My eyes cut to Mickey who was standing on his side of my bed in his pajama bottoms, looking at me.
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to, Mickey Donovan. You’re the king of the grand statement.”
His face got soft right before he stated, “Buckle up, baby.”
“I know,” I agreed. “Robin is a whackjob, just the good kind, but this isn’t going to go easy because Lawrie has his own baggage too.”
“Not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
He moved from his place by the bed across the room, past me, to his jacket he’d thrown over the arm of the daybed. He shifted it, dug into it, pulled out some tri-folded papers and walked to me.
He then held them out to me.
I took them but didn’t look at them.
“Itinerary,” he declared. “Shit’s sorted. Even called Conrad. He’s takin’ the kids and in two days, we’re goin’ to the Keys.”
I blinked.
“How big a rock he buy you?” he asked.
“Three and a half carats,” I answered automatically.
“Then prepare to drag your hand around, darlin’, ’cause you know I’ll have to best that shit and do it soundly.”
At that, I dropped the paper, threw myself in his arms, pushing back until we hit bed and went down on it, me bouncing on Mickey.
Then I was all over him.
“Babe, don’t know if the kids are asleep,” he told me (my kids, his were at Rhiannon’s).
“They won’t hear.”
“What if they—?”
I lifted my head, my brows knit and glared at him. “Are you about to whisk me away to the Florida Keys and ask for my hand in marriage?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Then we’re fucking to celebrate.”
His mouth twitched. “Fucking?”
“Fast, hard, rough,” I dipped closer, “and quiet.”
My breath left with the swiftness of him rolling on top of me.
“To be quiet, I gotta do all the work,” he declared. “You get on top, you moan and do it loud.”
That was okay by me.
I grinned.
My guy kissed me.
Then he fucked me.
We were as quiet as we could be.
After, me cleaned up and back in my nightie, Mickey in his pajama bottoms, we were tangled up in the dark in my bed.
“Love you, Mickey Donovan,” I whispered.
“Love you too, soon-to-be-Amelia Donovan,” he whispered back.
Amelia Donovan.
God.
I closed my eyes and pressed deep into his body.
His arms convulsed around me. “Shit, you like that.”
“Happy,” was all I could say.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
I tipped my head back and looked at his face in the shadows. “A flash?”
He slid his hand up my back, over my shoulder to cup my cheek. “No, baby. See, ’bout nine months or so ago, give or take a few weeks, this spitfire brunette moved in across the street and those flashes became history. Now I live life blinded and that is not a bad thing.”
That moved through me, setting me soaring, and I bent my neck and shoved my face in his chest so he wouldn’t see me crying, even in the dark.
He felt it since I was shaking uncontrollably (and might have let out a sniffle) and he gathered me closer.
“Don’t like my woman crying in my arms.”
“Ha-ha-happy tears.”
“Cut it out anyway, Amy. Yeah?”
My head tipped back again and I declared, “You can’t order me to stop crying happy tears, Mickey.”
“I just did.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen.”
“It already did, seein’ as you’re layin’ into me and no longer crying.”
I glared at him through the dark because he was right.
“Fuck,” he muttered, “I can actually feel that angry heat and now I wanna fuck you again.”
“I don’t actually have anything pressing on my schedule for the next oh, I don’t know, eight to nine hours, Mickey.”
“Jesus, you’re a smartass.”
“Bitching about me being a smartass is not fucking me, Mickey.”
I ended that on a gasp because I ended that being flipped to my stomach then Mickey’s hand was yanking up my nightie right before it dove right in my panties. It curled, I spread my legs to give him better access and he found me.
“Where’s the smartass now?” he murmured in my ear.
He didn’t allow me to answer. My clit, still sensitized from earlier, got a tweak from his finger and I had to concentrate on that while my hips twitched.
“Yeah,” he growled with satisfaction.
“You’re annoying,” I breathed, squirming.
“Challenge, Amy. Repeat that when you’re sittin’ on my face in five minutes.”
Oh God.
I kept squirming.
He swept the bedclothes off me.
“Lift your hips, baby. Wanna see that ass working for me.”
Oh God.
I lifted my hips.
Mickey kept at me until he was done with that and he dragged me onto his face.
It took a while to get to the fucking but it was a pleasurable while, and when we were again clothed and tangled under the covers, I had no smartass left in me.
So I fell asleep in the arms of my guy knowing soon we’d be lazing around in the sun of the Florida Keys and I’d be doing it wearing the huge-ass rock he was going to give me.
* * * * *
I walked into my house, past my beloved dining room table, straight to the kitchen.
I put my purse and bag on the counter, turned to go to the fridge to assess dinner options and stopped dead.
I stood and stared.
It took a while for me to reanimate my body. But when I did, I shuffled sideways, my gaze glued to the wall beyond the dining room table.
Blindly, I dug into my purse until I found my phone. I activated it without looking at it and continued not to look at it as I did what I had to do by rote, lifted it to my mouth and demanded, “Call, Mickey.”
I put it to my ear.
“Hey,” he greeted after one ring.
“Hey back,” I whispered.
He said nothing.
I stared at the wall.
On it was my Mother’s Day present.
Mickey in cahoots with the kids had arranged for a photographer to come to the house when the bluebells had taken over.
Mickey had been right. When they bloomed they were so profuse it looked like Cliff Blue was floating on a cloud of flowers over the sea.
It was the physical manifestation of my world. The home I shared with my loved ones suspended in beauty.