“We have a couple bags here,” Shane says, reaching into the overhead bin, while I find myself watching him, my mind troubled by those shadows in his eyes. My eyes are not at all troubled by the stretch of his tan UFC T-shirt across his broad chest and the way his sleeve tugs higher with the flex of his biceps, displaying the tattoo of the eagle sitting on top of the lion on his right shoulder. It hits me then that beyond the meaning he’s shared with me about knowledge and force, it’s ultimately symbolic of him rising above his father, and even his family name. Something he did by separating himself from them and coming here, among many other things.
I consider his “trial run” comment again, regarding the prospect of life without Cody following us around, and it hits me that if Shane feels comfortable without security here, and not in Denver, our home, we have a problem. Maybe there’s danger in Denver he hasn’t shared with me, but more likely, I think, the very idea of Adrian Martina, and even his father, being a stone’s throw from us is never going to allow him peace. And that too is a problem we have to solve. I just need to find the right moment to dive into that dark psyche of his and take a long swim.
Shane reaches for my hand, drawing it into his. And just like that, he’s successfully wiped out my worry, a shiver racing up my spine that has nothing to do with my bare arms in my thin black V-neck T-shirt, and everything to do with his touch.
“Let the adventure begin,” he murmurs, kissing my knuckles.
I smile, seduced by the idea of an adventure with this man, and even more so by finally discovering part of him I know but have never fully realized. The eagle, not the lion. He helps me to my feet. I settle my purse on my arm and, with his urging, step into the aisle before him. His hand is instantly at my waist, and he is close, kissing my neck from behind before he whispers, “Your ass looks really good in those black jeans.” He follows that declaration by smacking my new pancake-plumped backside that he seems to love, or I’d have already started running every mile it will take to shed it.
Nevertheless, I yelp with the sting on my cheek that he’s intentionally created, and move toward the exit. Stepping to the doorway, I feel suffocated by the late June New York heat. “It’s like being back in Texas,” I say as Shane steps to my side.
“I don’t miss the heat,” he says, but there is this silent inference that he misses everything else, or something else I don’t try to name now, but I will, or rather he will, before we leave.
Side by side, we start down the ramp when a limo pulls forward. “That would be our car,” he says.
“A limo? We need a limo?”
“It’s your first time in New York,” he says. “It needs to be in style. And it has a big trunk for our bags. You packed a lot of shoes.”
“That was Jessica,” I say, leaving the steps. “I should never have let her help me pack. I didn’t even buy those shoes. She did with your credit card.”
“Which is why we’re going to go shopping while we’re here and you can choose your own clothes.” It turns out John is our driver, and he holds the back door open for us. “And I’m paying.”
“Shane—”
He arches a brow, and I become aware of John staring at us. I bite back my words and save them for inside the limo, sliding inside, the tan leather seats a box that lines the back of the vehicle. A bucket of champagne on ice is in the center. Shane joins me and John shuts us inside, a glass window sealed between us and the front of the vehicle.
“I don’t need you to buy everything for me,” I tell him.
He fills two glasses and hands one to me. “Save your money so if you ever get pissed and want to leave me, you and I both know you can.”
“We both know?”
“That’s right. It’s good for us to both know you can leave. Because you can. I just don’t want you to. Ever, Emily.”
My heart squeezes with the rough quality to his voice, and I’m not sure if he’s talking about fights and relationship troubles, or rather death. I’m not sure what to say, because telling him I want to be here won’t erase the real, festering root of that comment.
“I still want you to know that I don’t expect you to take care of me,” I say. “I never want you to feel like—”
“You want my money? Sweetheart, if you wanted money, you would have jumped on your stepfather’s bandwagon. He had money. I have money. I’ve told you this, and I worked damn hard for it, for us.”
“For you.”
“For my future, which you are.” His voice softens. “We share a life, Emily. I want to share all of it with you. I have never wanted that with anyone else. I love you, Emily.”
Emotion wells in my throat. “I love you too, Shane.”
