“He’s appointed himself your son’s guardian,” Geoffrey told us, and I’m pretty sure the butler’s right. The same must be true for my other cats as well, because they now spend most of their day with the baby. At this very moment, Cottonball is warming his feet, Queen Elizabeth is guarding the top of his head, and Mouse—the nine-month-old calico who’s the newest addition to our family—is curled up at his side.
Marcus is the one who found her and brought her home. He had a business meeting in Greenwich, Connecticut, four months ago, and as he was waiting for the train back to the city, Mouse trotted up to him, meowing at full volume. She was painfully thin, clearly malnourished, so Marcus fed her some tuna from his sandwich, and a love affair was born.
“She followed me onto the train,” he explained apologetically when he brought the kitten home from the vet. “I couldn’t chase her off, now could I? And the vet said the shelters are full…”
“You did the right thing,” I said firmly, though I was somewhat worried about introducing the kitten to my cats. Next to them, she was tiny, like a mouse, and I was afraid they’d treat her like one. But after a couple of hours of wary looks and arched backs, Queen Elizabeth embraced the newcomer, and her siblings followed suit, welcoming the kitten—now officially named Mouse—into our household, where she’s been thriving, and loving Marcus, ever since.
Yes, my once-anti-pet husband now has two cats—Cottonball and Mouse—madly in love with him, and he doesn’t mind it one bit.
“Just look at that. I think my heart is melting,” Marcus whispers, staring at the baby-and-cats tableau, and I nod, too choked up to speak. I feel like that all the time these days, and I think it’s only partially the postpartum hormones.
We didn’t get married last December—a victory I achieved by arguing that I didn’t want Marcus to wear a cast at our wedding. Instead, we said our vows at the end of January, some six weeks after his hospital proposal, on the pier in Flagler Beach. It was a small, intimate ceremony, with just my grandparents and our closest friends, whom Marcus flew to Florida in his private plane. Afterward, we honeymooned in Fiji, where my husband pulled out all the stops, renting us a luxurious over-the-water bungalow on a private island. For three weeks straight, we swam in the crystal-clear waters, feasted on tropical fruit, and lazed around—or our version of lazing around, which involved our laptops and a fair amount of work. It was during those weeks that I wrote the majority of my first book, also a romantic thriller, which I quietly self-published two months later under a pen name and with zero expectations of commercial success.
To my surprise, it sold. A few dozen copies the first week, a few hundred the second as favorable retailer algorithms kicked in. Then some prominent bloggers picked it up, and a week later, I took Marcus out to his favorite single-berry restaurant and fessed up about my secret project and how well it’s done. He was proud of me, if more than a little hurt that I hadn’t told him earlier, and I promised never to hide anything from him again.
Now he’s my most avid fan, reading each scene as I write it and offering suggestions, and talking up my books to everyone we meet. He also funded the advertising campaign for my second novel, helping it hit all the bestseller lists. Or rather, we funded it, since shortly after we got married, I agreed to combine our accounts.
We’re family, and there’s no longer his or mine, only ours.
So yes, I’m now a full-time author, though I still edit on the side for some of my old clients—mostly because I enjoy it. The flexibility of my new career suits me, especially since Marcus and I decided not to wait to have children, and our little milk muncher was conceived almost right away.
I was right about Marcus’s swimmers; they are as ruthless and determined as the man himself.
Standing next to him now, seeing the love and tenderness on his strong, handsome face, I feel a surge of happiness so intense my chest feels too small to contain it. “I love you,” I whisper, lacing our fingers together, and as his gaze shifts to me, his cool blue eyes kindling with that dark, fierce hunger, I know that for him, I’ll always be a prize worth fighting for—worth crossing any line for.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
THE END