Page 136 of Beautiful Secrets

The dangerous look in her eyes fades. “I thought we were going to try and eat healthier food?”

“I got the veggie one,” I hazard through a toothy grin.

“You are incorrigible.” But she’s smiling, and a second later she nuzzles against me, as much as her belly will allow. When she gives me a squeeze, the ring box presses into my side. “What is this?” she asks, a bemused smile ghosting onto her mouth as she leans away from me and reaches for my suit jacket.

I sidestep her effortlessly. “I may or may not have started smoking again,” I lie.

I expect her to let out a disappointed sigh, or lecture me on how bad cigarettes are for a man in my condition. My condition being, of course, that I was shot in the chest. The bullet nicked my aorta. I almost died on the operating table—twice.

But thankfully for me, I had a gifted surgeon handling my procedure, and a strong enough constitution to recover.

And the will to live.

Of course, I was thinking about Mika the whole time. She’s what got me through the torturous physical therapy. I only endured it because she met me at the gym every single time I had an appointment.

All she did was sit silently on the sidelines, watching me sweat and swear.

But I’m convinced that’s the only reason I kept going.

Would have been so much easier just to give up. To fade away and turn into some weak old man at the age of thirty-five.

But there’s nothing more motivating than having the girl of your dreams—a girl you knew you were going to marry if you had to drag her to the altar with a shotgun—silently rooting for you.

That, or waiting for me to have a stroke and die.

I prefer to think she was rooting for me.

That same girl isn’t the kind to berate me for failing—I know that. But I guess I still can’t believe how lucky I am to have found her. Keep trying to convince myself that she’s a horrible person, as if she’s been playing pretend this whole time.

“You will just try again,” she says.

Simple as that.

You fall, you get up.

Same thing she would tell me at the gym when I was cursing my PT instructor.

Just try again.

I touch a hand to the box in my pocket, and quickly pull it away. I can’t have her suspicious. As it stands, I’m sure she has no idea that I ever want to propose to her again.

What we have right now, nearly three months after the day she put a gun to my head and told me to drive her to the airport, is a friends-with-benefits kind of relationship.

Except for the fact that she’s slowly been moving more and more of her stuff out of the Vasiliev estate and into my apartment.

It started with a toothbrush.

Now I’m not sure I even have enough room for the stuff she’s brought over here.

I think Mika has an online shopping addiction, but fuck it—don’t sweat the small stuff, right?

“So it’s official?” I ask as I head to the fridge to get her a root beer. “We’re roommates now?”

She laughs. Light, giddy.

It’s the best sound I’ve heard all fucking day.

“We are,” she says, nodding when I glance at her over my shoulder. Then she wrinkles her nose. “That is still fine?”