Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
“Glad to see you two found each other,” Dad says. “Ready to go see the new baby?”
“Absolutely,” I say, grinning at Sam.
“Good. Mom’s so excited. The doctors cleared her to come down to the nursery with us. Just let me feed Isabelle her lamb hearts and we’ll go,” Dad says, a spring in his step as he turns to head back down the hall to attend to the demon ferret.
“Disgusting,” Sam whispers.
“She’s a monster,” I agree, arching a suggestive brow his way as I add, “And so am I. We should pick up where we left off at the earliest opportunity.”
“Damn straight we will,” he says, and then he kisses me, and my heart does fluttery, squirmy puppy things in my chest that would have terrified me just a few days ago.
But now they just make me smile as I whisper against his lips, “Race you out the window. If we crawl out and meet Dad in the driveway, we won’t have to risk Isabelle mistaking our ankles for lamb hearts.”
We tumble through the window, laughing and giving each other shit for being afraid of a ferret the size of a slinky and it is…lovely.
As lovely as this unexpected treasure I’ve found with my best friend.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sam
They say money can’t buy happiness.
Growing up in a single-parent household, where grocery money was tight, and I was lucky to wake up to one present under the tree at Christmas, I wasn’t so sure about that. Mom and I were happy in our shabby little bungalow with nothing but each other and the rabbits she bred in the backyard for extra money, but I suspected a thousand extra dollars a month would go a long way to improving both our moods.
Mom could stop working doubles at the hospital as an X-ray tech, we wouldn’t have to worry about where the next mortgage payment was coming from and going out to eat more often would have been fun. Mom used to love getting dressed up in one of the disco-era dresses she inherited from her mother and heading out for a night on the town.
As a kid, I hated that we only went to the steakhouse she loved on her birthday. I wanted to be able to treat her to a filet mignon with fancy mashed potatoes squeezed out of a pastry tube, so it looked like the top of an ice cream cone, whenever she wanted. I vowed that when I grew up, I would make a shit ton of money and give her everything she missed out on being a young single mother whose baby daddy decided not to stick around.
Just a few years after my early graduation from college, I dropped half a million dollars in her checking account one Christmas morning, but Mom didn’t stop working doubles and still only goes out to eat on special occasions. She’s happy with her life and her work the way it is—though she did pay off the house, buy the bunnies a fancier kennel, and takes way more vacations than she did before.
But I can’t fault her. I’m the same way—I love my private estate in the English countryside and penthouse in London, but I was just as happy in my tiny garret studio, sleeping on a blow-up mattress and writing code at a desk that was way too small for a grown man. It was my work, my friends from school, and my amazing mom back home, rooting for me every step of the way, that brought me joy.
And it was the lack of one certain person, the one woman I couldn’t get out of my head, that kept that joy from being complete.
But now…Jess is with me, really with me, and I’m with her.
The fact that she can’t keep her hands off of me, even when we’re standing in front of the nursery window with her parents, watching Steve hold up his daughter, makes me so damned happy.
It’s all I can do not to run down the hospital hallway pumping my fist and whooping, “That’s right, people, she said yes!”
Only the fact that she hasn’t actually said “yes”—at least not officially—keeps me quiet and relatively cool. Still, I can’t stop smiling. Every time I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the nursery windows or the mirror on the wall in Mrs. Cho’s room, after we escort her back to her bed for the night, I’m grinning like an idiot.
I grin all the way back to the Cho house and through brushing my teeth and pretending to go to sleep in the guest room before sneaking down the hall to crawl into Jess’s twin bed with her. But it’s after midnight and we have to be up early to have breakfast with her dad and pick her mom up from the hospital before catching the train back to the city, so we don’t start anything we won’t be able to finish.