Page 136 of The Marriage Clause

It's already in the kiss.

In the way he holds me after.

In the way he falls asleep on the jet for the first time I've ever seen, with my head on his chest and his heartbeat steady under my ear.

I stay awake a little longer.

Watching Paris disappear behind us.

Thinking about a man who doesn't do birthdays because no one ever made them worth celebrating.

Thinking about how badly I want to be the person who changes that.

Thinking about the word I keep circling without saying.

The one that starts with L.

The one I can’t walk around.

I close my eyes and let the jet carry us home.

Chapter Twenty-One

EVERETT

She's still asleep.

I'm standing barefoot in the kitchen in sweats with no shirt on, unwrapping room service plates with my hands, trying to remember how much sugar goes in her coffee.

I woke up an hour ago with her on my chest. Her hand over my heart like she'd placed it there deliberately. Her breathing slow and even. I stayed longer than I should have—sixty-two minutes of Mediterranean light sliding across the ceiling before my body couldn't take the stillness anymore and I moved to the kitchen. Because staying too long like that might cause me to get used to it. Getting used to Aria sleeping on me is the kind of thing I need to be careful of wanting.

Pierre's team sent the preliminary deal framework at three a.m. Paris time. The Vancouver stadium purchase is unresolved. Everly has texted me six times about the Foundation gala—the sixth one just a question mark, which from Everly, is a threat.

I haven't looked at any of it.

Why? Because I'm currently standing in the kitchen on my honeymoon, trying to remember how my wife takes her coffee.

Her father said four sugars.

Four sugars and an inch of cream. More cream than any reasonable person would use, but Aria isn't any reasonable person. It's been almost seven months since I walked into my new Hawkeyes office and saw the assistant I'd already planned to let go. Almost seven months of my brain running some background process that catalogs every detail about her and refuses to delete any of them.

Remembering details isn't unusual for me. Wanting to remember them is.

I couldn't tell you how Sienna takes her coffee—or quite frankly if she drinks the stuff at all. The very few women before her were merely flings. One-night stands, and to be fair, not many of those either.

Aria's different. I can't stop myself from absorbing anything she tells me. There's nothing about her that I've forgotten. Like how she slips her heels off under her desk after two p.m. though she thinks I don't know. Or how she puts her index fingers on her lips when she's focusing really hard on something. Or how her eyebrows raise just slightly before I take my first sip of coffee—optimism that she's finally cracked the code on my preferences.

Aria's father told me at the rehearsal dinner like he was handing me a small, private piece of his daughter and trusting me to use it well.

I've been holding it since then. Waiting for the right morning.

This one.

I pour the coffee. Four sugars, then cream until it's the color of beach sand. Mine, more like the color of a brown paper bag, because I am who I am.

I set the cup on the counter and go back to plating: eggs, fruit, and pastries. They're all still warm from the resort kitchen. I ordered it thirty minutes ago and answered the door in my sweats and the woman who delivered it looked at my chest and then at my face and then at my chest again and I closed the door before the interaction could become more uncomfortable for either of us.

The floor creaks from the bedroom.