Page 77 of Grump Hard

Let Elliot say yes. Please let him say yes.

“Hey you, that was one hell of a ceremony,” a familiar voice rumbles from behind me.

My heart surges into my throat.

Elliot.

As if summoned by a Christmas wish…

I turn to see him standing a few feet away by the last of the still-flickering torches in a dark-green suit that fits like sin, hair slicked, cheeks pink from the cold. If he weren’t my best friend, I would have tried to climb him like a tree long ago. But he used to be a world-class flirt with a minor in sorority studies, and I was smart enough to protect the one relationship I never wanted to lose.

I’m thirty-four now.

Older, wiser, and smart enough to know that sex doesn’t always have to mean the end of a friendship.

Right?

“You okay?” he asks, a faint frown creasing his brow. “You look a little…sad. Or something.”

I shake my head. “Not sad, just thoughtful. Weddings always make me think, you know?”

Mostly, they make me think about how I’m nowhere close to getting married or finding a man to father the baby I’m running out of time to conceive. I’m not getting any younger and fertility issues will complicate this journey more for me than the average woman in her mid-thirties.

Elliot nods. “Yeah, I get that. Time is going by so fast, isn’t it? It seems like just yesterday, we were sixteen, stealing beer from the cooler at your dad’s third wedding and getting drunk in the barn.”

I smile. “I was so sick the next day.”

“So sick,” he agrees. “Let’s keep it more respectable tonight, all right?”

“For sure,” I agree, arching a brow. “But not too respectable.”

He laughs as he wraps an arm around my shoulders. “Absolutely not.”

I’m glad he’s on board. It will be much easier to say the things I need to say if we’re both a little tipsy. Because as soon as the speeches end and the band plays a slow song?

Well, I’m going to ask Elliot Ratcliffe to be the father of my baby.

I might even ask him to start trying…tonight.