Page 20 of Unconditionally With Me
“You really can,” he laughs as he passes by me with our luggage.
“Julian.” I stomp my foot before setting off after him. “I don’t even know if I’m going to accept the inheritance.”
He looks up from where he had just slung our suitcases. “Really?” Surprise is etched all over his handsome face.
It wasn’t a topic that came up on the long flight, though it seems like everything else was up for discussion. Julian spent the better part of the flight playing one million questions, instead of the normal twenty. At one point I complained, “Is this a chance for us to get to know each other again or a damned inquisition?”
He barked out a laugh before asking the flight attendant for champagne.
Now, I scuff my booted foot back and forth over the patterned beige carpet. Then I fling myself down next to my suitcase, face forward. My “I don’t know” comes out muffled.
Julian shoves the bags over. One topples over the side of the bed and clunks heavily onto the floor. My body shakes with laughter. “We’re so high-class,” I declare.
“Who cares?” He shrugs.
I think about it for a second and realize it’s one of the things I love best about him—how laid-back he is. That prompts me to ask, “How did you get to be so relaxed about everything?”
“You mean in comparison to you being wound up?” After I nod, he turns on his side and props his head on his hand. “I think it was because of the way Mom died. I knew there was nothing that could be worse than that, so why get worked up over it. Obviously, her death had a different effect on Jonas.”
“Obviously,” I whisper. Then I throw myself into his arms and hug him fiercely. Julian and Jonas’s mother was a nurse, who died when the boys were very young. She was hurrying to cover a shift for her sister-in-law, who was in the process of delivering their new cousin, when she was hit by a driver who ran a red light.
We hold each other close before Julian murmurs over the top of my hair, “I would have loved for you to have met her. I suspect the two of you would have been close.”
Then I think of something in the millions of questions we’ve asked each other over the three years we’ve been dating. “Why don’t you take time to mourn her each year?” I’ve been to Chelsea’s birthday bashes with Julian, and they’re a blast, but still…
He rolls to his back, pulling me with him. “I think subconsciously we, and by that I mean me and Jonas, decided years ago not to burden Chelsea with that knowledge—so much so that Jonas began to blame himself for Mom’s death. Now, I don’t know.”
I press a kiss beneath his whiskered jaw. “You should.”
He’s thoughtful. “I think I’d have to choose a different day. I still couldn’t do that to Chelsea.”
And those words make my heart fall just a little more in love with him when I already thought there was nothing more he could do to make me love him more. Maybe that’s what love is—falling in love with the person a little bit more every day as you grow old with them. When I share that with Julian, he doesn’t respond.
At least not verbally.
But we don’t end up moving out of the room. After all, it’s kind of gauche to do that after you’ve made love in it.
At least that’s what he convinces me of much later.
* * *
“Jonas saysthis is one of the best places to get Cajun food in Seattle,” Julian enthuses.
“Seriously? We’re here in the land of seafood and we’re spending our first night dining at a restaurant of your brother’s choice?” I yelp in the back of our complimentary car from the hotel.
I swear the driver tries to hide a snicker; Julian, not so much. He just grins. “Apparently all the locals eat at this place, and getting a reservation here takes a miracle.”
“Which is why we’re eating at four thirty in the afternoon?”
“Yes. But since I know you, and your voracious appetite, I’ve arranged for something later tonight at the hotel.”
I settle back against my seat, determined not to let Julian hear the grumbling in my stomach. “I hope this Toulouse Petit lives up to the hype you’re giving it.”
“Jonas drove up to eat here from Portland,” Julian confides.
“You’re kidding?”
He shakes his head.
