Madly (New York 2)

“Hush. I’m not finished.” It was easy to silence her. Easy to tell her what he wanted, finally. “I want you to keep failing. I want you to be fearless and impulsive, and to follow your instincts, invest in Ben’s restaurant, open a gallery for May, and become a New York businesswoman. I want you to reclaim your dogs and fly with me to London to meet my mother, and I want to purchase furniture in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, that will be our furniture, and buy a car, and meet your mother. I have to assume, somewhere in there, we’ll make an utter hash of things. But I trust you—I trust us—to find our way back from failure. I think we can learn together.”

Allie stared at her hands in her lap, leaving him in limbo, uncertain whether he’d done the right thing in taking his brother’s advice. Perhaps he ought to have taken things more slowly, instead of rushing in like a right tosser.

But looking at her, dressed in velveteen Technicolor, her hair enormous, he couldn’t feel anything but pleased he’d said it, because it was absolutely true. Every word.

“There’s not a thing wrong with the way you are, Allie Fredericks. You’re the most interesting thing to happen to me in all my life.” Her head rose, color high in her cheeks. “I’d like to spend my life with you, as much of it as you’ll have me. I think—”

“Oh my God, Winston, shut up.” She was unbuckling her seat belt, clambering across the car into his arms, rubbing her cheek against his, so he didn’t feel wounded by her silencing him. He knew he’d been pushing it. “Give me a chance to catch up, jeez.”

He kissed her instead, quite thoroughly, until her lips were pliant and her body had begun to relax. “Catch up later,” he suggested. “There’s no rush.”

“I think you just planned out the next, like, fifty years of our lives.”

“We’ll make a list,” he suggested. “Sort ourselves out. It won’t be a problem.” He kissed her neck, found a spot behind her ear that caused her to make a very satisfying squeaking sort of gasp.

“We are pretty good at list making,” she conceded.

“We’re incredible.” He dragged his thumb over her nipple, causing it to form a highly satisfactory peak beneath her clothes. She hadn’t worn a bra today.

“Incredible might be pushing it.” She scraped her fingernails over the nape of his neck and pulled him in for another kiss, deeper and more intimate.

“No one has ever made more outrageous lists.”

“Well, I’m kind of an outrageous girl.”

“I’ve noticed.” He found a zipper and lowered it in order to explore just how outrageous Allie was willing to get behind tinted windows.

“You don’t even know all my moves yet.”

“Show me one?”

She showed him several. They fogged the car windows.

Afterward, Allie asked to borrow a piece of paper and a pen so she could begin a new list.

Chapter 24

They’d turned the Brooklyn Bridge into a boat.

Allie knew nothing about boats, but she thought it was meant to be like the tall ships that visited Green Bay in the summertime, a schooner or a brigantine, with the iconic stone columns in the middle of the East River transformed into its central mast, reaching skyward, and banks of sails in white, orange, and blue puffing out with the breeze off the water.

Allie couldn’t stop looking at it. It was completely stunning—the scale of it, and more than that, the way it seemed to have appeared from nowhere as if it had always been.

It was the work of years, a masterpiece produced by makers with thousands of hours’ experience in art, design, showmanship, planning.

Her mother must have been on the bridge all night long with Justin. She must have broken out the job into sections and steps, secretly put dozens or even hundreds of people to work in secret, staged materials, sourced equipment, provided detailed instructions and blueprints.

Allie found it easy to imagine her mom, snippy and dictatorial, compressing her mouth at people, lasering them with her eyes, weighing them down with midwestern disappointment so they had no choice but to do exactly what she wanted, her way, on her schedule.

She’d made this. Nancy Fredericks of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and her old friend from art school, had transformed the Brooklyn Bridge into magic, and Allie didn’t know what to do with the awe she felt, the extraordinary swelling pride that made her heart so big she’d spent half an hour just crying and hugging people—her family, Winston’s family, Jean, complete strangers, everyone completely out of their minds with delight.

Winston put his hands on her shoulders, and she sighed. “My mama did that.”

“They’re saying it cost millions.”

“My mama.”

“You’ve a very distinguished family.”