Marriage For One

“What do you want on—”

“Mushrooms,” I blurted out. “And maybe artichokes too.”

“That’s it?”

“No, you add something too. What do you want?”

“Pepperoni. You’ll have water?”

I nodded and let him finish our order then, just as the girl left after promising to get our drinks ASAP, my gaze caught on an empty booth toward the back.

“Did you hear anything from your cousins?”

When I gave him a confused look, he continued.

“About your surgery. Did they call you to check on you?”

“No. I’m not even sure if I want to hear from them. I’m surprised that Bryan never showed up again though. Did he call you? I feel like he gave up too easily.”

“No.”

Because I wanted tonight to be just about us, I changed the subject and didn’t think too much about his angry expression.

Pointing with my finger at the booth in the back, I waited for him to follow my direction.

“Yes…that’s a table, I believe.”

“Ha ha.” Giving him a pointedly blank look, I ignored his dry comment. “Can we sit there?”

“You don’t like it here?”

“No. No, I do, but a booth…I don’t know, it feels more intimate.”

Jack caught the attention of the girl as she was bringing a soda to the cute little kid next to us and then helped me out of my seat and carried my coat. The touch of his hand on the small of my back practically seared me through my dress. I got in first and scooted.

Instead of sitting next to me as I had assumed he would and wanted him to do, he went to sit across from me again.

“What are you doing?” I asked, perplexed.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Jack, you’re gonna sit here.” I patted the seat next to me. “That’s why I wanted a booth.”

“To sit next to me,” he echoed.

I nodded slowly.

“We could’ve moved our chairs closer to each other.”

“It’s not the same thing. Come on. Move.”

“No touching, Rose. I’m serious. Do not drive me crazy in public.”

Hearing that I had any kind of power over him was exhilarating. Happy and excited, I laughed and raised my hands. “No touching—got it. Come on, I won’t bite. I promise.”

And what do you know…as soon as he settled next to me, he reached for my hand and tightly clasped it in his, playing with my ring the entire time. He was the one who couldn’t stop touching me, and I loved every second of it. We talked for hours in that little Italian restaurant, accompanied by some romantic Italian tunes. If Jack wasn’t touching my face, he was holding my hand. If he wasn’t holding my hand, he was offering me bites of pizza as I chattered away at him. When he wasn’t making me laugh with his dry comments, he was resting our linked hands on his leg. When I wasn’t smiling or laughing, I was melting.

He also kissed me. I didn’t know why I was surprised, but he kissed me so many times. Every time he leaned forward and I felt his lips moving against mine, asking for entrance, my heart lost its steady rhythm and I felt excitement bubbling up inside me, the kind of excitement you don’t know how to hold in, an excess of happiness. I loved it. I completely fell for him on our first date.

It was the most perfect first date I’d ever had in my life.

My husband was perfect. With all his arrogance and prickliness, Jack Hawthorne was perfect for me.

He wasn’t what I’d had in mind or even what I’d wanted for myself, but he was perfect and already mine, truly mine. There was no doubt of that in my mind.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Rose

It was after the official first date, not days after, only hours when I woke up with a weird feeling.

It was so hard to sleep in the same bed with Jack after I’d started feeling better from the surgery. As much as I talked about wanting to get him into bed naked, I never actually did anything about it, at least not when we were in bed like this.

That being said, I wasn’t actually surprised to find Jack spooning me—that happened a lot. I woke up in a lot of different positions in the morning, usually with my face tucked under his chin, my hand across his chest. Sometimes my face was on his chest with his arms wrapped around me, and there had been a few instances where we had woken up fused to each other just like we were right then.

Little spoon, meet big spoon.

In the hospital, that had been the only position we had slept in, but that was only because the bed wasn’t big enough for any other positioning. At the hospital, sex had been the last thing on my mind, but out of it…the last two months, things had been different. In those instances where we had woken up with his front pressed to my back, he usually got out of bed as quickly as possible and I said a silent goodbye to his lovely erection that had been pressing into me from behind.