Page 91 of A Billion Dollar Romance
Edie Martin.
My vision blurred.
“I had a crush on my student. She gave me a fake name at a bar, and I took her home with me. I asked her to be my fake fiancée, and I fell in love with her. Desperately, totally,romance-novelin love.”
The lump in my throat was so big I couldn’t swallow back my tears. I let them fall.
“And now, I want her to be my wife.”
I reached up, grasping the manuscript with my own shaking hands, and he released it.
“I love you, Edie,” he said, and I looked up from where our names were written on the cover of our story to see myself reflected in his gold-green eyes. “I need you to tell me. How doesourstory end?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking between them as my heart raced. His brows twitched together a fraction. “But I know how it starts.”
The smile I couldn’t hold back any longer crept over my face, and he pulled me into his embrace, his lips warm and soft on mine in the chill air of the mountain.
“I love you, James,” I murmured as I broke the kiss, our foreheads pressed together tightly. My manuscript was tight in my left hand, and my right came up to twist into his hair again, dragging him back down to me. He followed easily, his tongue sliding across my lips as he deepened the kiss. His arms looped around my waist, drawing my body against his, into the space I knew I fit perfectly.
“Are you disappointed?” he asked. “That I’m not… your professor anymore? Your writer?”
“No,” I said. “I realized while I was here that you never were.”
He flinched. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. That’s not what I meant. I only meant that–that the man I had a crush on was a fantasy. Glasses and a tweed jacket and a smile just for me,” I said, and his lips quirked into a crooked grin. “You aren’t that fantasy anymore,” I continued, snaking my hands under the lapels of the wool coat he was wearing, “but you’re mine, with all your flaws and your past and our history together, and that’s even better.”
“Our story,” he said, and I blushed.
“This is where the books end, you know, James,” I said, and he nodded, his eyes quizzical. “The happily ever after,” I added.
“Sad, isn’t it?” he asked. “When the best part hasn’t happened yet?”
“What’s that?” The heat in his eyes told me what exactly he had in mind, but his voice was soft when he spoke.
“The rest of our lives.”
Epilogue
Edie
“Congratulations, Mrs. Martin.”James’s firm hand snaked around my waist, pulling me into his suit-clad side. The last rays of the early-summer sun were fading from the bookstore. The letters on the door were reversed from where I stood inside, but the clear text was easily legible even backwards, casting slanting shadows on the polished wood floor.Verity Books.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been here.
The first time James had taken me to the cozy little shop, he’d kissed me under the still-jingling chime above the door, and told me the story as we browsed our way from the new releases in the front to the back room of used books, the scent of vanilla in the air. How his grandfather had purchased a small bookstore, and grown it into a publishing company in a tall building across the city, and named it all for her. Vera.
But it was the first time I’d been here when there was a display ofmy own bookin the window. Wine, and cheese, and all my loved ones, and even–I was still slightly amazed by their presence–people I didn’t know.
“How does it feel to be a published author?” he asked now.
It was a question I’d been thinking a lot about recently, and I answered in the most truthful way I could: “Not as different as I thought?”
I still had my job at Verity. I still had popcorn-and-wine nights with Flora.
And I had James. He tipped my face up to steal a kiss with one finger under my chin, then let his arm drop to his side. His fingers laced between my own. I looked up at him, but he was staring out over the crowd, a small, proud smile on his face.
“That’s because this is who you’ve always been. You just had to make it happen.”
