well.
I still didn’t know how to deal with any of this, so I kept my mouth shut.
“So you what, dropped that little warning in my lap and then…?” Erika lifted her eyebrows in question, though I could see the smile starting to form on her lips.
I huffed in annoyance at that. No one could ever stay mad at my brother. It was one of his most irritating characteristics. Something about the title, I was sure.
Javier finally grew serious at her question, though, and took a step back from the two of us. “I’m embarrassed to say that I had the two of you watched over the last week,” he said.
“Not all the time, of course,” he went on hurriedly. “But I… Well, I wanted to make sure that this was what you said it was. I wanted to make sure that you”—he glanced meaningfully at me—“were serious about settling down with this woman, who had flown halfway around the world to see you. And I wanted to make sure that you”—he turned his eyes to Erika—“were serious about him.”
“What, flying halfway around the world wasn’t enough to convince you?” she asked, her mouth trying hard to hide the smile that was trying to break out.
Javier finally gave her a bit of a smile back, and shrugged. “Would you do anything less, if it was your family on the line?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Did you see what you needed to see?”
“That and more,” he told her. “And may I be the first to offer you congratulations on your engagement?”
I reached out and pulled Erika against me before he could sweep her off her feet, scowling. “This one’s mine, Javier. You’ve already got a wife.”
He cocked his head and grinned at me, though, and I found that I couldn’t maintain the scowl on my face.
I was far too happy for that.
So when he held his arms open to us, Erika and I stepped forward together, partners, to hug him and accept his blessing.
Though that didn’t mean I was going to forgive him for having spied on us. If I was going to have a wife, and a family, then I guessed it meant I needed to have a serious talk with my brother about boundaries.
Because I’d finally found the girl of my dreams, and I’d somehow managed to get her to fall in love with me and agree to spend the rest of her life with me. And I wasn’t about to share that—or her—with anyone else. I didn’t care if he was the king of Tarana or not.
Epilogue
Seven Months Later: Erika
I got off the phone with my agent—that’s right, I had an agent!—and looked at my gorgeous husband, grinning.
“They said everything’s on schedule with the album,” I told him, almost incapable of speaking past the enormous smile on my face. “They said it’ll drop in a few weeks, just like they said it would.”
He wrapped me into one of his trademark hugs, laughing with excitement, and I let him. Despite my big belly, which insisted on getting in the way in a situation like this.
It had been doing that a lot, lately. I was right on top of my due date, which meant that the belly felt like it was starting to wear me. I was beyond ready to be finished with the whole process, and not only because I didn’t want to be pregnant anymore.
I wanted to meet our daughter. I wanted to know who she was going to be, see whether she had my eyes or Francisco’s, see whether she would come out with curly hair, like we were betting she would. Francisco had been encouraging me to go to the hospital early, so I could be there already when the time came, but I’d been fighting him on it.
Well. “Fighting him” was putting it pretty strongly. We hardly ever fought, beyond the occasional argument about who would be cooking dinner that night and whether I was too pregnant to take another road trip to yet another “nearby” city. But I’d been refusing to go to the hospital ahead of time.
There was just too much to get done before little Ana got here.
The biggest thing, of course, had been to move all of my things from Chicago to Orlo, because the moment Javier had decided that he would allow and even encourage our marriage, Francisco and I had both known that I was going to have to change my address.
After a lifetime of traveling and making trouble across the