Page 91 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

For a long moment, Maya just stared at me, her hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes bright with tears that hadn't quite decided whether to fall yet.

"You planned a proposal around a criminal confession," she finally said, half-laughing, half-crying. "Only you would find a way to make 'I once vandalized your family's business' into the most romantic speech I've ever heard."

"Is that a yes? Because my knee is doing something concerning on this gravel, and I'd love clarification before it becomes a medical issue."

"Yes. Obviously yes. Completely, ridiculously yes." She pulled me up, kissing me before I'd even fully processed the greatestword I'd heard in my entire life. "You absolute disaster. You beautiful, chaotic, occasionally disbarred disaster. Yes."

I slid the ring onto her finger, my hands shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the climb up here, and kissed her again, the overlook and the ocean and twenty years of history all folding into this one perfect, ordinary-extraordinary moment.

"For the record," Maya said against my mouth, "I would have said yes even without the beautiful speech about building versus destroying. I'd have said yes if you'd just handed me a ring wrapped in a to-go bag from the bakery."

"Noted for our anniversary gifts."

"I'm serious. I fell in love with you exactly as you are, Ethan Caldwell—including the parts where you're a walking legal disaster who apparently cannot stop confessing crimes at romantic moments."

"It's a very specific skill set."

"It's extremely specific, yes." She laughed, wiping her eyes, looking down at the ring like she still couldn't quite believe it was real. "My mother is going to be insufferable about this. She's already planning a wedding in her head, I guarantee it, and we haven't even told anyone yet."

"Tessa's going to be worse. She'll probably want to write the proposal into her book."

"She absolutely will, and you'll pretend to be annoyed about it, and secretly you'll love that some version of this moment gets to live forever in print." Maya pulled me close again, resting her forehead against mine, the exact gesture we'd shared on this same island a hundred times over the last six months. "I love you. Completely, chaotically, ironclad-legal-document-level love you."

"I love you too. Building instead of destroying, for the rest of our lives."

"Together," she added, the word we'd claimed as ours somewhere back in the wreckage of courtroom battles and lawsuit chaos.

"Together," I agreed.

We stood on that overlook for a long time after, watching the afternoon light shift over the water, neither of us in any hurry to leave. Somewhere down the hill, Honey & Hearth was waiting—full of Manuel's legacy, five generations of tradition, and now, apparently, one very committed lawyer who'd spent twenty years learning exactly what it meant to build something worth keeping.

I'd come back to this island once as someone sent to destroy what mattered most to Maya. I was leaving this overlook as someone who'd finally, fully earned the right to help protect it.

Manuel would have approved. I was almost certain of that.

Almost, and completely certain, all at once—which felt like exactly the right way to feel about everything that had happened since I walked back through that bakery door six months ago.

Chapter thirty-one

A Beautiful Kind of Chaos

Maya

"Absolutely not," my mother said, for what I believed was the fourth time in this single phone call, though I'd honestly lost count somewhere around the venue discussion. "A wedding at the bakery is charming in theory, querida, but where exactly do you plan on putting one hundred and fifty guests? Between the display cases?"

"We were thinking closer to eighty guests, Mãe, and we'd close the bakery for the day, clear out the front room, set up tables outside along the water—"

"And if it rains? This is the Pacific Northwest. It rains constantly. You cannot gamble your wedding day on Island weather."

"We'll have a tent."

"A tent." She said the word like I'd suggested holding the ceremony in a parking lot. "Maya, you deserve a real venue. Something elegant. I saw a beautiful vineyard outside Woodinville that does weddings—"

"I don't want a vineyard, Mãe. I want my grandfather's bakery. The place where he taught Ethan everything about starting over. The place where we actually fell in love, underneath all the fake dating and lawsuits." I switched my phone to speaker so I could keep icing the anniversary cake I was making for the Hendersons while simultaneously fighting my mother about venue logistics, which felt like an appropriately chaotic metaphor for my entire relationship with Ethan. "It's not negotiable. Honey & Hearth is the venue."

There was a long pause on the line, the kind that usually meant my mother was recalibrating her argument strategy.

"Fine," she said finally. "But I'm hiring a professional to handle the tent situation, and you're not arguing about it."