Smitten

“Now, where were we?” Fish whispers.

We resume our prior activity, giggling at our close call. Reveling in our naughtiness. And in no time at all, Fish comes underneath me, growling with pleasure. He quickly finishes me off with his fingers, calling me his “hot fiancée” as he does.

When I come down from my orgasm, I slide off his lap. After putting ourselves back together, I sit next to my fiancé, my back against the wall, and lean my cheek against his shoulder.

“When do you want to get married?” I ask.

Fish takes my hand. “I don’t care. We’re already married, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, would you like to do it before or after the next tour?”

He shrugs. “Before, I guess. That way, everyone on tour can call you Mrs. Fish.” He chuckles. “We’ll be a Goat and a Lioness called Fish.”

“That’s it!” I say. And he laughs. It’s been our running joke for a while now. Any time either of us says something weird, we pretend we’ve found the perfect name for our next album.

I look down at my sparkling ring. “It’s so perfect. So me.”

“I can’t take credit for that, to be honest. Mrs. Morgan, Georgie, and Kat helped me pick it out. I mean, I was there with them. But they all said, ‘This is the one!’ And I said, ‘Kewl.’”

I giggle. “When was that?”

“A year and a half ago. Right before we left on tour.”

I sit up from his shoulder, in shock. “You waited all that time to propose to me here—on this exact spot?”

Fish grimaces. “No. I waited all that time because I was trying to find the perfect moment. I’ve had that ring in my pocket for a year.”

“Fish!”

He laughs. “I wanted to propose on our first Christmas together. That was my original plan.” He’s talking about the Christmas we spent in Seattle with his mother and the Morgans. And now that I think about it, he did seem kind of out of sorts that entire trip.

“Why didn’t you do it then?”

“Because I convinced myself it was too soon, and you’d turn me down. Maybe say you were too young. So, then, I decided to wait until you could legally drink champagne on the day of your engagement.”

“And here we are a year later,” I say.

“Well, then we were on tour, and . . .”

“I would have said yes whenever you asked me, you know.”

“I just wanted it to be right. I was going to do it a hundred different times during our tour. Every time we performed ‘Smitten,’ I had the urge to do it after the song. But, then, I figured the reason I hadn’t done it yet was because my gut was telling me not to do it with anyone else around. Especially not a whole bunch of strangers in an audience. I know that’s the way lots of people propose—with a huge, public audience. But I’d already done the ‘public declaration of love’ thing at the Garden that time. So, I decided to pop the question when nobody else was around. Just to do something different.”

“This was perfect. Romantic and sweet and intimate.” I wink. “And hawt.”

“Whew, hot momma. You were on fire.”

“Something came over me when you slipped this ring on my finger. I just had to have you.” I look down at my splayed hand. “Seriously, the way you did it is the best of all worlds. It was just you and me when you asked me—which means we got to celebrate in the most intimate way possible. And, now, we get to float back into the birthday party and celebrate with everyone we love the most.”

“I love you the most of the most. You know that, right?”

“I sure do. Back at you.”

Fish stands and pulls me up. “Come on, my hot fiancée. Let’s go tell everyone I asked the girl of my dreams to marry me—to become my hot wife and grow old and gray with me—and, thank God, she . . . said . . . yes.”

He slips his hand in mine and guides me over the retaining wall.

“Damn, I’m a lucky little lioness,” I say softly, more to myself than Fish.

But, of course, Fish heard me. He returns my huge, beaming smile and whispers, “And I’m one lucky Goat.”

Epilogue

Alessandra

“Perfect!” I say to my grandson, Alfie, after he fingers a perfect C-chord on his brand-new ukulele.

I’m sitting on a blanket on the sand with Alfie in front of my house—the beach house I’ve shared with my family for the past thirty years. When our son, Winston, was born twenty-three years ago, Fish and I considered moving to a larger house. A place more like Dax and Violet’s sprawling compound on the cliffs of Malibu. In the end, though, we decided we liked our little home in Venice Beach too much to leave it. So, we added a second story—a spacious master suite with a massive bathroom and balcony—and that was that.