We shook hands.
He’s unlike most men I meet. Which isn’t surprising. We’re not cut from the same cloth. He grew up affluent and went to an elite boarding school in upstate New York. He’s bred for prep school games and aristocratic rules that I’m still learning.
But he treated me like I was worthy of his daughter.
That’s all I could ask for.
I feel good about my standing with her parents. But with her five brothers and little sister—fuck if I know. Charlie said I haven’t finished the Truth or Dare game yet. I could walk into Wednesday Night Dinner, and they could banish me for fucking eternity.
Even being engaged to Jane hasn’t changed anything with her siblings. They reacted to the news like someone offering a weather report. Jane said they’re keeping things close to the vest until the game ends. But I hated seeing Audrey purposefully temper her excitement.
At least I don’t have to fucking guess how the rest of her family feels. Overjoyed is a soft word for their reaction. Her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were beyond ecstatic. Luna and Sulli shrieked and grabbed Jane’s hands and the three of them started jumping up and down together.
But the biggest reaction was Maximoff’s. Her best friend. He hugged Jane. Then gave me a hug. He said, “I’m proud of Jane for following her heart, and I’m glad you’re the guy on the other side of it.”
I’d repeat that moment a thousand times just to see the happiness on Jane’s face over and over again.
Back in bed, Jane’s eyes begin to flutter open. Curiosity in them as she looks up at me. “How long have you been awake?”
“Not long.” I brush some frizzed hair off her cheek.
She stirs more, smiling, and then glances at her left hand splayed on my muscular bicep, the makeshift ring still on her finger.
Our engagement wasn’t a dream.
It was real. It’s been real since she proposed a couple weeks ago.
“I’m getting you an actual ring,” I tell her straight out.
Her lips suddenly downturn and she props herself higher, her left hand sliding to my chest. “I like this one.”
“You’re not wearing a paperclip forever.” I’m resolute and unyielding about this. I might not be able to afford a 5-carat diamond, but Jane is worth more than a two-cent piece of metal from OfficeMax.
She opens her mouth to argue, but I kiss the top of her head, then her temple.
Jane flushes and quiets at my touch, her nipples hardened against a silk blue top, and I clutch her ass that peeks out of the matching shorts. My cock twitches.
Her smile grows, and she shifts on me and straddles my waist, palms splayed on my chest. As she bows forward, dog tags suspend from her neck.
Same ones I wore during two tours overseas. They mean something to me, encapsulating a time of my life that civilians can’t understand—and I always planned to give them to the woman I’d marry.
I wish I had brought them to Scotland, and I was kicking myself that I hadn’t.
Because the dog tags were her Christmas gift.
She notices me staring at them and her fingers clasp the metal. She cried when I first put them around her neck, knowing what they mean to me.
Knowing what she means to me.
“Have you thought more about what kind of car you’d like?” Jane wonders, sitting up straighter on me. My shoulders press into the headboard, and I warm her thighs with my palms. She knows I’m practical, and she wanted to gift me a practical thing for Christmas.
A car.
Too fucking much. But then, I thought about it, and she could’ve easily said the dog tags were too much. I need to let her give me more, and I could use a car.
“Yeah.” I nod once. “Surprise me.”
Her eyes brighten. “That, I can do.”
My lip curves upward.
And Jane struggles not to grin. “We’re engaged.” Her cheeks are beet-red.
“We’re engaged.”
Wouldn’t dream of anything else than to be next to Jane forever.
Every now and then, the enormity of what this means slams at me.
The poor Italian-American boy from South Philly is marrying an American princess. I’m marrying into the Cobalt Empire. She’s marrying into my rowdy, obnoxious, and loving Italian family.
When I called them, they screamed so fucking loud I thought it’d burst the speaker. My mom and her wife put as many uncles and aunts on the line as they could.
Happy. Thrilled.
Crying.
“When’s the engagement party?!” they asked.
“Youse have a wedding date yet?! We gotta mark this down.” Doesn’t matter who the person is, if they’re family they assume they’re invited.
“What are you thinking?” Jane wonders, her eyes twinkling.
“That it’ll have to be a big wedding.” I watch her unconsciously scoot closer to my dick. My blood heats. “I have to invite everyone I know, unless I want to create about a hundred different lifelong grudges.”
“No grudges will be formed,” Jane says confidently, still smiling. It’s fucking contagious. “Our wedding will be giant and wonderful. We’ll play Italian music, most surely.”
That, right there, does a number on me. “Yeah?” Emotion fists my ribcage. My family means everything to me like hers does, and she remembers. Always remembers.
“Your grandma told me it’s the best part of Italian weddings. That and the food.” She was on the phone with my grandma and mom for an hour after the proposal.
We would’ve told them in person, but the news was going to leak fast. Jane’s blue-blooded grandmother overheard Rose talking, and no one trusted that Grandmother Calloway wouldn’t spill the engagement to the press.
She did.
Media have run a variety of articles. Most fixate on the timeline of the engagement.
Too fast, they say.
Doesn’t bother me. I couldn’t be more certain of where I’m headed. Life is short—I’ve known that since I lost my older brother. And while I’m on this earth, I want to be happy.
But to the world, Jane isn’t known as a spontaneous, wild Meadows girl. She’s seen as a logical, rational Cobalt—and in less than five months, she’s engaged to a bodyguard.
Pregnancy rumors are already circulating tabloids.
But the “Omega is fake” rumor is catching fire ten times more, ten times stronger. Entertainment journalists have been theorizing that Jane and I knew each other before I became a bodyguard—and that this wasn’t a shotgun engagement since we’ve been together for years.
I’m concerned about the other men.
SFO has to deal with fans aggressively pairing them off with their client (or ex-client in Donnelly’s case with Beckett). Because the media, fans, the fucking universe seriously believes they’re all real couples and fake bodyguards.
I don’t mention the media to Jane in bed. We’ve talked about tabloids enough.
As I lace her left hand in mine, we stare at one another, drinking each other in, and I say, “You’re going to be my wife.”
Her lips part in arousal.
I slide my large hand from her thigh up underneath her silk top, along the curve of her hip, and against her breast.
She grinds her hips.
I grit down on my teeth, blood rushing through my cock. I harden, and her fingers dig into my shoulder.