He lifts his glass. “To our first of many travel adventures.”
I touch my glass to his. “To our first—of many?”
“Of many,” he says, clicking his glass to mine. “Where do you want to go next?”
“I think right now I just want to enjoy this trip, and your city, through your eyes.”
“Our city,” he corrects me again, “and I’ll learn to appreciate it all over again through your eyes.”
* * *
We spend the next two hours driving around Manhattan, sipping our champagne and talking, taking in everything from Times Square to Rockefeller Center and much more before we finally end at Shane’s apartment building, an all-glass high-rise across from Central Park. John opens the door for us and I step outside, staring up at the building, which has a central structure and two towers behind it.
Shane settles up with John, having a conversation about our bags and the doorman before he steps to my side. “The building on the right is residential. The building on the left has office complexes and shopping.” He guides me forward and greets the doorman, who seems to know him well, but Shane doesn’t seem eager to get drawn into a conversation. Shane palms him money to deliver our bags to the apartment, and I’m introduced to a security guard, who motions us inside. We step into the building, the tiles shiny gray with swirls, the ceilings high, the lights dangling every few feet, like stars in a dark sky.
A few minutes later I’m registered as a tenant, which is rather surreal, and Shane is holding my hand, leading me into an elevator. We enter, and he punches the twenty-eighth floor before pulling me and motioning to the back of the elevator. My brow furrows in confusion until we start moving and the wall is gone, and I realize that the car is all glass. I’m now staring across Central Park and the Manhattan skyline behind it, with its jutted rooftops of various heights and colors.
“This is amazing,” I say, glancing over at him. “Though if I were afraid of heights, I’d have face-planted into your shoulder.”
He laughs. “I’ve actually seen that a few times.”
“How long have you owned this apartment?”
“Five years.”
The elevator dings behind us and we rotate, exiting the car hand in hand as we hit the tiled walkway and cut right. “Here,” he says, of the double doors on the right, halting to punch in a code. He opens the door and motions me forward.
“Your real home,” I say, starting forward, but Shane catches my hand and turns me to him.
“I never called it home,” he says. “I never called any place home before you, so turn this place into something more than it is.”
I wonder if he’s trying to convince me or himself, but I don’t say that. Not yet. Not when he hasn’t been back here in months and can’t really know what returning will feel like and what it means to him. Right now he’s just thinking of me, which makes him pretty amazing, but that means I need to be amazing to him too. And no one else in his life is amazing to him besides Jessica, which only makes me love her more. So my reply is not words. I lean forward, hand on his heart, and I feel it thunder beneath my palm, telling me he’s more affected than he wants me, and himself, to realize.
I lean into him and push to my toes, pressing my lips to his. He cups my head in that familiar way he does, and his tongue strokes against
mine, a slow, sexy caress that ends too soon, leaving us both breathing just a little harder. Slowly, we ease apart, our eyes lingering the way our lips had, the connection broken only when I turn away and walk through the doorway, a dark wooden floor beneath my booted feet. Much like in our Denver apartment, I walk down a long hallway, but this one is narrower, the ceiling above curved, creating a tunneled effect, and when I exit, I gasp at the sights before me and around me.
I am standing in a stunning contemporary space that seems to go on forever both to my left and right, the décor done in grays and blues, with clean, simple shapes and lines that also manage to be elegant. Windows, not walls, encase the room, the design managing to create a feeling of being in the sky, floating on air, while two huge pillars split the living and dining areas. A staircase to the right follows windows upstairs, and one to the left heads to a lower level.
“What do you think?” Shane asks, stepping to my side.
“It makes the Denver apartment look uninteresting, and yet the Denver apartment isn’t uninteresting at all.” My gaze travels the skyline, the sun beginning to set, creating a halo effect above the buildings. “And I thought Denver was beautiful.”
