Page 105 of The Deals We Make

It stings a little that she lets my bold comment slide. “Sure.”

“I’m paraphrasing a little, but she said that a time would come where I’m your old lady and I’d regret not being with them if I didn’t go wedding dress shopping with her.”

I huff at that. “Sounds like Rae. She’s a romantic.”

Calista takesmyhand and places it overherheart. “But she also said one day you’d be able to explain why me being your old lady was so important to you. Would you explain it to me now?”

I glance up at the sky. “A man’s only as good as the world he creates for himself, the way he loves and protects and serves his family, the way he honors his friends, the way he takes care of them all. ‘Property’ might be an old-school way of expressing it, but as my old lady, you’d be the most important person I’d have the honor of taking care of. And this world can be dangerous, but I know every single man in there would take a bullet to protect you too. I fucking love you, Calista. I’ll take you any way I can get you. And if that means I can’t have this version of the life I’ve built for myself, I’ll build another. You might need to give me time to adjust. But you’ll have all of me, I promise.”

“You want to know what else Rae said?”

“No, I fucking don’t. Because I just laid out my fucking heart to you and told you I love you. Don’t dismiss it.”

“I’m not, but you do want to hear what else Rae said. Trust me. There’s a point to it all. She said I’m probably the smartest old lady, which, honestly, I’d have a hard time arguing with. But only when it comes to business building, because I’d argue Rae is smarter in the way she understands people and Catalina is more lethal.”

“Babe,” I say, putting my hand around her throat, rubbing my thumb up and down her neck. “Can you get to your fucking point?”

She smiles up at me, eyes wide. “She said she’d imagine I would consider expansion. Two offices. East and west. And that given that I have the experience of building a business from theground up, I would have to promote the brightest and sharpest of my existing people to run the west and report to me.”

Hope tentatively flickers in my chest. I don’t want to assume what I think she’s saying. “You’ll stay?”

“I replied that we weren’t ready to expand.”

That flicker is doused. “Oh.”

“Do you want to know what else Rae said?”

“Fuck, no. If I wanted to know what Rae said, I would have brought her out with us. I want to know what you said. If you fucking love me too?”

“Rae asked if the company wasn’t ready, or I wasn’t. And it was me.Iwasn’t ready. It felt like too big a step. Too scary, maybe, to give up a piece of my baby, my heart, that I built from the ground up. The business that has been my life and my everything. But the truth is, the business is ready. And I’m ready. I’m going to stay here, with you, if that’s okay. I mean, I’ll have to travel back to the?—”

I crush my lips to hers. “Yes.”

“Wait, but there’s?—”

Another kiss.

She shoves her hands against my chest. “Vex, but we?—”

Another kiss.

And another.

“You’re my fucking everything, Calista. Whatever it takes for you to be here, we’ll make it work.”

“I’ll have to go back every month for a week or so.”

She feels so fucking good in my arms that she could say she was going to the fucking moon, and I’d be fine with it. “We’ll time it to when I go on runs, if we can.”

“Should I find my own place when I move so we can?—?”

“Shut up, Calista. For a smart girl, you can be really dumb sometimes. You’ll move in with me.”

She grins. “What if things change with Mom? I just hired an amazing live-in carer to help, but there may be times when Mom needs to live with us.”

“That’s just life, babe. Rough with the smooth. Could be my folks too. We deal with it together. That’s the only thing I care about.” I glance around the courtyard. “One last question. The truth is safe with me. Are you attempting to hack the Cosa Nostra?”

The look of genuine confusion on her face reassures me. “God. No. Who wants a horse’s head in their bed? Wait, why are you asking?”