“Then I promise to make you smile every day. Starting tomorrow, when I wake up next to my fiancé and help him rehome a possessed rooster cookie jar?—”
I snort-laughed.
“—and ending… oh, seventy years from now, let’s say, when I fall asleep next to my husband.”
The sweet words, combined with Jack’s weight pressing me to the floor, had a predictable effect… an effect that had nothing to do with roosters.
Jack noticed immediately and raised an eyebrow. “Reeeally? Four times in two hours, Hawk Sunday? That’s gotta be some kind of record.”
I grinned up at him unrepentantly. “Are you complaining?”
He shifted his hips, and I gasped. “Not even a little bit.”
Much later, when we’d finally managed to eat dinner on the porch with the cats winding around our ankles, and I was sitting back in my chair with my legs thrown over one of Jack’s strong thighs, I found myself glancing at Pecky, who sat on our kitchen counter like a poultry-shaped sentinel.
“I wonder what Pecky’s story is,” I mused. “How’d he get to be so… you know,lucky? And how’d a lucky rooster end up on a donation table at the Hookers’ Rummage Sale?”
Jack’s fingers traced up and down my knee idly. He glanced at the rooster, then gave me an amused look that said he still refused to believe in possessed ceramic poultry. But because he loved me, he didn’t say that. “Sometimes things just end up where they’re needed most,” he said instead. “Whether it’s a weird rooster finding its way to a rummage sale… or the most gorgeous, generous, loving human on the planet ending up in my arms.” He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. “You’re all the good luck I need, baby.”
“Same,” I whispered back, and I meant it with every fiber of my being. “Forever.”
KNOX AND GAGE
CHAPTER THREE
KNOX
I wokeup with a crick in my neck… and the sense that I’d made a grave tactical error somewhere along the line.
See, it turned out the sofa Gage and I had bought when we’d moved into the Pumpkin House four years ago was incredibly comfortable for watching movies and doing what Helena Fortnum might have calledcanoodling… but the fucker was not built for sleeping.
Not when you were over six feet tall.
Not when it was covered in squeaky, leathery material,andLittle Pippin Hollow was being gripped by a heat wave,andyou’d vetoed central air-conditioning during your remodel since it rarely got very hot in Vermont.
And especially not when you were supposed to be curled up beside the man you loved in your bed down the hall.
“Fuck,” I groaned, rolling my shoulders as sweat already gathered at the back of my neck. Our house was an oven, and my phone claimed it was barely 9:00 a.m.
As I stared up at the ceiling, the previous day’s events looped through my head… but made no more sense than they had the night before.
It had all started, I was pretty sure, when I’d gotten anemail from Rick, my former boss at Bormon Klein Jacovic, with an offer to consult on a short-term project in Boston. “Three months, Knox! Excellent pay, a chance to tackle something challenging, a no-brainer.”
To my surprise, my first instinct hadn’t been a hard no, but… well,excitement. Not for me—I’d already lived in Boston for years, seen all it had to offer, and quite literally had the T-shirt—but for Gage.
There’d been a time, right up until he’d come to the Hollow “temporarily” four years ago, when the man I loved had had an itch to do the big-city thing. And while I knew Gage wasn’t exactly crying into his cornflakes these days, running his own app-development company from home for a bunch of clients who fucking adored him, with plenty of free time to run a volunteer computer science program at our nephew’s school once a week, so that every kid in town knew his name and idolized him, it still niggled at me that Gage had never had the city experience he’d once craved.
I knew better than anyone that unfulfilled dreams could haunt a person. Sometimes you truly believed you were fine—resigned, reconciled, all thatadultshit—when really you were ignoring and overriding. Eventually, you’d look up and realize you’d been missing out.
That’s what had happened to me. I’d told myself I didn’t need to live near my family, that I didn’t want a romantic partner, that I was better off focusing on my career. Then Gage had come along, woken me up, and made me wonder what the fuck I’d been thinking.
I’d be damned if that happened to Gage. Not if I could help it. It was utterly unacceptable that the man who’d made all my dreams come true might have his own unfulfilled dreams ping-ponging around in the back of his weird and wonderful brain.
So, I’d emailed Rick back, asking him to send me the details, and once he had, I’d sat at the kitchen island andpored over his email while Gage had rushed around the house getting ready to run a robot-building demonstration for the kids who’d be attending the Little Pippin Hookers Rummage Sale.
I’d imagined what a sojourn in Boston might look like—me and Gage spending August weekends in P-town and soaking in the vibe of the place, strolling Castle Island and the North End, and watching the Head of the Charles Regatta. Like a vacation in slow-mo, just the two of us—because as far as I was concerned, it would always, forever, in all things, be the two of us.
And maybe,maybe, while we were there, I’d find just the right way to make our “always and forever” official and finally propose to the man. I’d brought up the subject of marriage once, just a couple of months after we’d gotten together, but even then, I’d known that Gage deserved a proposal that was bigger, splashier, and more memorable than a simple conversation. Nearly four years later, I still hadn’t found the perfect time and place.Yet.
