“Obviously.”
“Yeah, obviously, and Dom was cool too. We need to talk more, I think, but that’s about us, not you. We’ve spent so long focused on business, when the dust settles, we’ll have more to say about it.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“Who? Dom?”
Jude nodded. “He wasn’t home when I got to the house, and when he got home, he went straight upstairs to work.”
“That shit has to change.”
“For both of you?”
I briefly met his gaze. “For both of us.”
Jude smiled. “I like that.”
He faded out then, and it took me a while to wake him when we finally made it back to Thorston. I shook him gently. His eyelids fluttered, and opened slowly, his gaze becoming more aware with every weighted second that passed. “You’re still here,” he whispered.
“I am.”
“Isha?”
“Yeah?”
“Kiss me?”
I was kissing him before his request had fully imprinted on my brain. My lips brushed his, once, twice. Then I slanted my mouth against his, found the perfect groove, and I knew, right then, that life, already irrevocably changed by him, would never be the same again.
Jude leaned in, hands flailing, and I caught him, like I always would. He kissed me with a hunger that belied what he’d been through to get to this point, and I was powerless against the onslaught of emotion that swirled around us, binding us together for as long as he’d have me.
Only the need to breathe made me pull away. I pressed our foreheads together and held him tight. “You want to check the shop before we go home?”
“That’s it,” he said.
“What is?”
“The everything reason I love you so much.”
It didn’t make much sense, but it didn’t have to. I loved him too, and it was everything. Jude and my kids. Mina and my friends. For as long as I lived, I’d never need anything else.
Epilogue
Nine months later…
Jude
I let the blue-eyed snake—Lucy, naturally—ease her way closer to Mina. “You’re not really scared, not anymore.”
“I am so.” Mina flicked me with perfectly manicured fingers, but her grin was girlish and beautiful. “I don’t mind if you put her in my lap, though. She curled up in a ball last time.”
“That’s why they’re called ball pythons.”
“I know. Tam tells me ten times a day.”
I swallowed a laugh. The day Isha and Mina had decided to buy the white snake from me stood out as remarkable in many ways, most of which I couldn’t think about around Isha’s ex-wife, but the most hilarious result of Lucy finding a home in Isha’s new house had been Tam constantly schooling his parents. Isha reckoned I’d created a monster, but I didn’t care. The world needed more kids like Tam and Delilah.
Later, when Mina and the kids had gone, I went to find Isha in the office he’d had built in the attic of the big new house. He was on the phone, but I’d learned to interpret which calls were important, and those I could interrupt.
