News
Marigold
She didn’t have to wait long to experience her first big Corravian storm.
Alarms sounding on every device woke Mari. She jumped out of bed, awake but not yet alert. She grabbed her comm unit, trying to assess if the station had a breach or if the ship was off course. When her heart stopped pounding enough for her to think, she realized they were on Corra and not a crashing starship.
Winter rolled over to grab his comm unit. “A storm alert. We need to secure the house.”
Dressed in their sleep clothes, they went through every room in the house and manually closed the security shutters over the windows. Apparently, wind speeds in a Corravian storm exceeded hurricane-force winds. Not that she had ever experienced a hurricane, but it sounded serious. Winter explained that the house was designed to withstand a storm, but due to the age of the building, not every safety feature was automated.
Mari worked her way through the upstairs rooms. With the lights kept low out of consideration for Winter’s eyes, she stumbled her way through the unfamiliar house, bumping into furniture. The empty bedrooms were easy enough after she fumbled to turn on the lamps. The shutters were a metal mesh out that covered the outside of the windows. A hand crank on the windowsill lowered the shutters.
Zero muttered and buried his head under the blanket when she entered his bedroom. The room had that musty teenage boy smell she remembered Joseph’s room having.
“How can you breathe in here?” she whispered, seeing no obvious cause for the funk, like piles of sweaty socks or whatnot.
“Is fine. How about you breathe somewhere else,” he muttered, rolling to face the wall.
Funky smells were something to worry about later.
After securing the windows in the hall and the cleansing room, she thought about finding Winter and brewing a pot of coffee.
Floorboards creaked from the ceiling above.
She forgot about the attic. It took her a good five minutes of opening doors before she opened what she assumed to be a closet in the empty bedrooms. The rooms were connected, which told her they were originally meant to be part of the master suite with his and hers bedrooms, but both sides sat empty.
The door opened into a disused stairwell. Dust covered the steps of a narrow staircase.
“Okay, secret door and a secret staircase. Totally things to deal with before coffee,” she said, testing the bottom step. It seemed solid enough. She hadn’t had a chance to explore the house completely, what with the rush to the courthouse and paperwork. The house was not a sprawling manor but more than large enough for three people, especially since the caretakers lived in a separate cottage. It hardly seemed fair to call it a secret staircase when she hadn’t poked her nose into every corner of the house. Yet.
Branches from a nearby tree beat against a window too high on the stairwell for Mari to reach. She’d need to be a few inches taller or have a step stool to reach the crank.
Steps creaked, and dust kicked up with every step. It had to be an open window or vermin making the noise. No one had used these stairs in some time, possibly years.
