“God, I love your kisses. I would almost pay for those,” I joked.
“Well, you can start with that piano you promised me,” she whispered.
I grinned and tweaked her nose. “I'll buy you a warehouse full of pianos if you keep kissing me like that.”
“Deal.”
EPILOGUE
Nalia
“Come on, come on, where the heck is that dress?” I muttered. I tore into my closet, and eventually managed to find the little, black dress I had been looking for in the back behind my winter clothes. Crazy place for it to be, but it didn’t matter. If I didn’t hurry up, I was going to be late. Not that it was a new concept.
Throwing it on, I pulled all of the curlers from my hair and gave it a fluff, glad that I had already done my makeup. Tonight was extremely important, and I didn’t want any part of it or me to be out of place.
In the middle of all the hubbub, the doorbell rang. I rushed barefoot to it, throwing open the door to find my brother waiting impatiently in the doorway. “I’m running behind.”
“Tell me what else is new,” Jackson grumbled as he walked in, Grace was right behind him. “That’s why I picked you up last, sis.”
I rolled my eyes at him, a little too melodramatically for his liking, although Grace let out a chuckle.
“I couldn’t find my dress,” I shot back, picking up the small studs that Owen had given me for our first Christmas together. The thought made me smile, set my heart aching to see him, and sent my pulse racing.
It was rare that we spent more than a day apart, but he had been working so hard on tonight’s event that I had stayed largely out of his way for the better part of two days. He had been working feverishly to make sure the event would go off without a hitch. Besides, my apartment needed to be packed up, hence the reason I couldn’t find anything. Half of the place was already in boxes, and the other half was scattered in piles and stacks and general mountains of disorder.
I was moving in with Owen at the end of the week, a date which would mark one year of happiness for us. He had popped the question about moving in to me over dinner just a week prior, and since I already spent the majority of my time at his place anyway there didn't really seem to be any reason to continue to pay rent here.
“Come on, Nalia!” Grace shouted from the hallway, her tone bordering on agitated. Probably not because I was running behind as much as she was having to listen to Jackson go on about me running behind. When it came to Jackson, she had a rather short fuse and her moods could switch in a blink. Plus, she was ready to go. For some reason, she was more excited than I would have thought for tonight’s event. We were all excited, though.
I had cried like a baby when Owen had casually mentioned a few months before that he was putting on a black tie charity event for the local orphanage. After growing up in and out of orphanages, I had a heart for helping in that area and there were a great deal of kids growing up like I had who were going to benefit from his generosity.
The thought of my own past and the fact that he was so dedicated to helping people who were going through such hardships really made my heart swell with both pride and love. It made me even more proud to call him mine, and ever so grateful to have someone like him in my life. I wasn't sure what I'd done to deserve someone as kind and generous as Owen but, whatever it was, I thanked God for it.
Finding my shoes, I slipped them on and grabbed my purse, adjusting my dress as I clacked down the hall until I stood before them. “How do I look?”
“Like a woman who’s making me late,” Jackson jabbed, rolling his eyes. “Come on, seriously, we are going to be late if we don't get a move on. C'mon, hustle! Let's go, let's go!”
I socked him in the shoulder as we walked out to his car. “No need to be such a grouch! We'll get there on time, take a pill. Besides, you know I’m not going to be late for Owen’s big event, as hard as he’s been working on this. He's been so stressed about every detail of this event being right for, well, for a long time now. It's really taken it out of him.”
“I’m sure you can provide him with some extra special relief,” Grace giggled from the front passenger seat eliciting a loud groan from Jackson. He had finally come around to the fact that Owen and I were a couple, but there were times I still thought my brother felt like it was going to fall apart at any moment.
Thankfully, he and Owen got along pretty well now, and I knew it was only a matter of time before my brother finally got used to the fact that I had, in fact, wrangled the wild rock star and not only locked him down, but domesticated him, as well. He'd never believed that such a thing could have been possible, but there I was – there we were.
“Do you think the mayor will come tonight?” Grace asked as she checked her reflection in the visor mirror, making sure that everything was perfectly in place and that her makeup looked as good as it had when she had left her house. “I honestly can’t believe I’m attending this event,” she said, sounding overly excited, almost like a middle school girl going to a high school party.
I eyed my friend, wondering why she was so enthusiastic. While I was blown away by some of the names that were going to be present, Grace had been in the limelight for so long that I just a
ssumed she knew most everyone and that she’d grown used to attending events like this. Surely once you'd been to enough of these things, you'd get over them and perhaps even begin to see them as something of a chore, right? But there she was, acting like a girl heading to her first prom.
Unlike Grace, I no longer felt the need to be famous. Once upon a time, I thought that if I got myself out there that all of my dreams would come true – but recently I had come to realize that I already had everything I needed. Owen was so much more than I could have ever imagined or wished for, and I couldn’t wait to see what else our lives would hold for the future. Now that his touring days were behind him, he had really delved into his record label, signing some new talent that, in my opinion, was going to make him a great deal of money. The sky was the limit for the future.
“Wow. I don’t think the orphanage has ever looked so good,” I remarked as we pulled into the parking area.
I gazed up at the brick building with pride, admiring some of the changes that had been made thanks to my new foundation — the one I was funding with sales from my songs.
It wasn’t much yet, but I wanted to do what I could and I wanted the children that stayed there to think of this place as a home, not a jail or a place of purgatory. It had to be, above all, a place in which they could feel safe and wanted. With Owen’s help, I had started to oversee some renovations to the building and land, changes that I was really proud of. Tonight’s fundraiser would hopefully allow me to expand and help other orphanages as well.
I focused on the spotlight shining brightly on the name of the building as, below it, elegantly clad men and women ambled through the doors, heading through to the gymnasium where the event was being held. Owen and I had gone back and forth on where to hold the event. In the end, we had both finally decided that having it here where the attendees could see where their money was going was the most sensible option.