The Last Eligible Billionaire(99)

She rises on her tiptoes and presses her lips to mine. “You are my favorite kind of everything.”

And this is why it’s so easy to love Begonia.

Oh, yes. Love.

It hasn’t been four full months since she startled the hell out of me at the house she now insists we call Driftwood Manor—all your houses need names if one has a name, and I was driftwood in your house when you found me—and in those four months, we’ve spent most of our time in Virginia, with Begonia making list after list of things that need to be done to the summer camp to bring it back to its original glory, and me making list after list of improvements on her ideas.

Razzle Dazzle does nothing small, even if the end result might look like a normal summer camp. I’m not destroying her vision. Merely putting additional support beams beneath it so that it runs as smoothly as if it were the next Razzle Dazzle Village.

But I was talking about love.

And about living with Begonia, who gives it so very freely, to everyone, with no expectation of anything in return and no fear of rejection—if they don’t want love, I can’t fix that for them—that I’ve rediscovered the meaning of the word.

The way it’s meant to be used.

She makes love her own.

She claims it.

She doesn’t hide from it or let other people tell her what it is.

And so I’m following her lead, and in our house, there’s only real love.

Unselfish, whole-hearted, freely-given love.

This woman is helping me heal my very soul.

And she insists that my easy acceptance of her joy for the little things in the world is something she could never find in another man, nor would she want to.

It’s so foreign to me to think that anyone wouldn’t love her for exactly who she is, and perhaps that, more than anything, means I truly am the right man for her.

It’s mind-boggling that simply accepting a person can mean so much, and yet here I stand, contemplating how easily I love this woman who’s accepted me and all of my broken and ugly parts too.

She kisses me once more, then goes flat-footed again, drops her hands from my face, and grabs me by the arm. “Show me the dance floor.”

I give her the grand tour while the violins play, and as we reach the private quarters below deck, where I intend to give Begonia the best part of the tour, Marshmallow appears.

He’s soaking wet and carrying a fire extinguisher.

Begonia’s eyes go wide.

One wrong squeeze of his jaw, and we’ll be covered in the contents of that thing.

“Put it down,” I tell him. “And then go dry yourself off.”

We have a fifty-fifty shot that the dog will obey.

He’s quite a nuisance.

And we can’t help but love that about him.

Especially now that the houses we spend the most time in have all been Marshmallow-proofed.

Mostly.

The dog drops the fire extinguisher, shakes his whole body, coating us and the sleeping quarters in wet dog-scented droplets, and Begonia makes a noise that I’ve learned very well these past few months.

“Let it out, bluebell,” I tell her.

She does, and before long, I can’t help laughing with her.

She’s joy, and she gives me joy.

“When we get back to Driftwood Manor, we’re locking him in his room, and then I’m going to recreate the day we met,” she informs me.

My cock stirs. “Are you?”

“I am.” She slips her arms around my neck and smiles at me. “Except without the hot wax and hair dye.”

“And the singing?”

She laughs all over again, and I couldn’t hold myself back from kissing her if the world depended on it.

There’s nothing in the world like my happy Begonia.

“I love you,” I murmur against her lips, my heart kicking up as it always does when those three words leave my lips. “I love you and adore you and want to spend the rest of my days cherishing and worshipping you.”

She sighs, a contented sound that eases the lingering anxiety I still sometimes feel when I utter that four-letter word, her breath warm and delicious against my skin. “I love you isn’t enough for how I feel about you.”

I kiss her softly, slowly, until she’s slipping her hands under my shirt to push it up and over my head, and then her shirt is gone—bra too—and slow and soft won’t cut it anymore.

I need her.

I need her more than I need air.

And thanks to a little twist of fate, I’ll never be without her again.





BONUS EPILOGUE





Hayes



There’s a vast difference between living a life of obligation and living a life of joy.

I’ve found I prefer the latter.

Even when it comes with two hundred screaming adolescents hyped-up on sugar sitting in an outdoor amphitheater for campfire skits and the end of the summer marshmallow roast.

Yes, yes, I’ve spent most of the summer hiding in the main house or the offices, or utilizing the private areas that Begonia insisted be roped off from the campers—and by roped off, she means triple-gated with fences and hedges and trees and monitored with cameras and motion detectors like a prison, because she did grow up as a camper and knows what they’re capable of.