Royal Holiday (The Wedding Date, #4)(59)

“Something wrong, V?” he asked.

She liked the way he’d started to call her V. Her family called her Viv, which she hated from anyone outside of her family. But she liked V from him a lot.

She shook her head at his question.

“No, nothing wrong.”

He came over to her.

“Okay, but you’re looking indecisive about something. What is it?”

Sometimes it was annoying that he was so perceptive.

“It’s nothing bad . . . I was just wondering if . . .”

She felt silly about this, but then, he hadn’t found any of her quirks silly yet.

“Since it’s New Year’s Eve, should I change? Into something more fun, I mean.” She had no idea why she’d suddenly felt the need to change, but for some reason, she really wanted to.

A wide smile spread across Malcolm’s face.

“What a smashing idea. Absolutely, you should change. We should both change. Let’s do that, then open the first bottle of champagne.”

She grinned at him, plucked a dress out of her suitcase, and disappeared into the bathroom. After twenty minutes, most of which was spent putting her hair in as fancy an updo as she could manage, and using that sparkly eye makeup Maddie had given her, she emerged.

“Just warning you now; you’ve already seen this dress before,” she said as she stepped out of the bathroom.

He turned around, midway through tying his bow tie.

“I loved it on Christmas Eve, and I love it even more on New Year’s Eve,” he said. “You look incredible.” He bent down to kiss her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back hard.

“Let’s pop that first bottle of champagne.”

She followed him into the kitchen. He pulled a bottle out of the fridge and carefully took down two champagne glasses from the cabinet. He paused before he opened the bottle and smiled at her.

“Confession: I just bought these glasses a few days ago, once I realized you’d be here with me on New Year’s Eve. I haven’t had a reason to have champagne glasses in this apartment until now.”

He unwound the wire around the cork and pulled the cork out with a gentle pop. After he’d filled their glasses, she lifted her glass to his.

“To both of us having more reasons to drink champagne.”

He grinned at her.

“What a perfect toast.”

They spent the next few hours sitting on the couch talking, drinking champagne, and looking out over London. After a while they both got hungry, so he got up and shucked the oysters they’d bought at the market. Later they got even hungrier, so she made them an enormous cheese plate with the many different kinds of cheese and charcuterie they’d bought earlier that day. And then, when they wanted something sweet, he served them slices of the chocolate cake they’d bought. And with everything, they drank more champagne.

At one point, he reached over and took her hand.

“I wish . . .” he said, and trailed away.

She wasn’t sure his wish was exactly the same as hers—that they had more time together, that they lived in the same city, that they could suspend time for minutes or hours or days until they could get their fill of each other—but she recognized the look in his eyes as the same feeling in her heart.

“I do, too,” she said.

He sighed and pulled her closer to him.

“I hoped you did,” he said.

A few minutes before midnight, Malcolm brought a new bottle of champagne to the coffee table and popped the cork.

“And the New Year is just seconds away,” he said, as he poured champagne into both of their glasses. He looked at his watch. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”

Vivian joined him in the countdown.

“. . . three . . . two . . . one!” they said in unison. They turned to each other and smiled.

“Happy New Year, Vivian,” he said.

“Happy New Year, Malcolm,” she said.

She started to clink her glass against his, but he shook his head.

“You’re forgetting the most important thing about midnight at the New Year,” he said. “The kiss.”

She was forgetting that, as a matter of fact. How many years had it been since she’d had someone to kiss on New Year’s Eve? She’d certainly kissed people on New Year’s Eve, but it had been quite a while since she was guaranteed a kiss on that night. And from a person she truly wanted to kiss.

He took her glass from her and put it down onto the coffee table, then swept her into a kiss that left her breathless. When they finally parted, he brushed her hair back from her face and kissed her cheek.

“Now we toast.” He handed her the champagne glass and picked up his own.

She touched her glass to his.

“Happy New Year. I hope this year ends as well as it began.”

He lifted his glass to his lips.

“Well, I can definitely toast to that.” A wide smile crossed his face. “And you said that without even seeing the one last surprise I had in store for you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. She’d forgotten about his last surprise. Did he think she was in any shape to leave his apartment again tonight, with all this champagne they’d had? Or had he bought her a present?

He laughed out loud.

“I see that look on your face; no need to be so suspicious. I can’t take credit for this, but I love it anyway. Look!” He gestured in front of them at the windows, and she turned to look at what he could be talking about. At first there was nothing, but then: Fireworks!