Your Love Came Late, I Chose Another novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: After the Storm
I didn't breathe.
The candle on the counter guttered in a draft from under the door.
"Say the rest," I said. "Plainly. You made me."
He laughed, one short wet breath.
"I love you," he said. "Since a woman called me a cobbler murderer at Marion Square. I wrote the year so you'd marry me, and I've hated it every day since."
"Every day."
"Every single one. I crossed them off in my head. Like a sentence."
I put both hands on his chest.
His heart was going.
"I don't want a year either," I said.
He went very still.
"Say that again."
"I don't want a year. I don't want April. I want the shrimp and grits and the stupid truck and you scowling at my salt." My voice cracked. "I love you, Ronan."
He kissed me.
Not careful this time.
He took my face in both hands and kissed me so hard my back hit the steel counter, the same counter as the burnt caramel.
I grabbed his apron strings and pulled him in.
His mouth was hot and tasted like biscuit and the cheap white wine.
His hands slid down to my hips and lifted me onto the counter.
I wrapped my legs around his waist.
He groaned into my mouth.
My hands went under his shirt, up his back, over the warm skin I'd learned in the dark.
His thumb dragged up my ribs under my dress, slow, then higher.
I arched into his hand and heard myself moan.
The swinging door banged open.
The housekeeper stood there with her flashlight pointed straight at us.
She looked at my legs around Ronan's waist.
She looked at his hand under my dress.
"I'll find my own candles," she said, and backed out.
The door swung shut.
I buried my face in Ronan's shoulder and laughed until I cried.
"Thirty-one people," he said into my hair, breathing hard. "And a beagle."
"Not tonight."
"Not with a beagle."
We slept on the dining room floor with everyone else, on couch cushions, his arm across my waist.
The storm went over us in the dark like a train that took six hours to pass.
By morning it was gone.
Sunday came up blue and silent.
No power anywhere. No traffic. No air conditioners humming.
Just birds, and somebody's chainsaw a long way off, and water dripping off every roof on Church Street.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Your Love Came Late, I Chose Another are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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