Page 90 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

"You know about the book?"

“This is Tessa we’re talking about. Everyone knows about the book. Besides, she came to me for background information on art collecting. I am something of an expert, you know.”

"You're just full of surprises today, Richard Sterling."

"Forty-five years of practicing law teaches you to keep a few things close. I’ll have to show you my new Piazzetta sometime." He pulled out his files, spreading them across the counter with the familiar efficiency of a man returning to solid ground. "Now. About Wednesday's hearing."

I settled in to listen, grateful—not for the first time in six weeks—that whatever chaos Ethan had dragged into my life, it had come attached to people like Richard Sterling. People capable of carrying old guilt honestly, of choosing correction over comfortable denial, of building something better even decades after the damage was done.

Vovô would have called that the whole point of everything.

Better late than never. Building instead of destroying.

Even when it took forty years to get there.

Chapter thirty

The Question

Ethan

Six months is apparently how long it takes to go from "professionally destroyed disaster" to "cautiously optimistic almost-normal person," at least according to my extremely unscientific personal timeline.

The ethics board, in the end, split the difference between mercy and punishment: eighteen-month suspension instead of permanent disbarment, contingent on completing an ethics course that I privately suspected had been designed by someone who'd read my case file and decided to make an example out of me in workshop form. Judge Morrison's letter had apparently mattered. So had Jennifer Walsh's testimony aboutmy cooperation with the criminal case, and—somewhat to my surprise—so had two hundred witness statements from Lopez Island residents who'd shown up exactly like they'd promised, submitting written accounts of what the fraud exposure had actually protected.

Marcus's civil suit collapsed three months in, once the criminal case against Hutchins and the investment group resulted in guilty pleas across the board—turns out juries and defendants alike find it hard to argue "he stole documents maliciously" when the documents in question prove an actual, admitted criminal conspiracy. Marcus settled for a face-saving nuisance amount that Richard negotiated down to nearly nothing, and Victoria Curtis's additional complaint quietly evaporated once her brother's credibility imploded alongside his firm's.

Caldwell & Associates dissolved entirely eight weeks ago, the partners scattering to smaller firms with noticeably diminished client lists. I felt approximately zero sympathy about this.

Patterson & Associates opened their Lopez Island satellite office in April, which meant I now spent three days a week doing paralegal and investigative work from a converted boathouse near the marina, and would transition to full associate status the moment my suspension lifted in eleven months. It wasn't the corner office I used to have. It was better.

And Maya—Maya had spent six months running the busiest bakery in the San Juan Islands, expanding to supply two more hotels, hiring a second full-time baker so she could occasionally leave before 6 PM, and generally becoming the kind of local legend that made tourists specifically plan trips around pastéis de nata availability.

We'd built exactly the life we'd promised each other that midnight in her kitchen. Messy, complicated, occasionally involving unexpected process servers, but real.

Which was why I was currently standing on the north-island overlook with a ring box burning a hole through my jacket pocket like it had opinions about my nerve.

"You're doing the thing," Maya said, hiking up the trail behind me, slightly out of breath from the climb. "The thing where you go quiet and stare at the water like it personally wronged you."

"I don't have a thing."

"You absolutely have a thing. You've had a thing for months. Tessa noticed it too, so when her next book comes out, be prepared to read about Edgar the lawyer doing the exact same thing.”

"Maybe I'm just admiring the view."

"You've admired this exact view roughly four hundred times since we started dating. I know what regular Ethan-admiring-a-view looks like, and this isn't it. This is nervous Ethan. Suspiciously well-dressed Ethan, might I add, for what you described as 'just a hike.'" She gestured at my definitely-too-nice shirt for hiking terrain. "What's going on?"

I turned to face her, and every carefully rehearsed speech I'd been practicing for a week evaporated instantly, the way they apparently always do in moments like this, leaving nothing but the actual truth standing there unrehearsed.

"Twenty years ago, I stood somewhere near here—not this exact spot, but close—the night before I left for college. Reflecting on how I was so angry at everything, so certain I'd never figure out how to be someone worth respecting. I spent fifteen years destroying things efficiently and calling it success. Then I came back to this island, met you—properly met you, adult you, brilliant and stubborn and completely unimpressed by my corporate credentials—and everything your grandfather taught me finally made sense. Building isn't just better than destroying. It's the only thing that actually means anything."

"Ethan—" Her voice had gone soft, uncertain in the specific way that told me she'd started to suspect where this was headed.

"I've spent six months building a life with you. A real one—messy, occasionally sued, definitely more complicated than either of us planned. And I don't want to just keep building it as some undefined, ongoing arrangement. I want to build it as something permanent. Something with your grandfather's name on it, honestly, because Romano built this island's trust one loaf of bread at a time, and I'd be honored beyond words to spend my life trying to live up to that."

I got down on one knee, which on a rocky overlook trail was significantly less graceful than movies made it look, and pulled out the ring—simple, vintage, found at an estate sale in Anacortes because I'd wanted something with history instead of something engineered to look expensive.

"Maya Romano, I destroyed your family's bakery once, twenty years ago, in the worst moment of my life. Your grandfather gave me a chance to build it back. You gave me a chance to become someone worth loving. I would like to spend the rest of my life proving both of you right. Will you marry me?"