put on the kitchen island and coated with cake batter was one thing. But insisting on being with her after she’d puked on him—and likely would again—and would be costing him paperwork headaches, if not actual money, and would probably not be up for kitchen-island canoodling for a little bit was another thing entirely.
She lifted onto her toes and tipped her head, wanting to kiss him. But he was enough taller than her that he had to meet her partway.
Which he did. They kissed, but it was sweet.
That was nice. It really was.
But she wanted more. Josie arched closer, gripping the front of his shirt, and opened her mouth.
Of course, just then her bastard gall bladder decided to remind her that he wanted out and the sooner the better. She felt the stab under her ribs and gasped.
Grant seemed to realize it wasn’t a gasp of pleasure—or maybe it was the way she stiffened in his arms suddenly—but he lifted his head frowning down at her.
“Are you okay?”
Josie pressed her hand into her side even though she knew that wouldn’t help. She gave him a smile. Or she tried to. The way his frown deepened, she was pretty sure her smile had come off as more of a grimace. “Sorry,” she said.
“Jesus, don’t be sorry.”
He bent and lifted her into his arms, tipping her so quickly her head spun a little. He kept doing that—picking her up as if it were nothing.
She liked it.
“Let’s get you to bed,” he said, starting in the direction of the main part of the house. It was really the only direction to go from the kitchen other than out the back door again.
“This isn’t really how I imagined you saying that to me,” she said, pointing toward the staircase.
He started to climb. “Not how I imagined saying it either.”
“Ugh!”
He chuckled. “One thing at a time, tiger. I’ll be taking you to bed every night for a long time.”
Her heart stuttered at those words. That sounded amazing. She wouldn’t even mind if he carried her to bed. She would never admit that to her strong, feisty, best friends, but yeah, she liked this. A lot.
But would he be doing it for a long time? Maybe to Grant a long time was three months. To her a long time, at least in terms of marriage, was fifty to sixty years. She sighed. This marriage was practical. It would be fun and sexy too, which was great. But it was not a till-death-do-us-part kind of marriage. In fact, she’d kind of like to leave that out of the service, come to think of it. She did not want to promise that in front of her friends and family and God and all, knowing that it was until her stomach healed and her debt was paid off.
She was going to have to look up how long it took people to recover from gall bladder surgery. She was guessing that, even if she milked it a little, it wasn’t going to get her to her silver wedding anniversary.
“Which one?” Grant asked at the top of the stairs.
“Second on the right.”
He stepped through the doorway to her bedroom, and Josie was struck by three things at once. How damned big he was, how feminine her bedroom was, and how much she wanted him to stay.
This wasn’t the master bedroom of the house, but it was the one that Josie had stayed in when she’d been a little girl visiting her grandparents. Even though she’d lived in Appleby too, spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s house had been a treat, and she’d slept over often. She had incredibly good, warm, happy memories here, and when she’d moved into the house, it had felt wrong to sleep in any other room.
Grant set her down on the edge of her bed. The duvet was a light green that went with the pale green walls and white wood trim around the doorway and windows and the baseboards. She had only sheer curtains over the windows because she loved the sunlight, and this room got amazing morning sun.
All of her white, wooden bedroom furniture had been handed down to her with the house, including the rocking chair in the corner with the pile of books next to it and the green, blue, and white blanket that her grandmother had knitted for her draped over the arm. She’d slept in this bed, though she’d replaced the mattress a few years ago, when she’d been a