Lulu pushes them back into Zoey’s chest. “Someday you’ll think different, and you’ll find yourself an Oliver.”
My eyebrows rise. “I’m a thing now?” I ask, marching up to my wife and her sister.
“Not all men are like you,” Zoey says, turning her gaze toward my dipshit brother. “They’re like him.”
“I can’t argue with you there,” I tell her, laughing as my brother hits on every single woman at the party but is immediately shot down. “He’s making his rounds.”
“And not winning a damn thing,” Lulu says, watching Liam. “Thank God the women in my family have common sense.”
“Can we go now?” I ask Lulu.
Zoey giggles. “Someone wants to get lucky.” She nudges her shoulder into mine, looking genuinely happy for the first time in a long while.
“I already got lucky. Your sister said yes,” I explain to her.
“We can go,” Lulu says to me, taking my arm. “I need to get off my feet.”
“That’s the plan,” I tell her with a wink.
“I don’t need to hear this,” Zoey says, covering her ears. “It’s too much, even for me.”
“I’m ready to start our forever.”
“I thought we already did,” Lulu says, and she’s right.
Our forever started the moment we met, but neither of us knew it.
23
LULU
“May I cut in?”my father asks Oliver.
“Of course.” Oliver gives my father my hand and steps backward to where my mother’s waiting to scoop him up.
“Daddy,” I whisper, placing my hand in his and resting the other one on his shoulder.
“I remember you standing on my shoes, dancing like this,” he sighs and gazes down into my eyes. “It feels like yesterday.”
“Time moves quickly.”
“Too quickly,” he says. “It’s been hard for me to let go.”
“You don’t say.” I smile up at the man who raised me to be the person I am today. Not a day went by that I didn’t feel loved and wanted by him, even if he isn’t my biological father.
“I think I did well.”
“You did, Dad. Better than I thought you would.”
“Someday, you’ll have kids, and you’ll understand the overwhelming need to protect them. But there were times you and your sister didn’t make it easy on us.”
I giggle, thinking of all the dumb shit we did growing up. Most of it, my parents don’t know about—and never will, if we can help it. “It kept you young.”
“Do you see the wrinkles on my face? My two girls put them there.”
“Daddy, I think a few are from Mom too.”
“A few, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, Lulu. You and Zoey are my greatest joys.”
