Page 108 of My Dark Prince
“Yes. Isn’t he a dreamboat?”
“He’ssomething,” Ollie muttered into his mug.
I advanced toward his precious coffee machine, a sophisticated model that must have cost five figures. Stretching onto my tiptoes, I reached for a mug in the overhead cabinet. My breasts swayed with the movement.
Oliver twisted around, visibly flustered. “Do you want me to make you coffee?”
“It’s okay, I’ve got this. You sit and rest.”
“Careful. Mom got that custom-made for me in Italy. It’s the only machine of its kind and irreplaceable. The manufacturer shut down years ago.”
I waved him off. “You’re such a worrywart.”
He turned back to his laptop. I grabbed one of the valves in the coffee machine and twisted it the wrong way, purposefully unscrewing it. It fell off with aclank.
“Oh, shoot.” Itsked, slapping my thigh. “I broke the coffee machine. You don’t mind, do you?”
If he looked closer, he’d realize that it would take ten seconds to screw the valve back on, but he didn’t. Smoke practically oozed from Ollie’s ears. He remained rigid, facing his laptop, probably because he didn’t want to yell at me.
He cleared his throat, his spine ramrod straight. “It’s fine.”
I drifted to the industrial walk-in fridge, retrieved a cold brew, and plopped beside him, sending my best winning smile his way. He frowned at his screen. I was a thorn in his side. Little did he know, I was about to make him bleed.
“So.” I slurped the coffee loud, a major pet peeve of his since we were kids. “I was thinking … for our wedding …”
He ground his teeth through the obnoxious slurps, forcing himself to look up at me. “Yes?”
“Dallas mentioned you hosted her wedding here.”
“I did,” he drew out the words, his apprehension obvious.
“She sent me a binder of your emails printed out. The ones you sent her with suggestions for the wedding.”
I left out the part where we’d giggled on the plane about how ridiculous most of them were and collectively agreed that Oliver needed to step up his trolling game. I, on the other hand, needed no help in this domain.
Ollie closed his laptop, choosing his next words carefully. “Those were a joke.”
“Were they? I found some great ideas in the binder.” I conjured the eight-inch binder and plopped it on the table. It rattled the entire frame with its weight. “Plus, Dal said you seemed enthusiastic about them, so I thought I’d incorporate as much as I can into the wedding.”
“Dal?” he echoed, watching me flip mindlessly through the pages.
“Yeah. Her nickname, silly. I’m not gonna call mybest friendby her government name. I just … I don’t …” I shrugged. “I feel soblessedto be in a relationship with you.”
“You do?”
“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted. You would never let me down. Never lie to me. Never abandon me like my parents and Cooper did. You put me first, always.” I stared right into his eyes, watching him flinch with each word I speared him with. “I love you, Oliver.”
He said nothing.
What could he, when he was absolutely none of these traits?
I sighed, stopping on a page I’d bookmarked. “I don’t want to be a bridezilla and make the wedding all about what I want, so I’d rather simply take your suggestions and run with them. Not that I even remember what I want anyway. This solves that problem.”
“Yeah. Totally.” He seemed lost in thought, still caught on my earlier description of him.
I leaned over the table and snapped him out of it with a hard kiss to his cheek. “It’s like you were thinking ahead of time when you compiled this.”
“What I was thinking was that I’d fuck with Romeo andDal, since neither particularly wanted to marry one another at that point in time.”
