Faked (Ward Family #2)(71)
"Really?" I smiled. "And?"
"And he wants a hotheaded, stubborn asshole to be the new face of their company."
"Bauer!" I exclaimed, giving him as much of a hug as I could with a wriggling kitten clutched to my chest. "That's incredible."
"It is," he admitted. His cheeks were endearingly pink from my praise. "But it's still not the best part."
"There's more?"
He shook his head, eyes tracing every feature on my face. "There's you. That'll always be the best part of my day."
"Total boyfriend material," I whispered through my face-splitting grin.
When we faced the room together, I grabbed his hand, curled my fingers through his, and squeezed.
Epilogue
Bauer
Two months later
“Bauer, this is getting completely out of hand.”
I loved when Claire did that thing. When she set her hands on her hips and looked at me all I am serious right now. It was like getting reprimanded by the hot teacher you always had a crush on.
“She needs it.”
“She absolutely does not need it.”
Because she was standing there like she was, looking like she was, I tugged her to me for a hard kiss. “I like spoiling my girls rotten,” I said against her lips, sweet and smooth. “I didn’t hear you complaining last night when I bought that thing from that shop.”
Claire snorted.
When the spoiled girl in question wandered out of Claire’s bedroom, she scampered over to the bag waiting on the floor next to my feet. Her tail twitched while she sniffed along the top edge.
Before I sat on the floor to open it, I smacked Claire’s butt.
Bag cast aside as soon as I had my back braced against the couch, I pulled the box out and started opening the sides. Belle curled around my leg and butted her head against my thigh when I didn’t immediately scratch her head. “Hey pretty girl,” I cooed. “I bought you something new for when Mommy is ignoring you to do her homework. She’s so mean, isn’t she?”
Claire sighed heavily, which made me grin.
“It’s a master’s program, Bauer, and I’m not ignoring her. Unlike you, I think the cat will be just fine if she’s not doted on every single second of the day.”
When I pulled the wooden contraption out of the box and set it on the floor for Belle to inspect it, Claire dissolved into helpless laughter.
“Where the hell did you find that?” she said as she wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.
“The greatest website ever. Where else would I find a cat whack-a-mole toy?”
Belle studied the setup, cautiously sticking her nose into the first of the holes. Weaving her small body around to the front, she stared at the wooden levers before pushing on one with her paw.
When a small blue mole popped up out of the corresponding hole, she scrambled back. I grinned up at Claire, who was shaking her head.
“See? She loves it.”
“You’re gonna go broke buying her all these toys.”
I stood with a groan.
“Your knee?” she asked. “Should I tell Scotty to take it easy on your poor, poor body? He’s training you too hard.”
Pointing at the offending spot, I leaned in for another quick kiss. “My hip. Which is your fault, not Scotty’s.”
Claire smiled. Given we still lived about two and a half hours apart, we made up the time we missed during the week on the weekends. And we made it up in spades.
But that would change, soon.
“You still okay checking out that apartment with me?” I asked her.
“Yup. I’m done with my paper, so I’m good to go whenever you are.”
Claire finished her bachelor’s and slid straight into an online Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health Master’s program with the University of South Florida, and her work ethic blew my mind. The times she did have to finish an assignment when I was over, sometimes I’d just sit back and stare in complete awe of her while she worked on a paper or did research.
Hot teacher fantasy, I’m telling you. I begged her to wear black-framed glasses and stick her hair up in a bun one night, and she did, after only a little persuasion. I broke her desk that night, but how was I to know that it wasn’t meant to bear the weight of two adults?
Given Belle was fully entranced with her new toy, one of about a dozen I’d bought her in the past couple of months, we ducked out of the apartment before she could dart out of the opened door with us.
“She won’t even notice we’re gone,” Claire said. She liked to tease me about being a cat dad, but really, the timing of my gift couldn’t have been better. Lia had left for London a couple of weeks earlier, which meant Claire was living alone for the first time in her entire life.
If either of us had felt ready for the next step, I probably would’ve moved in with her, but hell … she was only twenty-one, and we’d only been dating for a couple of months. And I needed to wrap up things in Whistler before I could relocate closer to Seattle.
Snoqualmie was a perfect compromise. I had a mountain to keep me busy, and I’d be less than thirty miles away from Claire.
Closer was definitely better.