“It is, but Manhattan’s skyline is its answer to the Rocky Mountains. Come,” he says, linking our fingers. “I want to show you my favorite part of the apartment.” He leads me to the stairs to our left, and my hand skims a stainless steel railing while steps of the same dark wood as the floor lead us to an office with a vaulted, completely glass ceiling that I am certain must be our destination.
But we don’t stop there.
He motions for me to walk up a narrow stairwell in the center of the room, and something about his energy has me excited to get to the top. I quickly move ahead of him and climb the narrow path, stepping into a cubbyhole of sorts, encased in glass, that fits only two cozy overstuffed chairs and a small table.
“My thinking room,” he says, joining me, his head nearly touching the glass ceiling. “And the reason I bought this apartment.” His fingers lace with mine and we step to the window, the sky now blue, orange, and yellow. “It’s like you’re on top of the world,” he says.
“I want to sit in this room with coffee and a book and stay for hours.”
“I’ve done that many times,” he says, turning to me, his hands settling on my waist. “Emily.”
“Shane,” I say, suddenly nervous and I don’t know why.
“When I thought of the way I wanted this weekend to happen, I knew we needed to be someplace that didn’t surround us with tragedy.”
“It feels different here, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It does. I knew it would, but I also knew you’d associate this place with my past, and I worried that you’d decide I would rather be living my old life, not my new life. So to be clear: my past made me the man I had to be to face what was waiting for me in Denver. It made me the man I needed to be when I met you. The man who I am right now. The man who fell in love with you. That’s why I wanted to do this here.”
“Do what? You’re scaring me.”
He laughs without humor. “Then this is really not going the way I planned, so let me just get to the point.” He goes down on his knee. “Marry me, Emily.”
Shock rolls through me. “What? I … Yes. No. Oh God. No. You can’t marry me.”
“I assure you I can and will. If you say yes. Let me rephrase: Will you marry me, Emily?”
“But I’m not Emily. I’m Reagan. What if the marriage license application exposes that somehow?”
He pushes to his feet and cups my face. “You are Emily, and I swear to you that one day, if you let me, I’m going to make sure you don’t react to everything with the fear you do now. Marry me, Emily.” He reaches to the table and then goes down on his knee again, opening a blue Tiffany’s box.
I gasp at the sight of a stunning heart-shaped diamond that glistens almost blue in the lights. “It’s incredible,” I whisper.
“This is where you say yes, sweetheart.”
I start crying and go down on my knees with him. “Yes.”
He reaches over and strokes tears from my cheeks. “Why are you crying? Please tell me it’s not fear. I promise you—”
“It’s not fear. These are happy tears, and don’t ask me to explain what happy tears are because I really don’t know. They just are what they are.”
“Then let’s let them exist with your ring on your finger.” He removes the ring from the velvet and sets the box aside before slipping the ring on my finger. “It’s a little big,” he says, “but we’ll size it.”
“It’s perfect and it’s not big.” I forget the ring and press my lips to his.
He lays us on the floor, and only then do I realize there is a fluffy, soft rug beneath us, while the stars and sky are above us. “Emily Brandon,” he says, his leg twining with mine. “I like the way that sounds.” He strokes hair from my face. “I love you, woman.”
“I love you too.” My fingers curl on his jaw. “I’ve never had anyone I trust like you. I’ve never had anyone I … trust. Trust says it all. You even told me when you wanted to kill Martina, when I know you knew how I’d react.”
“That wasn’t completely honorable. There was a part of me that wanted to scare you off if you couldn’t handle who I really am.”
“Good thing I know who you really are,” I say, “because you seem to think you’re your father’s son.”
His voice sobers. “I am my father’s son, Emily.”
“But you are also your own man. The one I love.”
