KristoI wasn’t sure she would want me to lay so much as a finger on her now that we weren’t married. Perhaps she would cut that all off and leave. But we were so entangled in one another now, emotionally, physically, financially, and familially. Both our families had met and promptly formed bonds with each other, and to cut them off from that now seemed unnecessarily cruel. Or maybe I was just looking for reasons to keep her around. I glanced down at the ring on her finger, the glowing gem I’d purchased for her just a week before reminding me of how sure I’d felt of her and of us, and my stomach churned. I tossed the covers back and climbed out of bed. I was doing no good sitting around here and brooding. I needed to get myself a coffee, and then perhaps I could work out what it was I needed to say to her.Because I wanted her to stay. That was what all of this had been about, really. The ring, the contract, the money—whether or not I would have admitted it to myself, I wanted nothin

AmayaI watched as Darla made her way out of my office, and I leaned back in my seat and let out a long sigh. I knew I shouldn’t have let it bother me, but I couldn’t stop looking at the clock, wondering if Kristo was finished with that meeting yet. I had been checking my phone constantly since I’d arrived at work, on the off-chance he might somehow have decided what was going to happen to the two of us without my knowing. This state of uncertainty was driving me crazy, and I needed to lock something down before I lost my mind entirely.I went back to the papers I had been filing and tried to focus my attention on them, but my head was restless and wouldn’t let me. What was going to happen with Kristo and me? Would we get married now? Would we just keep up with the charade? Either of us could walk away at any moment, and that made the ground feel like it was slipping out from beneath me. I hated this feeling, hated how uncertain I was, hated how my brain seemed to be sloshing full of

KristoAs soon as I heard that voice, my stomach dropped, a learned reaction from all those times that very same voice had cursed me out for having my hand in the cookie jar when I was a kid. I spun around and found myself face-to-face with my nonna.“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, and I shifted so that I was standing in front of Amaya. It wasn’t that I thought my grandmother would actually try to physically hurt her, but the brunt of whatever she was dealing with was going to hit me and not her. Nonna stormed toward me and jabbed her finger into my chest, a motion that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so deadly serious.“A contract?” she yelled, her voice cracking. “You married this woman, and she took money from you for it?”Fucking Cleo and her big mouth. My stomach dropped. Well, the secret was out now.“It’s not like that.” I brushed her away from me, not liking the way she was coming at me like I owed her something. Hadn’t enough happened in the last few d

AmayaIt felt as though he had punched the breath out of my body. There was no other way to describe the feeling as I waited for him to throw his hands in the air and announce the whole thing a joke and me a gullible idiot for falling for it. But he didn’t blink. He didn’t look away. Somehow, this was real.“You mean it?” I asked, my voice comically tiny as I looked at him. He nodded.“I want to marry you,” he told me bluntly, and all the feelings I had been doing my best to clamp down on these last few months came flooding up and over me in an instant. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t keep them in any longer. Maybe it was the intensity of the last few days or maybe it was something else, but I needed to blow off some steam. And, the champagne mellowing my inhibitions, I knew exactly how to do that.“Kiss me.” I moved into him and breathed the words into his ear, and he didn’t need telling twice. He guided me on top of him, spreading my legs as though it came easy to him, and kissed

KristoI woke up on that Tuesday morning with a pounding headache and a woman in my bed. It would have been déjà vu, were it not for the fact that I could actually remember the night before and was happy to see this woman lying next to me. I brushed my fingers over her back, grinning, remembering what we’d gotten up to the night before. She might not have been as wild as me yet, but she was sure as hell getting there. And I was more than happy to be her guide on her path to complete debauchery.Her eyes fluttered open, and her gaze met mine. Then, she grinned and snuggled into the sheets.“Hey,” she greeted me, and I planted a kiss on her temple.“Hey,” I replied. She moved toward me and cuddled into my chest, holding me tight.“It’s so nice to wake up next to you,” she confessed as though she was sharing a dirty secret, as though the two of us hadn’t swapped “I love yous” for the first time the night before.“It really is,” I agreed. “I mean, for you. I can’t imagine how nice it is t