Page 46 of Embracing the Change

I’d been waiting for him, so, no. I hadn’t seen it yet either.

“Dru loves it,” he kept muttering before he put more eggs in his mouth.

I knew she did. She’d rhapsodized about it for half an hour the first time I saw her after she’d gone to a showing.

I knew from what I’d heard, I’d love it too.

And the killer of it all, one of the many things that destroyed me when it came to Jamie, was that I knew Jamie was the kind of man who was going to love it too.

CHAPTER 6

BADGLEY MISCHKA

Nora

Iwas fully dressed for the evening meal, it was time to leave my cabin to join Jamie for cocktails…

And I was pacing the floor, phone in hand, panicking.

It was our third night on board.

Jamie and I had breakfasted together the last two mornings.

Jamie and I had watched Barbie after our first breakfast (we’d both liked it, and after talking about it for some time, I could say that Jamie liked it even more than I did), and we’d returned to the screening room to watch Rear Window after dinner that evening.

Jamie and I had sat in the hot tub that first afternoon (yes, his chest was all it promised it would be in clothes…and then some—also yes, it was torture sitting in a hot tub with that man and his amazing body). And we lazed in the aft lounge the second afternoon, Jamie alternately reading and working, me catching up on the editions of Vanity Fair I’d brought along with me.

Jamie had teasingly accused me of being a witch after I made him a French martini during cocktail hour last night, something he’d liked so much, he requested I make him another one before we headed in to view Rear Window.

We did not talk about the kiss.

We did not talk about the limits of our relationship.

We did not talk about the words we’d hurled at each other.

We did not talk further about Roland.

We absolutely did not talk about his assertions during breakfast that first morning.

We relaxed. We chatted about my children. We made a bet on the gender of Judge and Chloe’s baby (they didn’t want to know, so no one knew—and by the way, I said boy, Jamie said girl). We shared our mutual frustration that Dru wanted to “go it alone” and therefore was refusing Jamie’s financial assistance, and as such, she had two roommates, and they were living in a small apartment in Queens. We discussed how we both knew the tea that Ned had a woman, but he hadn’t shared this information with either of his daughters. We then discussed the reasons we thought Ned had not disclosed this information. We got on Jamie’s laptop and ordered Alex and Rix’s wedding present together.

I made Jamie laugh. He made me smile.

And through all this, I woke up to what was happening and started panicking because…

I was his damned girlfriend.

No, I was more.

We were more.

We just were that without sex.

I was his (he said so his damned self!).

He was mine.

I loved him.

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