My Sister Is the Warlord Queen novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Keane
I had a morning bun in one hand and a twenty-dollar bill in the other.
I didn't put either of them down.
"Get up," I said. "You're kneeling in flour."
"I'm aware."
"That's a fifty-pound sack. You carried it in here as a prop."
"It was the only way to get down here without you noticing."
"I noticed."
"You noticed too late." He opened the box.
It wasn't a diamond.
It was a plain band of dark gold, a little worn, with a tiny ship's wheel cut into the inside.
"It came off a wreck in the outer harbor," he said. "Two hundred years down. I hauled it up myself."
"And kept it?"
"In the wheelhouse. Waiting to find out who it was for."
The man at the front of the line said, "Oh, come on," very softly.
One of the nurses had both hands over her mouth.
Roisin had stopped boxing buns.
She was standing perfectly still behind the counter with a bun in her tongs, crying all over it.
"Shea Keane," Cal said again. "I don't need you to stop being anything. I just want to be the place you come back to."
I looked at him on the floor of my sister's shop.
Flour on his knee.
Salt still in his beard from the morning.
"You know what I do," I said.
"I know exactly what you do."
"I'll get called at three in the morning for the rest of my life."
"I'll make the coffee."
"You burn pancakes."
"Roisin's teaching me."
"He's terrible," Roisin said through her tears. "Say yes."
I put the morning bun down on the counter.
I put the twenty in the register.
Then I held out my left hand.
"Yes," I said.
He put the ring on.
It fit.
The bakery went up.
The parish men were pounding the window table, the landlady was banging a spoon on a mixing bowl, and somebody in the line started singing.
Cal stood up and kissed me in front of all of them.
Roisin came over the counter.
She didn't come around it.
She climbed over it, pregnant, in her apron, and threw her arms around both of us.
The bun in her tongs ended up in Cal's hair.
That night I used the key.
The front door.
I turned the key and let myself in.
The apartment was dark except for the city and the harbor, the wall of glass making the whole room blue and gold.
He was standing in the middle of it, barefoot, in the navy flannel and jeans he'd proposed in.
Flour still on his knee.
"Took you long enough," he said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of My Sister Is the Warlord Queen are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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