Page 124 of Wild Fury (Fallen Royals 6)

He smirks. “I had to think of some way to keep you around.”

“I don’t know why you’d think, of all your qualities, your brain would be it.”

He stops me. “What, then?”

“Your abs,” I say with complete seriousness… until I break, anyway. “I don’t know. All of it. The fact that you get me is probably the top reason you’re my favorite person ever.”

“Ever,” he repeats.”

“Duh, Theo Alistair.”

“Promise me something,” he demands.

I raise my eyebrows. “Just like that?”

He rolls his eyes. “Promise that forty years from now, you and I will still have this sort of banter. We’ll watch grandchildren run around our living room and have sex in our recliner—”

“Oh god, not at the same time!”

“No, during nap time,” he says.

“Fine.” I grimace. “I notice you said recliner, singular, so we better be cuddling even when we can barely get out of it. We can wear matching life alert buttons.”

“Excellent idea.”

I pause. “So, were you proposing just now, or…?”

He pauses, too. “No.”

“Well, technically—”

He sighs and pulls me along. “Technically I was proposing a future together. I didn’t get down on one knee and pop the question.”

“The question being…”

“You know, ‘Will you marry me?’”

I gasp and jump up and down, spinning away from him and finally stopping just in front of him. “Theo Alistair!”

“Lucy Page, that was not my proposal.” He tries to hold back his laugher and fails. “Stop bouncing.”

I’m insane and I don’t care. “That was the most romantic—”

“Hush, woman,” he growls. He scoops me up, one arm behind my knees and the other at my back, and marches down the street. He’s probably worried about the neighbors peeking out their windows at us. “When I propose, you’ll know it. Romance overload. It’ll turn your black heart red again.”

I giggle and press the back of my hand to my forehead. “Be still my beating heart. You might just turn me into a hapless romantic yet.”

Probably not… but you never know.

Theo

One month later

“Go,” I say. Now or never.

The video starts. Just her, front and center. Hair down around her shoulders, no glasses, no makeup. Black shirt. The background is my white wall and the back of the couch.

I wish I could sit next to her, but this is her battle.

---