“I love you.” He pulled her to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. “What do you say to an after-dinner snack of iced tea and chocolate-covered graham crackers?”
Julia gasped, delighted. “How did you know?”
It was a joke, and Cooper laughed. He knew that Julia wanted to eat chocolate-covered graham crackers because they were her latest pregnancy craving and she’d sent him out that morning to buy her some before he went off to work.
Hand in hand, they went down the stairs together. Julia checked on Macey as she watched her movie in the den while Cooper got them a couple of glasses of iced tea along with the box of chocolate covered graham crackers.
They sat down together on the couch in the living room, cuddling and munching the sweet crackers. For a while they were quiet, simply enjoying each other’s company.
“What do you think we should do for Faith’s party?” he asked her after a while.
Suddenly animated, she turned to him with a grin. “Oh, I have so many ideas! Let me run and get my notebook and I’ll show you.”
He laughed. “You stay put. I’ll get it. Where is it?”
“It’s in my purse.”
Cooper returned a moment later with Julia’s small notebook, which she’d filled with several pages worth of ideas for Faith’s surprise party.
“I’m not sold on all of these,” Julia said, opening her notebook eagerly. “So tell me what you think and be honest. What do you think about decorating with wildflowers instead of balloons?”
“Hmm, might be expensive since not a lot of wildflowers have bloomed yet. We’d have to get them all from a store.”
“Hmm, good point. I just wanted to do something elegant—maybe twinkle lights and some flowers?”
“Sounds nice.” He smiled. “Faith really likes flowers, doesn’t she?”
“She does, and pastels. So whatever dishes we use should be cute pastel colors. Maybe pink and purple?”
“Sure. Do you want to do any games?”
“Oh, maybe some board games. Or we could play Twister.” Her eyes widened suddenly as an amused look crossed her face. “Or we could get a bouncy castle!”
Cooper shook his head, chuckling. “I thought this party was for adults.”
“You know most of the adults in our lives would love a bouncy castle,” she retorted. “Unfortunately, though, I was kidding.”
“We could play a murder mystery game, those are fun. We could buy a party pack online and everything.”
“Oh, sure! Those are kind of involved though—it might take a lot of time. But I’ll write it down and we can decide later if we want to do that or not. We should run all of our ideas past everyone else before making decisions anyway.”
Cooper peered over her shoulder at the list. “It says here you want to serve fried chicken and sloppy joes and barbecue pulled pork sandwiches and grown-up grilled cheese?” He sounded almost alarmed. “Sweetheart, that’s a lot.”
She laughed. “Not all of it. Those are just my ideas. We should pick one of those to serve, or maybe two—putting some barbecue pulled pork inside a grilled cheese sandwich sounds absolutely divine.”
“Mm, yes it does. Write that down so you don’t forget. You just had a stroke of genius.”
“I know,” she said cheerfully, and circled grilled cheese and barbecue pulled pork on her list and then drew a line connecting them. “Okay, what else?”
“How about a piñata?”
“I love that!”
“I was kidding, actually.”
Julia wrinkled her nose at him. “Hey, it’s an idea and I’m going to write it down.”
Cooper shook his head, laughing, and picked up a chocolate-covered graham cracker. “Here.” He held it up to her mouth. “Eat this.”
