“For helping us out. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.”
“You would have found someone.”
“But not the best, and I wanted the best.” He tapped his bottle of water against hers. “We can pretend this is champagne.”
“After hauling half a ton of soil around the place, I’d take water over champagne any day.”
“I hope that’s not true because I’m taking you to dinner tonight to celebrate.”
“
You mean like a date?”
“Not like a date,” he drawled. “It is a date.”
“Sounds good to me.” She thought about how much things had changed in less than two months.
Then, she’d been nervous about having dinner with him, and now they were virtually living together.
With Roxy in her apartment, the option to move back downstairs had been removed.
At one time that would have panicked her, but not now.
There was a new intimacy to their relationship.
“So this dinner—am I dressing up?”
“You are. It’s an excuse to wear your starfish necklace.”
“I’ve worn it almost every day since we came back from Puffin Island.”
“We should go back there soon. Make a trip to see the baby before the weather turns cold.”
Emily had given birth to a little boy a few weeks earlier. They’d called him Finn after a friend of Ryan’s, a photo-journalist who had been killed while reporting from Afghanistan.
According to Ryan, mother and baby were doing well, and little Lizzy was so in love with baby Finn it was touching.
“That sounds good.” Just how good, surprised her. Just as she was surprised by how much she loved being in a relationship with Matt. It made her giddy and dizzy with excitement.
She’d never had a long relationship before, but she was loving every minute of it.
When she was wrapped up in Urban Genie work, they talked and texted regularly and she found herself telling him all sorts of things she’d never told anyone before. Somehow Matt had become a key element of her life. She found herself wanting to share every little thing with him.
She’d been wrong to think that she wasn’t capable of having a relationship, she thought happily. Wrong to think she couldn’t trust.
It had been a gradual process, but little by little things had changed.
She trusted Matt totally.
She trusted their relationship.
She’d never been happier.
Chapter Eighteen
Life is like a seagull. You never know when it’s going to drop something nasty on your head.
—Frankie