Page 15 of The Angel and the Agent

“Why do you hate your birthday, Ethan?” Maggie asked, snagging a piece of bread from the basket beside him. Shecraned her neck, looking inside it. “Hey, real butter. Thisisa good restaurant.”

“I don’t know. It never lived up to the hype, you know? When I was a kid, I would have these big fantasies about how it was going to be, that something unexpected and amazing would happen, but then it would be another day. Eventually I stopped wanting it to be anything different,” Ethan said.

Maggie blinked at him and gave him the piece of bread she’d just buttered. “You might need this more than I do.”

“That sounded more pathetic than I intended,” he said, but he accepted the bread and ate it. “Why do you guys like birthdays so much?”

“Because there were four of us, and it was hard to get individual time. Birthdays were our day, the one time a year it was all about us and no one else. We got to feel special and like the center of the universe,” Amelia said.

“I was going to say because we got cake,” Maggie added. “Plus Johnny loves birthdays. It doesn’t even have to be his birthday, he gets so excited over everyone’s birthday you can’t help but catch the mood. You end up wanting to have a fun, good birthday for him, so you don’t let him down.”

“Plus we got cake,” Amelia seconded, and the sisters bumped fists. The waitress arrived then. They ordered and spent time talking while they waited for their food to arrive. It was a fun, pleasant night, and Ethan was enjoying himself, but he was distracted by Amelia, by her nearness and scent. He was supposed to be becoming immune to her. The more he saw her, the less he should want to see her. That was how it had always worked with women before. He found flaws and ran away quickly. But he couldn’t run away from her. She was his friend’s sister, and she had become his friend, too. And so she lingered in his circle, tantalizingly close yet completely out of reach. It wasmaddening that when he finally developed lingering interest in a woman, she was completely off limits.

It worked to his advantage that she was an expressive speaker, using her hands and body to make a point. Every time she leaned forward or moved back, she brushed his leg, his arm, his thigh. Once he might have believed she made the contact on purpose as a secret signal of her interest. Now he knew better. She had no idea how many times she bumped and brushed him, how closely her chair was aligned with his.

After supper, Maggie presented him with a cake. “Amelia baked it, and I decorated it,” she said. It was leaning, sliding, and a little lumpy, but Ethan was deeply touched by their thoughtfulness.

“She’s better at decorating than I am,” Amelia confessed.

“If Maggie’s better at decorating, your cakes must be,” Ridge began, but then caught sight of Maggie’s expression.

“What, husband? Amelia’s cakes must be what?” she prompted.

“Equally delightful and full of love,” he said, kissing her cheek.

“Nice save, LT,” Ethan said with full admiration. “Thank you for this. And thank you for not bringing candle…oh, I spoke too soon.” Amelia opened her purse, pulled out number two and eight candles, and stuck them on the cake. She also removed matches and held them aloft, paused.

“Before we light, you have to make a wish, and before you make a wish, you have to tell us what you wanted to have happen when you were little that never did,” she commanded.

“I don’t know, really. Something spectacular and amazing, I guess,” he said. He rested his arm on the back of her chair as he spoke, using the opportunity to gaze at her face, her warm brown eyes, her cute, slightly upturned nose, her full, perfect mouth. He was fairly certain he knew what his wish would be.

“Okay, now you may blow out your candles.” She lit his candles and sat back while he blew them. Almost immediately when he was finished, the man directly behind him stood up and began to loudly sing.

“One day more, another day another birthday gone, how could this one day last so long,” and when he was finished another person stood to add to the song, and then another and then the entire line of people waiting to get inside joined in, singing a song fromLes Miserables,but with different words. Finally, after his initial shock wore off, Ethan realized that not only was it a flash mob, but it was a flash mob forhim, and they were singing about his birthday.

He sat frozen and mortified, blushing for what had to be the first time in his adult life. At the same time, he was oddly thrilled. They had done this for him, had planned and carried out an elaborate birthday surprise involving thirty people, some of whom had been sitting and dining as long as they had.

The song finished and everyone applauded—not just the singers, but him. “Wow,” he said. “So much wow. I was pantsed during the final football game my senior year in front of a stadium of five hundred people, including my grandma. And I think I was less embarrassed then than I was just now. But at the same time that was amazing, so thank you.” Under the table, he squeezed Amelia’s knee. As much as Maggie also loved birthdays, he knew Amelia had been responsible for the whole evening. It had her fingerprints all over it. She covered his hand, gave it a squeeze, and let go. He followed suit and removed his hand, pressing it to his own leg to keep it from straying back to her.

“So, seeing as how you guys are our closest friend and our closest family, respectively, we have an announcement, and we wanted you to be the first to know,” Maggie began.

“You’re pregnant,” Ethan blurted.

“Are you insane? We just got married, bite your tongue. No, we’re getting a puppy.” She clapped her hands together excitedly.

“No way,” Amelia replied, clapping her hands in the exact same gesture. “What kind?”

“We’re getting him from a rescue, so they can’t say for certain, but he looks mostly Dane,” Maggie said.

“Although they said he probably has some mastiff in him, so he has the potential to be even bigger than a regular Dane,” Ridge added with a sarcastic thumb’s up.

“I’m going to take a few days off until he gets settled. Ideally, I’d become a stay-at-home mom now, but financially I don’t think we’re there yet,” Maggie said.

“Maybe that will happen when we have an actual child,” Ridge said.

“Just because he’s adopted doesn’t make him any less our child,” Maggie argued.

“But the fact that he’s not human does,” Ridge said.

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