His eyes widen, and his grip tightens on my waist. “How’d it go?”
“It was awful,” I admit, because it was, “but I’ve never felt closer to my sisters than I do now. All that time, my secret was standing between us, and I didn’t even realize it. You helped me see that.”
“By being a dick?” he asks, his tone chagrined.
“No, but that didn’t hurt.” I smile. “A girl does a little soul-searching when the man she’s falling for keeps throwing truth bombs at her.”
“I don’t deserve you,” he says, but the way his arms are wrapped around me, pressing me to his body, it’s obvious he doesn’t intend to let that stop him.
Thank God.
“I disagree, but if you don’t want to take my word for it, consider this: if we all got what we deserved, Augusta would have taken a tumble from grace a long time ago.”
“I guess she needed you to push her.” He gives me a wicked smile. “Who are you going after next?”
“Oh, definitely my brother-in-law. Glenn needs a good push down the hill of ruination. Maybe two pushes. But I’d rather not talk about him right now. Seems to me we’re in the middle of something.”
“Oh yeah?” Cal asks, his eyes teasing now. His hands run up and down my waist, sending sparks of pleasure through me, but he can do better than that. A lot better.
“Makeup sex is the very best kind,” I say, “at least according to me, in the top ten list I made up for Valentine’s Day last year. I say we give it a go.”
His hands flip up my skirt, and he takes in my lace panties, his eyes hooded. “I’m not sure we can make it to the bed.”
“It’s about ten feet away, Cal,” I say, waving to the Murphy bed, which takes up a good thirty percent of my studio when it’s down. Which it is. “We’re practically on it.”
“Exactly,” he says, slipping my panties down and leading me the few feet to the door. “Too far. Besides, I seem to remember a door being on our non-bed fucking list.”
“You know?” I tug his hemline and lift his shirt over his head, then unbuckle his belt. “I think I love you, Cal Reynolds.”
“Good,” he says as he goes for my shirt. “Because I know I love you.”
Epilogue
Cal
“Make no mistake. I don’t need you, Henry, but I sure as hell want you,” Roxie said.
He pulled her to him in the manner of a man who had no intention of letting go. “Good, because I’ve never wanted a woman as much as I want you. I wouldn’t care if you’d been married four times.”
—Molly O’Shea, Hearts in Flight
“Where do you want this?” I call out as Harry and I maneuver a sofa through the front door of the rental house Molly is moving into.
“Over here,” Tina says, sounding giddy with excitement. She, Harry, and Molly are renting the house together, and it’s move-in day. It’s a three-bedroom bungalow with a crappy kitchen and one vintage bathroom (not the cute kind), but Molly loves it. I suspect she’s more excited about moving in with our friends than she is about the house itself. After living alone for so long, she’s eager to live with other people.
I’ve told her I’ll check back with her in another month to see if she’s as enthusiastic. (That earned me a shove in the arm.)
She’s been staying at the old O’Shea house for the past two weeks, but it’s put a serious damper on our sex life. Okay, maybe not as much as it would have if we were bed-fucking kind of people. Still, it will be nice to sleep together without worrying we’ll be overheard by my father (whom we’ve learned has exceptionally good hearing for someone his age) or her sister and brother-in-law while Ein and Chaco whine outside the door. Now we’ll just be overheard by one nosy roommate and another who hears our moans and looks up possible diseases we might have on WebMD—to make sure they’re not communicable, of course.
How has he already heard us when they’re just now moving in? That’s better left unsaid, especially since Harry hasn’t looked me in the eye since. Molly, being the resident sex expert, says he’ll come around. It might take a few months—give or take a few hundred years—but he’ll get over it.
Harry, who’s struggling to hold up his end of the sofa, or perhaps he’s just reliving seeing us in the back of Molly’s new clunker car she bought a day after moving back, grunts, “I can’t hold this much longer.”
“Go ahead and drop it,” I say, but he doesn’t set it down gently. He literally just drops it.
I set my end down and realize the sofa is in the middle of the room.
Molly walks out of the kitchen, her eyes bright with excitement. “It looks great!”
“It’ll look better when it’s not in the middle of the room,” Tina says with her hand propped on her hip.
“It’s heavy,” Harry says, trying to catch his breath.
“Of course it is,” Tina says. “It’s good quality. Solid wood frame. A nice worn leather, so no bedbugs.”
“Unless they’ve burrowed into the cracks,” I feel compelled to say. Harry is terrified of bedbugs, but since he’s graduated, our relationship has changed. We’ve become more friends than sponsor-sponsee. At least until he walked in on us…
Molly sends me a warning glare. “Don’t listen to him, Harry.”
Harry glances back at me, not quite meeting my gaze. “I think I liked you better as the strong, silent type.”
We all burst out laughing, Harry included, and Molly walks over to me, wrapping her arms around my waist and burrowing into me. An overwhelming feeling of belonging and love washes through me. Once again, I marvel at what we’ve found together.
Molly looks up at me, and I know she feels the same way. Nicole, being Nicole, asked why we weren’t moving in together given that I live with my father and Molly was bed-surfing with her sister. The answer is simple: we’re still working on ourselves, and this way we can spend lots of time together but still have space for self-work. I’ve been getting back into my woodworking, and Molly is hard at work on her novel about Mrs. Dahl, and Dottie, I’ve heard, is angling for the story Molly wrote for her to get the novel treatment next. In the meantime, Molly’s also pitching and writing freelance pieces for Rogue Word and, yes, Beyond the Sheets.
As for the Bad Luck Club? I’m letting Dad take the reins. Molly’s article brought lots of attention our way. As in, every day brings a new bag of letters and sketchy boxes and, worst of all, love notes. Willow sighed dreamily when a stack of love letters showed up at our office. Our office. “It’s like you’re Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle.”
“You don’t remember the character’s name, do you?” I asked with a smirk.
“Nobody does,” she said, throwing her hands up. “It’s Tom Hanks!”
I shrugged, because fair enough. “Well, I have a real girlfriend, not a space-filler girlfriend like he had in the movie.”
She heaved a long sigh. “It’s too bad you’re not a woman.”