When I turned around, King was snuggling back down into the covers, faking sleep again.
I let out a sigh. “Fine. Let’s go look at the house.”
He was up and dressing before I finished the sentence.
It was spring in small-town Texas which delighted me even more than I expected. As we wandered across the town square, we saw several families congregating on the grass, chatting and enjoying cups of coffee outside of Nico’s bakery. Two kids had ice cream cones that seemed a little out of place that early in the morning.
“Since when do you serve ice cream?” King asked his brother-in-law because, yes, they’d all come with us.
Nico muttered something under his breath about Stevie wearing the pants in the family. I leaned over to whisper in King’s ear. “Isn’t Stevie with the fire chief?”
King flapped his hand in the air. “Yes. He wears the pants with the chief too. Stevie has lots of pants.”
I reached for the flapping hand and twined my fingers with his. “Are you sure about this?”
He looked over at me with an expression of confusion. “What part? The move to Hobie? The consulting firm?”
“All of it. Going into business with me. What if we fight?” It was something I’d brought up a million times back in Paris when we were planning everything. King had been patient with me while I hemmed and hawed about quitting my job. After capturing Le Chaton, I’d finally been promoted to SAIC. It hadn’t been easy to walk away from that since I’d spent so long thinking that promotion was all I’d needed to be happy.
But I’d been so damned wrong.
“Oh, we’re going to fight. There’s no question about that,” King said with a laugh. He pointed ahead to where Charlie had just shoved Hudson into someone’s shrubbery. “He’s pissed because Hudson brought home a barn cat without asking, and it’s driving the dog crazy.”
“Be serious. You know what I mean. We haven’t—”
King stepped forward and turned to face me, stopping my progress down the sidewalk with a hand to my chest. “We haven’t known each other that long,” he mocked in a deeper “Falcon” voice, “and I just think we should be aware of the challenges we face when two such different people—”
MJ joined in with her mock Falcon voice too. “Come together after such a short period of time.”
I stared at them. “I hate all of you.”
King walked into my arms and wrapped me in his. “You don’t. You love me. And you know how I know that? Because you’ve told me every day for months.”
I leaned down and kissed his soft lips, feeling the contrasting prickly scratch of his heavy scruff. “I do. I love you so much it scares me,” I told him. His family members had walked on toward the house, leaving us alone on the quiet patch of sidewalk.
“Don’t be scared, Dirk,” King said. “Because I love you too, and I want what you want. To settle down and build a life together. I want to take MJ up on her offer of carrying our child one day so we can teach them about art and take them around the world to see all of the amazing cultures. I want to share a home with you and encourage you to do what makes you happy. And if that’s not the business we talked about—”
I shook my head. “It is. I promise. MJ’s idea of starting the security consulting business was brilliant. There’s no one better suited to help people protect their art collections than the two of us together. I just don’t want you to feel rushed into anything. I know one of your brothers suggested getting the business up and running in time to have a booth at the Hootenanny in July, but I’m not sure I truly understand what a Hootenanny is. We didn’t have those in Michigan.”
King snorted. “It’s like a pride parade with 50 percent less skin and 100 percent more fried food… wait, actually, now that I think about it, there’s almost as much skin. But most of it is sunburnt.”
I ran my fingers through his floppy hair. Just being in this man’s presence made me feel light and happy. “I love you.”
He stopped talking and his jaw clicked closed. “I thought we already went over this?”
“Nadine called me earlier today.”
“Mpfh.”
My boyfriend wasn’t my ex-boss’s biggest fan, but I ignored his grunt of disapproval.
“She said a courier delivered something unexpected to her at the office.”
“We should catch up with everyone,” King said, nodding toward the clutch of Wildes spilling into someone’s yard ahead of us. “They’re waiting for us.”
“She said it was a little notebook filled with the location of countless works of stolen art,” I continued. “Enough to keep her team busy for a year if it checks out.”