The Dating Proposal(54)



“Hey, wife.” He loops his arms around my waist.

“Hi, husband,” I say, curving a hand around his neck.

“Are you having a good time?”

I pretend to ponder his question. “Hmm. There are French fries with forty-seven varieties of dipping sauce, including orgasmic ketchup. All my friends are here, and so is my dog. And I’m with my favorite person in the whole world. I’m having the time of my life.” I give him a cheeky smile. “I still want to beat you at Q*bert though.”

“You have a lifetime to do that,” he says then spins me around and brings me in close for another kiss.

I do have a lifetime with him. I have something more too—faith that we’ll go the distance.

As the King would say, some things are meant to be.

I take his hand as we leave the dance floor later that night, stepping into our forever.



THE END





Curious about Cooper’s romance? He has a story to tell in the USA Today Bestseller MOST VALUABLE PLAYBOY, available everywhere! McKenna’s sister Julia experiences an epic, sensuous romance in the New York Times Bestselling Seductive Nights series, available in Kindle Unlimited!





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Teaser from Satisfaction Guaranteed





Some women you never forget.

Your brain won’t let go of the scent of her skin. Your muscle memory holds the shape of your body curved around hers, and your senses recall the feel of your hands in her hair, your lips on hers.

It can be months, even a year, since you’ve seen her, longer since you’ve touched her, and everything rushes back in an instant.

Every damn image collides at once in a traffic jam of sensation. Sounds, sighs, scents. Her back arching, her lips parted, her waterfall of hair cascading over my hands.

But now, she’s three-dimensional, flesh and bone. I blink all those memories aside, and they take a back seat to the woman in front of me.

As I drink in the long blonde hair, the chocolate-brown eyes, a body I wanted to get to know so very badly, I’m reminded of one damn near perfect week seven years ago.

One tempting, tantalizing, torturous week. It’s seared in my mind. We met at a fundraising event in Manhattan, danced, drank, laughed, and stayed out all night. In the seven days that followed, we embodied infatuation. Late nights, lingering calls, chats you never wanted to end. So many sparks you could light up the night sky.

I can recall every moment, I swear.

Including the ending.

The bitter realization of who she was.

One more step, then another, and she stops in front of me, looking impossibly sexy, and she was the sexiest woman I’d ever known when she was a mere twenty-two.

But now? Dear God. She’s not even dressed up. Sloane Elizabeth is decked out in exercise pants, running shoes, and a sporty tank, and I still want to lick and kiss every inch of her. A canvas bag is slung over her shoulder.

I gesture to it. “You’re still shopping at midnight?”

“It’s the best time to go.” She raises her hands in fists. “I don’t have to fight anyone over the last head of radicchio.”

“I bet you don’t have to arm wrestle anyone for radicchio during the daylight hours either.”

“True,” she says with a laugh, then eyes me up and down. Those brown irises. Those red lips. God, I remember exactly how they taste. She punches my arm, knocking my thoughts from the dirty zone to the buddy level. “How the hell are you, Malone?”

“I can’t complain. And you? I take it from the grocery bag on your shoulder that you’re living here. Did you move from Connecticut?” She’s lived an hour or so from the city for the last several years, first New Jersey, then Connecticut, so I’ve run into her every now and then. But it’s been a little over a year since the last time.

“I did. I’m working here now.” She shifts her weight to her left leg, her soulful eyes never leaving my face. “What has it been? A year or so?”

A year and two months. We bumped into each other at a Moroccan restaurant in Chelsea that Truly dragged me to because the drinks were legendary. Sloane was dining with some hipster wannabe with a dangling earring who was clearly an asshole. Who else wears dangling earrings? She introduced me to him that night. His name was Plant. Or Brick. Or something painfully trendy that made me dislike him even more. She was still living in Connecticut at the time, so she obviously took the train into the city to see him. That tipped the scales to loathing for Dangling Earring Boy, who was also too young for her.

Her father would have hated him.

Her father hated everyone she dated.

He once remarked after she'd stopped by the office that he despised the guy she was seeing. No one was good enough for her, he’d said. I'd arched a brow asking, “No one?”

He shot bullets with his eyes. "No one, Casanova."

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