Baking Me Crazy (Donner Bakery, #1)(73)

"Oh, that's a guarantee, Sonic."

She laughed. "I want to go with you. I want to do this together."

"You're sure?" I whispered, sliding my hand around the back of her neck.

Joss nodded. "Someone will think it's crazy. Think we're too young, or we haven't been together long enough, but that doesn't matter either."

"No?" I was so impossibly in love with her. "What does matter?"

Her fist clutched at my shirt and pulled me in so that her forehead rested on mine. "What matters is that it's you and me. It always has been. Five days, five weeks, five months or years, the time doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that you love me"—she paused, pulling back so that I could see her eyes—"and that I'm just as in love with you."

I wrapped my arms around her, lifting her easily from her chair as we sank back together onto the ground. She sat on my haunches, her arms tight around my neck. My mouth found hers, and the kiss that was waiting was sweet and full of promise. Her tongue touched mine as her fingers dug into my hair.

We stayed there, lips brushing softly, her nose grazing mine and the curls escaping from her ponytail tickling the side of my face.

I pulled back and smiled. "Did you really pack my bag?"

"I did. Do you know how many boxer briefs you have?"

"I hate doing laundry."

She laughed. "So do I. Heaven help us."

I glanced back at the bags—one for her and one for me. "So this wasn't just for show?"

"Nope." Joss tilted her head to the house. "The errands your mom sent you on were to give me enough time to pull this off. She booked the tickets while I packed."

"Nice work," I muttered, trying to ignore the warm, aching spot in the middle of my chest at the fact she'd done all this. That she was in this with me. That she was mine. "When do we have to leave for the airport?"

She lifted her arm to look at her watch. "In about fifteen minutes. I'll need extra time to get through security."

I slid my hands up her back, tilted my head to the sky, and whooped loudly. "We're going to Seattle!"

Joss was laughing when I kissed her deeply.

"You're excited now," she said. "Just wait until the apartment hunt begins."

I held still while she braced her hands on her chair and lifted herself up into it. "Why's that?"

"Are you kidding?" She lifted her bag into her lap and handed me mine. "You'll need space for a big dog and a place with big doors for me. I'm a high maintenance roommate."

My hands gripped her armrests as she tilted her chin up for another kiss. "You're forgetting a really, really big bed," I whispered.

"I love you," she told me, eyes sparkling and mouth stretched in a smile.

"Because I want a big bed for us?" I teased.

Joss shook her head. "Because of all of it. Just … because you're you."

We kissed slowly. I might have been a man cursed, but when she took my hand, nothing else mattered.





Epilogue





Jocelyn





Two months later





"I swear, if you don't move these boxes out of here today, I'm kicking you out."

His heavy sigh was loud from the bathroom attached to our bedroom. "The romance is dead already, huh?"

When I snickered loudly, Nero lifted his head from where he was curled up on Levi's side of the bed. I folded the sweater in my lap and added it to the pile of laundry. "It will be if you don't move them."

Levi popped his head out of the doorway, his toothbrush stuck in the side of his mouth. "I'll move the boxes, but Sonic, you're stuck with me."

My lips curved up because this was about the fifteenth time he'd made comments like that in the past couple of weeks since we'd made the long drive to Washington.

Not-so-subtle remarks about our future, the certainty of us being together. He wasn't making them because he thought I needed the reassurance. I was all in, happier than I ever could have imagined, even among the chaos and stress that came with a cross-country move.

"Eh," I said flippantly. "Maybe I'll find some swoony Seattle hipster who knows his recycling rules and would never let boxes fill up the second bedroom because he knows they could be used to make some fancy hipster paper or something."

Levi attacked from behind, burying his mouth in the side of my neck and blowing raspberries into my skin while I laughed helplessly. His arms wrapped around me as the tickles turned into sweet kisses onto the curve of my shoulder. My hands gripped his forearms, holding his sexy, frustrating, non-box moving ass in place.

When he sucked the lobe of my ear into his mouth, my nails dug into his skin. I felt his lips curve up into a smile when they did.

"No hipsters for you, Miss Abernathy," he whispered, pecking a kiss on my upturned lips before he sat in front of me on the edge of the bed and took my hands in his.

"You know, I had no clue that underneath your easygoing fa?ade was a chest-beating, possessive Neanderthal just waiting to be unleashed." My words were meant to tease, but sometimes, I couldn't help but marvel at how sure, how certain he was. We were so young even though, by Green Valley standards, we should've been married already at this age. In Seattle, though, we had a decade to go before anyone expected us to be settled and popping out babies.