Page 109 of Bearly Out Loud

Below that, Suki: one word.Good.

Nari laughed. The sound carried off the rooftop and into the city—Manhattan at night, warm spring, a sky that wouldn’t go dark because the buildings wouldn’t let it. She leaned against him. His arms closed around her. The ring caught between their bodies, warm against his chest where her hand lay flat over his heartbeat.

“Your family is texting.”

“Our family.”

“You said that before. When you showed me the sketches.”

“I meant it then. I mean it now.”

She tilted her face up. The silver crescent at her neck glowed in the string light. Her eyes were wet and bright and full of the same ferocious warmth that had drawn him across a pane of glass and into a recording booth and onto a studio floor and through every fight and crisis and midnight and dawn that had brought them here, to a rooftop where bees made honey and a bear made bread and a woman with the loudest voice in every room had said yes at a volume that scattered pigeons.

“Dojin.”

“Hmm.”

“The bees are going to be in the wedding photos.”

“The bees were here first. They have seniority.”

“I’m registering a formal objection to being outranked by insects at my own wedding.”

“Noted. Overruled.”

“Overruled by who?”

“The bees. They voted.”

She kissed him. Not a premiere kiss, not a red-carpet kiss, not the kind of kiss that existed for cameras. A rooftop kiss. A barefoot, ring-on-her-finger, bees-as-witnesses, engagement-on-a-garden-where-their-whole-story-grew kiss. Her voice hummed against his mouth. The mark between them pulsed warm and steady and sure.

Below them, the den kitchen was filling with bears. Reo was cutting cake. Takumi was on his way with champagne and a playlist he’d titledBear Daddy’s Big Daybecause he was Takumi and nothing was sacred. Colette was calling Gerri Wilder. Stellan was sitting in the kitchen with a coffee, nodding once, satisfied.

Above them, the bees hummed.

The spring night was warm, and the city was bright, and the woman in his arms was saying his name in the voice that had changed everything, and Dojin Keiser—alpha, builder,beekeeper, the man who had learned that the best thing he’d ever produce was a life loud enough for two—held her close and let the rooftop hold them both.

EPILOGUE

ANOTHER ONE DOWN

The Matchmaker’s Book Club had never finished a book.

This was, Gerri reflected, entirely by design. The books were props—beautiful ones, leather-bound and selected for spine aesthetics, arranged on the parlor table of the Wixx brownstone between a tray of French pastries and a ceramic pot of matcha that Suki refreshed with the timing of a Swiss clock. No one had read the selected title. No one would. The books existed to give the gathering a name that sounded respectable when husbands asked and harmless when press inquired, and beneath that respectable, harmless name operated the most effective romantic intelligence network on the eastern seaboard.

Gerri loved this about the club. She loved all of it—the women, the gossip, the pastries, the quiet ferocity with which a roomful of powerful mothers pursued happiness for their children. But mostly she loved the brownstone. The shift from the Plaza Hotel events of last year to Suki’s home marked an evolution: these women were no longer acquaintances gathered around a matchmaker. They were friends. Friends who happened to control a combined net worth that could purchasea small country and who spent Thursday evenings plotting love lives instead of acquisitions.

She stood at the parlor window, lemon cookie in hand, watching the room fill.

Suki moved between guests with the teapot, dispensing matcha and silence in equal measure. She wore a charcoal cardigan over a white blouse, Hideo’s ring on its chain catching light at her throat, and her expression carried a benevolence Gerri had never seen before—as though the engagement had loosened a knot five years in the making.

Colette arrived with a tower of pastries and an energy level that had not dropped below euphoric since the proposal. She wore emerald tonight—a jewel-toned blouse with sleeves that billowed when she gestured, which was constantly—and she set the pastry tower on the table with the solemnity of a woman presenting a doctoral thesis.

“Pain au chocolat,” she announced to the room. “Almond croissants. Financiers with Dojin’s honey.” She paused for effect. “The honey is from therooftop. Where theproposalhappened. Among thebees.” Her eyes swept the room, daring anyone to not find this unbearably romantic.

Suki poured Colette’s matcha without looking up. “You’ve mentioned the bees.”

“The bees have been promoted to family. Motion carried. No dissent accepted.”