“Chicken and dumplings.”
“You are a goddess among women.” Chicken and dumplings was my favorite comfort food, and it was perfect after the day I had.
“What did Miss Whitney do this time?”
“She, honest to God, wanted to know if I could set up one of our other clients to make a sex tape with her and then leak it.”
Vi audibly gasped and then glanced up at me with a look of complete disgust. “Why on Earth would any woman ask such a thing? She already has a great start to her career. That could tank everything for her, especially since most of her audience is younger girls.”
“That is exactly what I told her. You can’t go from being a wholesome singer with tween and teen fans to a porn queen overnight while we’re still handling her first album release. It’s like she wanted to travel warp speed past all the steppingstones we talked about in the beginning.”
“I told you she was a little too wild to go down the wholesome route.”
“You should come work for me, sweets. I ran your thoughts by Caroline in the beginning, but she thought she could make it work.”
“And now, she’s shoving her failures off on you.” Vi leaned in and went up on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on my mouth. I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her tighter to me.
“Missed you, my sweet flower.”
“Missed you too, honey. It feels like we’re ships passing in the night here lately.”
“Yeah, why is that?” I asked and apparently didn’t manage to hide my tone from her. Vi stepped back and pulled free of my arms. Before she could mask it, I could see the hurt look on her face.
“I’ve been busy with that party I told you about.”
“Seems like a lot of work to go into one party. It’s a birthday, right? It’s not a major charity event with a bunch of moving parts.”
“That’s true, but it has a lot of intricacies that require a lot of time and far too much planning.” Vi shrugged her shoulders. “The payout for it will be huge, so I guess it will all work out in the end.”
“You don’t need money, Vi. It’s not like we’re living hand-to-mouth here. We’re supposed to be working toward a family and you’re either never home or too tired to do that this past month.”
“Sorry,” she whispered. I hated myself then because my wife looked like a kicked puppy and that wasn’t my intention.
“Can you just promise me that this is the last one for a while?” She nodded her head as I pulled her close. “I know you love doing all that party organization stuff, but this one is killing you and we never see each other anymore. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d swear you were having an affair.”
Her head snapped up and eyes narrowed on me. “That would never happen. You are the love of my life, Ridge. My soulmate. The man put on this earth just for me. Who could ever compete with that?”
I kissed the top of her head, then the tip of her nose, and finally her lips. “No one. Remember that when you’re prancing all over Atlanta and the outlying areas making all the men out there drool over your perfection.”
“Stop it.” She huffed and turned back to the stove to start plating our meals. “I made some fresh bread to go with this, too.”
“Honey butter?”
“Honey butter and apple butter are both on the table already. I’ll grab the sweet tea, if you can carry the rest in.” That was the thing about my wife. She was always thoughtful. If she knew I liked something, she went out of her way to make sure that I had it available to me when I needed it most. Whether that thing I needed was my wife, comfort foods, or a specific suit for a meeting, Violet had this weird sense and made it happen before I could even ask. She took care of me, plain and simple. She did it while working her own job, too. Granted, her job was supposed to be more of a hobby that she took especially seriously when she would organize charity events. Still, she did it all with a smile on her face and almost never complained.
There were days when I wondered how I got so lucky. In the grand scheme of things, Violet working extra hard on someone’s party shouldn’t bother me the way it did. The problem was that I was ready to start a family with her, and it felt like the minute I got serious about it, she took on one of the most time-consuming projects possible. It made me wonder if she still wanted the same thing, or if this was her subtle way of telling me she wasn’t ready for that next step yet.
“You were put on this earth especially for me, too. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know it; and you best not ever forget it.” She winked at me and turned away to go grab the sweet tea from the refrigerator as I took our food into the dining room. We rarely used it, but once in a while, it was like my wife could sense when I had a long day. She’d make one of my favorite home-cooked meals and serve it up as fancy as a restaurant would.
“Did you need to go shower the day off first?” Vi asked as she came into the dining room behind me. “I didn’t even think about it before I started dishing everything up.”
I shook my head. “It can wait. Maybe, when we’re done, you can come help me wash away the day.”
Violet’s responding grin was all the answer I needed. “That sounds like the perfect way to wind down. Sorry my schedule has been so crazy. My client is very hard to please, and since part of it is a surprise, it makes things even more difficult.”
“How about we put talk of work aside for the rest of the night and just enjoy our time together?”
