Page 82 of Irresistibly Dangerous

She’s mine. My wife, my lover, my future, and my past. No more dancing around this, no more fighting—at least not without the good kind of making-up—and no more pretending it’s not as real as it gets.

No matter what.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Georgia has been dancing around the kitchen for the last two hours, baking what I believe to be sugar cookies, wearing one of my shirts, knee-high socks, and nothing else, all the while listening to Christmas music. The next song comes on, and Alice gives a bark.

“I know,” Georgia exclaims, doing a little shimmy to the upbeat, croony voice of whoever is singing. “This is one of my favorites too.”

I groan as I lift my gaze away from my laptop. I’ve been sitting at the breakfast bar watching her while needing to get work done. I could go to my office. I could lock myself away. But the view is just too damn good for me to even attempt to put one foot in front of the other. Over in the great room, I have the television on mute as I casually watch the football games. Asher is playing in the four o’clock game, and he already texted me this morning to tell me that he’ll miss me at the game.

During football season, I do try to go to as many of his home games as I can, but between Georgia and the snow, that didn’t happen this week.

Still… “Georgia, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”

She throws me a menacing glare. “Uh, next week is, and it’s a blizzard outside,” she states in such a way that suggests this is standard blizzard protocol.

“So? It’s Maine. A blizzard isn’t exactly uncommon up here. We get them through April.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “April?!”

I shrug. “Sometimes, yeah.”

She shakes her head. “How am I going to deal with that?”

That gives me a moment of pause. Because while I chose Maine for several reasons, she didn’t. She is a self-admitted city girl. “Would you rather move back to Boston?”

She freezes and does a swivel in her socks to fully face me. “But you live here.”

I nod, watching her carefully.

She tilts her head. “I can’t tell if you’re asking if I want to move back to Boston without you or if you’re offering to move with me back to Boston. Sometimes your short answers, silent demeanor, and stoic expressions make it difficult to glean your full meaning.”

My lips twitch. “You’re not living anywhere I’m not.”

“Okayyy.” She drags out the Y sound. “So, you’re offering to move there?”

I shrug and she rolls her eyes.

“No wonder you’ve been single since me. If you weren’t a totally hot nerd and didn’t know how to fuck like a porn star, women would never bother with you.”

I bark out a laugh.

“Women talk too much.”

“It’s so true. We do. But in answer to your question, I don’t know.”

“Women do that too. Give vague responses.”

“Agreed.”

The timer goes off on the oven, and Georgia immediately springs into action, throwing on her oven mitts and pulling out the third tray of sugar cookies. How or when we’ll ever eat all of these, I have no idea. She removes them from the tray, and places them with care onto the cooling rack so she can frost them later like she did the first two batches.

Once that’s done, she turns back to me. “Do I have to decide now?”

“No,” I tell her. “Of course not. I just didn’t want you to think we had to stay here indefinitely if it’s not where your heart is. We can stay or go or do both, however or whenever you like.”

She gives me a flirty smile. “You’re going to make me wet again with talk like that.”

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