Lana(27)

“I love you, Lana, and I want you to stay. You said you could never say no to me, and I intend to hold you to that. Marry me.”

He hadn’t made it a question, as though he just couldn’t quite do it, and that made me smile even through my tears.

He wiped the tears away as I nodded tremulously. “Yes,” I said, my heart filling with joy. I hadn’t been lying. I was literally incapable of telling him no.

He smiled, moving against me, and the relief in his face let me know just how much he’d feared my refusal.

“I love you,” I said breathlessly, as he pushed himself inside of me.

“Good,” he murmured roughly, “because I’m keeping you forever.”

“I’m planning our wedding, not Tutu and Mari,” I told him some time later.

He was folded against my back, his hand stroking my hip idly, while we caught up.

He kissed the side of my head. “It’s cute that you think that. Let me know how it works out for you.”

I laughed. “You don’t think I can go toe to toe with your mother and win?”

“I don’t think anyone can.”

“We’ll just see about that.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the end, it was a compromise. Tutu wanted to plan the wedding in two weeks. I wanted two months. We settled on one. I wanted a smaller ceremony, with family and our closest friends. Tutu thought it was completely rude not to invite the entire island. She was closer to winning that one than I was, though I insisted on a ceremony on the beach at my family’s villa, and I got my way there.

I made my dear friend Bianca fly in a week before the wedding. Since she’d retired from being a flight attendant to be a painter full-time, we’d taken to calling each other nearly every day. I’d been helping her plan her own wedding, and I thought that it was only fair that she become equally involved in my own special day.

James, her ridiculously possessive fiancé, couldn’t join her for several days, and I picked her up myself from the airport for some one-on-one girl time. Well, as one-on-one as we could get, since she had a full-time bodyguard that tried to follow her everywhere. Considering that she’d been shot just a few months ago, I couldn’t completely blame her crazy future husband for going to such lengths. Two men had died in the attack, and she, her bestie, and her bodyguard had all been shot. I had heard about the whole thing after the fact, when she was in the hospital. I thought of how worried I’d been when I heard about the tragic incident. They’d known she would live by the time I learned of the attack, but I’d rushed to her side, completely distraught. I couldn’t even imagine how James must have felt.

We hugged. She tried to pull away first, but I held on tight. “Thank you so much for coming,” I said into her good ear. “I know it must have been a fight. Is James still having a hard time letting you out of his sight?”

She laughed, and I pulled back to look at her. Her hair nearly covered the quarter-sized, pink scar back near her jaw. It still made me want to cry every time I saw it. Not because it looked that bad, but because I’d heard the story of how it had happened, and the thought that we had come so close to losing her was still a tender wound for me.

The scar got to me, but Bianca seemed completely over it. She didn’t try to hide it, or show it off. It was as though she’d already forgotten about it. Even the hearing aid that she’d had to adopt didn’t seem to affect her, and I’d only heard her complain one time about the fact that she hadn’t been able to eat solid food for over a month after the attack.

I’d made a comment once about the fact that a traumatizing incident that would have defeated most people seemed to have barely affected her.

“We were so lucky that it’s hard to sweat the small stuff anymore,” she’d responded with her little shrug. She was just like that, weathering storms in that quiet way of hers. She fascinated and impressed me in so many ways, because she was both one of the most soft-spoken, and one of the strongest women that I’d ever met.

“Jackie tried to come with me,” she told me, as we walked to my car. “I had to put my foot down. I wanted some time with just the two of us, but I guarantee she’ll be here within two days.”

I smiled. I could tell by her tone that Jackie was growing on her. “And how many days do you think James and Stephan will stay away?”

She pursed her lips, taking the question more seriously than I’d intended. “I predict they’ll come together, and if they don’t show up by tomorrow, I’ll be surprised. I actually think that Stephan will be the one to egg James on, because James is afraid he’s been too smothering since the attack, and Stephan would never think of it that way. The only girls’ time we’re guaranteed is today, most likely, so what should we do before my boys crash the party?”

I laughed at her matter-of-fact tone. She didn’t sound a bit put-out about it, either, which was good, because I couldn’t imagine James becoming less possessive of her time in the near or distant future.

“Well, we need to stop by for a last dress fitting. It shouldn’t take too long, so how about an afternoon at the spa?”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said easily.

We met Mari at the bridal shop. She was my maid-of-honor, and Bianca was a bridesmaid, but it was the first time the two of them had met. I was relieved but unsurprised when they got along right off the bat. Neither were the type to cause drama.