“I don’t have anything to wear,” she blurted.
“Huh?”
“To your gala. If it’s black tie, I definitely don’t have anything appropriate to wear.”
I chuckled at the frantic look on her face.
“So? Then I’ll just have to take you shopping tomorrow,” I said, watching her big eyes crinkle slowly into a smile.
“No. Don’t do that, Emmett…”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have the money to pay you back for a nice dress,” she frowned. I squinted at her.
“Have you never had a boyfriend buy you gifts before?”
“I… have. But small things,” she said in a small voice. “Not big things. Or expensive things.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve already established that your exes were idiots, so let’s make this the last time you compare me to them ever again, alright?” I laughed, eventually making her laugh too.
“Fine,” she said, her fingers playing with my hair as she looked me in the eyes. “It’s no contest anyway,” she added in a whisper before kissing me.
Fuck. This woman.
Every word out of her mouth had me even more hooked than before. She didn’t even know it, but she was addicting me to her so hard so fast that all I could think of was the next thing I wanted to do with her, the next thing I wanted to see with her. All I wanted was to see and hear every little smile and laugh that she had in her. Just that was enough to make me feel full – complete in a way I never thought I could feel.
Shit.
I shook my head as I pulled back to look into Aly’s gorgeous eyes.
If this was what it meant to get soft, then as usual, Julian was onto something.
26
ALY
My entire staff hawked me with big, dopey grins when Emmett came to pick me up after work the next evening.
He arrived a little prior to closing to grab a bite before our shopping trip, and since he sat at the raw bar, he chatted up Teddy, miraculously getting the poor kid to come out of his shell for literally the first time all summer.
“Poor Teddy. I don’t think he even knew how much this estrogen-fest of a restaurant was affecting him,” Evie snorted as she and I hung out with Hannah by the espresso machine.
“Yeah, he just needed a boy to talk to,” I giggled as Hannah finished making three macchiatos for us to sip on.
“Yeah, that’s not a boy though. That’s a man. That’s like, the Merriam-Webster definition of a man.”
“Really? So if I look in the dictionary, there’ll be a picture of Aly’s boyfriend?” Evie asked Hannah as I grinned awkwardly, trying to act unfazed by the word “boyfriend.” Yeah. Totally. So used to it, I nodded to myself.
I figured I’d try to fake it till I made it because I definitely didn’t want to go to Emmett’s fancy gala and blush every time he introduced me to someone. I knew well that I’d already feel out of my league and nervous there, so getting used to the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing would give me one less thing to fret about.
“Hey. So I have good news and bad news,” Evie said later when we were doing the closeout paperwork in the office.
“Hit me with the bad news first,” I said.
“Got it,” Evie nodded, rearranging her desk in a million unnecessary ways because that was what she did when she was trying to play off being nervous.
“Evie,” I snorted. “I already know that they canceled thei