“For you, baby,” Lorenzo says from behind me, his hands landing warm on my shoulders, steering me gently toward the stairs. “Do you like it?”
“Of course I do, oh my god.”
We eat for two hours, and it’s the most relaxed I’ve been in longer than I can remember.
I drink a full glass of white wine at a pace that is not hurried by a single small person. At one point, I laugh so hard at something Rex says that I have to press my napkin to my face, and when I look up, all five of them are watching me with smiles on their faces.
“Gifts,” Rex announces when the plates are cleared, rubbing his hands together.
Lorenzo reaches under his chair and pulls out a flat, cloth-covered package, sliding it across the table to me. I open it carefully and find a photo album. It’s thick and heavy, every page filled with photographs I didn’t know he was taking. There’s one of Kael at six months old, asleep on Marcus’s chest, both of them with their mouths slightly open. There are the twins at their first Christmas, Rose wearing a bow bigger than her head. There’s one of me and my mother on her cottage porch, not posed, just talking, the ocean behind us, and I don’t even remember Lorenzo being nearby that day.
“Wow,” I say, feeling warm inside and shocked that he did this.
“I started it last January,” he says, watching my face as I turn the pages. “Figured someone should be actually capturing things.”
“I don’t have words. This is amazing.”
He smiles that warm, slow smile. “Glad you like it.”
Marcus goes next. He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces something small. He holds it out. It’s a bracelet, made with a simple leather cord, with a small silver charm. I look closer. The charm is a tiny wolf, mid-run, its lines smooth and precise. He carved it himself. I can see the faint marks of the tool along one edge.
“Give me your wrist,” he says quietly, and clasps it on himself, his big fingers careful with the small clasp. He doesn’t let go right away.
“I love it,” I tell him.
“Good.” He releases my wrist, and there’s a faint dusting of color across his cheekbones that I find completely endearing.
Then Rex stands up and picks up a guitar from behind his chair. He plays a song for me.
It is not good. It is spectacularly not good. The first chord sounds like a question that went wrong, and he stops, adjusts his fingers, and starts again. When he finishes, I’m crying and also giggling at the amount of effort he put into his love song for me.
“It’s a work in progress,” Rex says when he finishes, tucking the guitar away with great dignity.
“It was perfect,” I tell him, wiping my eyes. “I love it.”
Alaric produces a slim black box without preamble and sets it in front of me. Inside, on white satin, are earrings and a matching bracelet to the necklace he had bought for me years ago at the mall. Diamonds, brilliant-cut, serious, and beautiful. I’ve learned, in four years of living with Alaric, that his version of love is very expensive, and I’m not complaining anymore.
He stands and comes to me, moving my hair gently to reach my earlobes, setting each earring in place. Then he takes my wrist and clasps the bracelet on. His fingers brush my pulse point.
“You said once that you never felt like you deserved pretty things,” he says, low, close to my ear. “I’ve been correcting that error for four years. I intend to continue.”
“Thank you, babe,” I whisper, kissing him on the lips, and he turns red.
Then Ryker sets his hand flat on the table. “My turn. But you need to come with me.”
“Come with you where?” I look around. “It’s nine o’clock.”
“Humor me.”
A limo is waiting at the top of the stairs. We pile in, and I spend the short drive across the resort property trying to read Ryker’s expression, which is its usual granite self except for the faintest tension at the corners of his mouth that means he’s pleased about something.
We stop at the far edge of the resort grounds, where the property narrows to a strip of land between the beach and the palms. And there, set back from the sand with a white picket gate and a porch wrapped in climbing jasmine, is a cottage.
I step out and stop.
It’s small and white and lit from within, warm amber light spilling from the windows onto the stone path. The whole thing looks like a picture from a book I would have stared at as a child. The color is warm, and there are fireflies everywhere, lighting up the night.
“What is this?” I breathe.
