The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(93)

I’ve never wanted to be responsible for anyone. I’ve never wanted to belong to anyone. But I want both those things with her, and I don’t want the job of keeping her safe and happy to belong to anyone but me for the rest of our lives.

“Marry me,” I say, and when the words emerge, I expect to regret them. I expect to want to pull them back…but I don’t. I’m simply stunned by how perfect a solution it is. “That’s how I want you to prove it. Marry me.”

She laughs. “Sure, I’ll marry you…like, eventually. But right now, we really need to go back to your room.”

Yes.

No.

“Tonight. Before you forget and decide you’d rather be with Six Bailey.”

She stops in place, blinking up at me. Maybe it’s because she’s the only one of us sober enough to see this whole thing clearly, but I feel clearer than I ever have in my life.

“You don’t think you’ll regret it in the morning?” she asks. “You seemed pretty unhappy with me a few hours ago.”

“You were letting Six fucking molest you all afternoon. Of course I was unhappy.”

Her mouth opens to argue, which is when Drew pushes between us, drunkenly throwing an arm around Keeley’s shoulders. Poorly timed interruptions are apparently the primary character trait of the Bailey family.

“What’s up, kids?” she asks. “We’re taking this party back to my house because my pool is way better than the one at the hotel. I just called for the limo.”

My gaze locks with Keeley’s. Don’t go with them, I silently plead.

Drew looks between us. “Umm…what’s going on right now?”

Six is Drew’s brother-in-law, so this is definitely a conversation she shouldn’t be privy to. “Just party stuff. Some issues with the—”

“Graham thinks we ought to get married,” Keeley says. “Like, tonight. In Vegas.”

Drew’s eyes widen, and I wait for her to say, “that’s insane” or “you guys hate each other.”

Instead, she looks at Keeley. “Wow. What are you going to do?”

“I still don’t even know why he asked,” Keeley says, but she’s smiling, and it gives me hope that I can still sell her on this.

My fingers twine with hers. “Maybe I just wanted someone who’d force me to go to Santorini.”

She grins wider. “We both know that’s not true.”

I was joking, of course. But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I do want someone to force me to go Santorini. Maybe I’ve been locked up for a long time and I’m starting to think she’s the key to the outside.

“I want to marry you because you don’t wear enough clothing when you go out, and I want it to be my jacket you wear home at night. And because a part of me has wanted to marry you since the first time we spoke. You bring my entire world into color, and I don’t want to go back to the way it was.”

Tears spring to Keeley’s eyes. “I wasn’t planning to ever get married,” she whispers.

“I wasn’t either,” I tell her. “But I want to marry you.”

“Oh boy,” says Drew, pulling Keeley away. “We’re going to have a chat outside. Meet us out there in five.”

Keeley allows herself to be led, but at the last moment she turns and smiles at me.

I’m pretty sure it was a yes. And for the first time in decades, the future is technicolor and open wide, and I can’t wait for it to start.





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KEELEY





I listen breathlessly as he describes the night we wound up in Vegas. He’s told me bits of this, of course, but never in such detail. I feel like I can almost remember it now too. And then he stops.

“Come on,” he says, climbing out of the car.

“You can’t just end it there!” I protest.

In my head, he’s still inside the building a year ago, and I’ve gone outside with Drew. Even though I know things worked out okay, I want to scream at story-Graham and say, “go outside and get her, idiot, before Drew convinces her not to marry you!”

“We’re getting to the rest,” he says, reaching into the trunk and hoisting my bag over his shoulder before he grabs his own. It’s only now I realize he never put the surfboards on the roof, or packed our wetsuits. I’m shockingly unobservant at times.

He slams the trunk shut and comes over to where I stand, twining his fingers with mine as he leads me to the building’s entrance.

“What happened next is that Six stormed outside and grabbed you,” Graham says. “So I clocked him, which I’d been dying to do all day.”

I put a palm over my face. “Oh my God,” I groan. “You punched Six? Look, I know he’s kind of a douche, but he isn’t a bad person—”

Graham’s nostrils flare. “If you remembered the way he grabbed you, you might feel otherwise.”

I hide a smile. He’s still irritated over the attention I paid to another man a year ago. Then again, Anna Fucking Tattelbaum will never be my favorite person either. “Please continue.”