He studies me for several beats, those shadows in his eyes still there, but when he kisses me, I taste the bad still haunting him, and I let him taste the bad that still haunts me. And that’s where I got it wrong in my journal. I thought we were too good to be true. But we aren’t. And I know this because when he strips me naked, and I strip him naked, it’s more than physical. We bare it all, and that makes me believe that maybe, just maybe, we can have it all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I wake the next morning in a massive four-poster bed, facing a wall of windows that are all electronically shaded, with Shane curled around me and a Tiffany’s engagement ring on my finger. Life is good, and I close my eyes, not quite ready to get up. It just feels too good to be right here, right now. I snuggle closer to Shane and allow myself to drift back to sleep. The next time I blink awake, the windows are no longer shaded and Shane is no longer in bed with me. I sit up straight and Shane is sitting next to me, fully dressed in a gray suit with a blue pinstripe and a navy-blue tie. “Why are you awake, dressed, and holding coffee while I’m in bed, in a robe, and not holding coffee?”
His lips curve. “The coffee is for you,” he says, offering it to me. “And I have some work I have to finish up, then I can focus on the fashion brand with you today.” He glances at his watch. “We have an hour before we need to leave to meet the Realtor to look at the proposed store location.” He reaches down and takes my hand, studies my ring, then without another word, stands up and leaves.
I watch him leave, and sigh with satisfaction at the realization that not only is he sexy, intelligent, and protective without being obnoxious, he’s going to be my husband. I sip from my cup approvingly and add: he also makes a really good cup of coffee. I carry it with me to the stunning window-framed bathroom, vowing to take a bath while looking out over the city. Because who doesn’t want to take a bath with a sweeping view of the city, and bubbles that might just be clouds?
Laughing at the silly idea that proves I’m a little giddy this morning, I enjoy another sip of my coffee, strip away my gown, and take a quick hot shower. My relaxed mood continues through the process of drying my hair and flat-ironing it to a sleek, shiny finish, and applying makeup in pale pinks. I head into the giant closet that’s the size of my bedroom back in Texas, or maybe actually bigger than my bedroom back in Texas, and open my suitcase, pulling out my choices for the day, and it’s then that my nerves kick in. I’m going to mee
t our new famous fashion designer in person for the first time today. What if he judges me incapable of running a fashion brand because my personal style is lacking?
I have three outfits with me, all of which Jessica chose when Shane sent her shopping for me, but they’re high-fashion brands, and beautiful. I decide on a light blue dress with a matching belt, nude hose and shoes, and once everything is on, I study myself in the mirror. What if light blue isn’t an approved New York fashion color? I strip it away and choose a black skirt and a black silk blouse, which means black shoes and hose, but as I inspect myself, I question black as a June color. The only thing I have left is the pale pink dress Shane really likes on me, but pink ages me young, and I’m not sure that works for my first meeting with someone reporting to me.
“Problem?”
I rotate to find Shane leaning against the doorway while I stand in the center of the closet in a black bra, panties, and black thigh-highs. All of which he gives a wicked hot inspection, and I force myself to ignore the wicked hot heat it stirs in me in response.
“I want to look like I know fashion and that I know my job. I’m not sure which of my three outfits to wear.”
“Which is your favorite?”
“The pink.”
“Then wear the pink and own it like you would a courtroom.” He walks to me and cups my face. “You’re the boss,” he says. “Remember that. That’s an order.” He then plants a kiss on me, releases me, and exits the closet.
“I’m the boss but that’s an order?” I call after him, but I’ve already absorbed his message and I’m reaching for the pink dress. He’s right. I am the boss, and I have to own this job the way I would have a courtroom.
* * *
The rest of the day is incredible, both professionally and personally. The retail location is perfect, and we sign a lease. Since it’s right across from Tiffany’s, Shane and I stop inside. One of the Tiffany’s employees adds some sort of spacer to my ring, and it now fits perfectly. Afterward, we head to the fashion district and spend the rest of the day with our new designer, mapping out plans, staffing, and setting a launch date of spring. About an hour into our meetings, the designer pushes to move manufacturing to New York, but Shane nixes that idea; based on labor and real estate operational costs, we’ve already purchased a Castle Rock, Colorado, production facility as part of our acquisition. Even so, it’s still quite clear that much of the business side of things will be rooted in New York and I’ll have to travel back and forth between there and Colorado.