Page 93 of My Dark Prince
He wouldn’t today.
Oliver shot me an unreadable look. Again, I found myself confused. We’d spoken about starting a family together since our first date. He knew where I stood. No way would we get engaged without discussing this. And if we did, he wouldn’t be swallowing a lump in his throat the size of Baylor.
“Don’t care either way.” He lifted a shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “Leaving it up to you.”
“Well, I do want them. But you know this already.”
“Good. I promise to work diligently on making it happen.”
“Don’t you care about the world you’ll be leaving behind for our kids?”
He squinted at the clouds, frowning. “Isn’t Elon colonizing Mars?”
Elon?They were on first name basis? Was he friends with the guy? Forget it. I didn’t want to know.
“And if he is?”
“We’ll buy them a few lots. They’ll be okay.”
I shook my head. “This is outrageous.”
“Hey, hey, we haven’t even looked at the price sheet, yet.”
“What are other people, who aren’t wealthy enough to buy a place on Mars, going to do?”
Oliver’s light eyes brimmed with something suspiciously close to annoyance, but he kept his voice light. “Sweetheart,
I barely care about the lives of my best friends. To care about the lives of hypothetical future strangers is a stretch.”
I pressed my lips together, stifling a scream. “I really don’t know what we found in one another.”
I would say we stuck together as childhood sweethearts, but the four-year, college-sized gap in our romance proved otherwise.
“Happy to give you a demonstration once you get your memory back,” he drawled, making a show of clicking buttons I was fifty percent sure he only clicked to distract me.
“Do you ever think about things that aren’t sex?”
“Rarely – and not voluntarily.”
“I can’t believe you’re in your thirties.”
Actually, I couldn’t believe this was the same Oliver von Bismarck I’d pined over as a child. What happened to him? But I suspected I knew.
Seb.
“Me either.” He adjusted the throttles. “Trust me.”
The engine’s soft rumble hummed in my ears, accompanied by the occasional confirmation from traffic control. Silence stretched between us. The uncomfortable, tense kind.Notthe silence of well-seasoned couples.
“So …” Oliver cleared his throat, restarting the conversation out of nowhere. “I guess you won’t be attending the official grand opening of the Grand Regent’s artificial ski resort in Palm Springs?”
I whipped my head toward him, aghast. “That’s the desert.”
“Until it becomes beachfront property in thirty years.”
My jaw struggled to remain attached to its socket. “Whose idea was that?”
He pointed at himself.
