I rest my head on his shoulder and sigh.
“Damn, woman,” he says. “Just… damn.” Then he’s grabbing my hair and pulling my mouth to his, and we’re kissing like two teenagers on a yacht down in Key West who just figured out they’re soulmates.
We stay like that for a little bit, neither of us ready to break the moment and pull ourselves back into reality.
We are flying to Key West. In a few hours we will be there. There will be a big street party tonight with lots of loud, boisterous laughing and talking. And lots of food. And lots of love.
But right now, this is all the love we need. It takes many more minutes before he slaps the sole of my foot and says, “OK. We can start our holiday now.”
I roll off him and settle into the couch with my eyes closed. “I could sleep for days right now. I could sleep right through Christmas.” I crack open one eye. “Maybe we should?”
Jesse is leaning back into the couch cushions with his eyes closed too, a broad, charming, satisfied grin on his face. “Should what?”
“Stay home.”
He opens both eyes. “What?”
“We could just have a quiet holiday all to ourselves. Never put clothes. No make-up, no suits, no parties. Just nine days of sex.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
I shrug. “We are grown-ups, right? We can do whatever we want.”
“Emma Dumas. Your mother would flip her lid if we didn’t show up for Christmas. Remember that weekend in September when we couldn’t make it for Saturday night dinner?”
“God, don’t remind me.” My mother forced the whole family to get in the fucking Suburban and drive up to the city to bring Saturday night dinner to us.
It took twelve hours. Twelve hours of my poor giant brothers and father stuffed into a Suburban with grocery bags and ice chests filled with food—because God knows she couldn’t shop for dinner when she got here, right?—and then when they got here they took over my apartment.
Don’t get me wrong, it was fun. And sorta amazing. That my mother would go to all that trouble just to have her precious dinner night with her family.
But Jesse is right. She would bring Christmas here. And I can’t in good conscience force my poor brothers to endure another twelve-hour drive with groceries and presents jammed between them, not to mention a Christmas tree strapped to the roof of the Suburban, just because we want to have a sex holiday.
“OK.” I sigh. “Let’s do this.”As much as I complain about my bossy mother, being on the jet and on our way to Key West is exciting. I don’t care how many times I have made this trip in the past, or how many times I’ll make it in the future, the moment I see the jet waiting for us on the tarmac the only thing I can think about is that one-up date I took Jesse on last summer and how my family fell in love with him immediately.
Well, maybe not Alonzo. And Tony has fantasy fights in some MMA game he plays with a guy who looks suspiciously like Jesse. But Luke loves him.
That date, though.
I had just spent ten million dollars to buy Jesse in a bachelor auction, drugged him with roofies, kidnapped him with my three best friends, tied him up in our lake house basement, and then hate-fucked him. Sorta. I let him eat me out, then I walked out, flashing him the finger as I squealed my tires.
The whole day was a plan of revenge. Both on his part, and mine. And since he technically was in control that day—holding a fake blood test over my head that proved he’d been drugged the night before—I was fuming when he insisted I had to spend the day with him.
So I came up with the one-up date out of anger, and hate, and schemes of revenge.
How could such a perfect day come out of these emotions?
It still makes my head spin. Also makes me question the sanity of the universe. Like… who was the insane god-thing that decided “Hey, we can totally turn this hate-date into a love connection,” once he/she/it got wind of my plan?
But then… then I realize it was me.
I did that, not the universe god-thing. I’m the one who planned the day from top to bottom. And it was perfect. Jesse Boston fell in love with me the moment I started banging my head to Smells Like Teen Spirit in that matte-black Lamborghini outside my building. And then he slipped on a rock or something, a patch of mud on the hillside called Emma Dumas Gets Revenge, and the rest is history, baby. Or maybe herstory?
Ha.
I make my own future. I’m totally in charge of the whole thing.
So I’m smiling big with this realization when Miles comes at me with the jet’s satellite phone on a silver tray. I sorta love that Miles takes his jet-butler duties so seriously. He and his partner—our pilot, Christopher—they both totally deserve this holiday trip to Vegas that Jesse bought them.