“It wasn’t shitty. You asked it with a shitty attitude for some reason, but the question itself is valid.”
“I never should have—”
“Hey,” he whispered in my ear. “I wouldn’t wish that nightmare on anyone, but I absolutely believe fate was in control of that flight. At least for me. Because through a statistically impossible chain of events, it brought me here. With you.”
Oh my God.
Oh.
My.
God.
While I was having some sort of jealousy-induced stroke, comparing myself to a deep-fried appetizer, this gorgeous and wonderful man was sitting beside me, thinking fate had brought us together.
Chancing a glance at him, I tilted my head up. “I wish it hadn’t taken a plane crash for us to meet.”
He smiled and used both hands to palm my face. “Me too. But fate isn’t always the good stuff, Remi. Sometimes the path provided isn’t a straight line but rather a journey filled with obstacles and detours. It took the unimaginable for me to find you, but I will never stop being grateful that there was even one single junction in time in which our paths crossed.”
I closed my eyes and blew out a shaky breath. I was grateful for that too. Whether it was fated or coincidence didn’t matter. Bowen Michaels was mine.
I wanted to tell him I loved him.
I wanted to tell him I was sorry he’d lost Sally.
I wanted to tell him that, whether I believed in soul mates or not, I knew that he was someone I saw a future with.
But I’d said enough for one evening. “Let’s go home. It’s getting late and three is going to take you a long time.”
He grinned. “And you have an oral presentation to prepare for.”
I brushed my nose against his. “After that win, your fingers have done a lot for me already tonight. What do you say you give them a rest and we both do a little oral presenting…at the same time?”
I don’t know how it happened, but in the very next blink, I was off my stool, one of his arms under my legs, the other wrapped around my back to hold me against his chest.
“Bowen!” I laughed, clinging to his neck.
“You better get your nachos,” he said, carrying me past our waitress.
She lifted a paper gift card in the air, and I snagged it from her hand as he paraded me out the door as if I were the real prize he’d gone there for.
Turned out, Bowen’s fingers didn’t need a night off after all.
He made me come with his hand down the front of my shorts on the way home.
On his mouth, atop his couch as soon as we walked through the door, unable to even make it to the bedroom.
And just before midnight, he finished the hat trick with his cock, me on my knees, him taking me from behind.
Bowen
“Soooo, how’s work?” my mom asked through the phone as I wiped my bathroom counter.
I rolled my eyes knowing good and damn well this call had absolutely nothing to do with my job. We’d been on the phone long enough for me to scrub down both the bathrooms, sweep the kitchen, fold a load of laundry, and pack up another load to be dropped off at the dry cleaner.
Tyson gave me hell for not hiring someone to clean for me, but there was something therapeutic about the act of such mundane tasks. Maybe it was the distraction of it all, or possibly the ability to wash the past away and start fresh and new. But whatever the case might have been, it afforded me countless hours to humor my mother and sister with their marathon phone calls.
“It’s good. Oscar is finally moving into his office next week. When I named it Michaels & Company, I had no idea the company part would be so hard to find. But it will be nice not to have to turn away business for a change.”
“Anything else going on in your life that you might feel the need to tell your mom about?”
There it was: the real reason she called.
With the phone wedged between my shoulder and ear, I rinsed the rag out. “You mean like something Cassidy may have told you, but I haven’t yet, so you called and talked my ear off for over an hour until you eventually ran out of things to say so now you’re passive-aggressively asking since I still haven’t spilled the goods?”
“Sure,” she chirped, no shame in her game. “You got anything like that you want to tell me? I’m really more like a friend, you know.”
Grinning, I tossed the dirty cloth into the bucket and flipped the light off. “Hardly and not really.”
“Bowen Alexander Michaels,” she scolded. “Why are you torturing me with this?”
I barked a laugh. “I’m not torturing you. I’m happy, Mom. How much more do you need?”
