“Well, so far on this vacation, you have done no wrong,” she said, smiling as she toyed with the hair at the nape of my neck. “I’m going to miss you tomorrow, but I don’t want you to worry about having to go back to work. You didn’t need to do this for me, but thank you.”
“I know I didn’t need to, but I wanted to. And you’re welcome.” I dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose and took her hand, leading her over to meet Dudley, the driver, and Victor and Victoria, the horses.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said to Dudley after I’d made the introductions. Then she spent a good ten minutes cooing over Victor and Victoria while I went over our itinerary for the evening with Dudley.
“Are we actually going to get on this thing, or would you rather spend the rest of the night with them?” I joked, wrapping my arms around her from behind and nuzzling her neck. “I mean, I get that they’re cute but I’m cuter, right?”
“Nope,” she said happily. “They’re definitely cuter, but you’re not so bad.”
Laughing as she turned around in the circle of my arms, she touched her palm to my cheek. “We’re all spending the night together, though. Aren’t we? Or did you just bring the horses here to say hi before they go pick up someone else.”
I chuckled. “Well, at this rate, they might have their next pickup before we’ve even climbed on. So I’ll ask again, are you coming?”
“Not right now,” she murmured jokingly and winked. She pulled away from me and walked backward to the carriage. “Hopefully later, though.”
“It looks like I’ve rubbed off on you,” I teased as I climbed on and held out my hand to help her on, too. “In more ways than one. Just a week ago, you were still scolding me for making comments like that in public.”
“Just a week ago, I didn’t know I could be this person.” She smiled, effortlessly taking the step up into the carriage with her hand in mine. “It turns out it’s true that travel changes a person. I just never knew how much.”
“As long as you think about it as being changed for the better, then my work here might be just about done.”
Snuggling into my side once we were both seated on the red faux-leather bench, she watched closely as Dudley climbed into his spot on the slightly elevated bench in front of ours and gathered up the reins.
“We’re really doing this,” I murmured breathlessly. “We’re going on a horse and carriage ride through the streets of Paris at sunset. Dear heavens. My mother is never going to believe this.”
“Speaking of your mother, what have you told her about our trip?”
She shrugged. “Only that I was here with a friend. I keep distracting her with what we did every day when she tries asking for more information on myfriend.”
“You haven’t told her about me?” I asked, not sure how I felt about us still being kept a secret from everyone back home.
“I thought it would only be right to tell Teddy first,” she said, lifting a hand to rub at the crease between my brows. “Don’t look so serious, baby. I’m not hiding what we have forever. I just think we owe it to your sister to be the first to know.”
“You’re probably right.” I shook away the sinking feeling that something was about to go wrong if she didn’t even want to tell her parents about us.
What she was saying made sense, and as I kissed her while the sun set behind us, I realized it didn’t matter anyway. I was madly in love with her and I wasn’t going to lose her. Whatever went wrong, we’d face it together, and as long as we did that, just like Teddy and Scott always did, we’d be fine.
Emma and I were forever this time around. I was willing to bet on it.
30
EMMA
Breakfast was at some classy café with a view over the river, but as beautiful as it was and as delicious as my freshly baked croissant tasted, I was really missing home. It had been two and a half weeks, the longest I’d ever been away from Rockdale, and I was ready to go back.
Colt grinned at me from the other side of the table, but since he was on the phone, I went back to my thoughts and picked at my food. I hadn’t told him how homesick I was. When I did, I knew it might mean the end of us and I didn’t want to give up. Not on him or the life we could have together—or even on this trip.
Those first few days had been amazing. Actually, all the days had been amazing. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Paris. I loved this place. Everything about it was absolutely breathtaking. It just wasn’t home.
The longer I was here, the more obvious that became. I didn’t speak French and hadn’t managed to meet any other Americans that weren’t just passing through. The food, while fantastic, wasn’t familiar and we couldn’t cook anything by ourselves since we were in a hotel and didn’t have a kitchenette in our room. Frankly, I didn’t think it would help much if we did since everything here tasted so different.
Plus, this was also the longest I’d gone without doing anything useful—not even chores. I missed being productive and I missed the kids I usually volunteered with over the summer. Colt spent a lot of his time working, and even though he made a point of having at least breakfast with me every day, him being gone and doing what he did made me acutely aware of the fact that I wasn’t doing the same thing.
Long story short, this wasn’t working for me anymore. All my life, I’d been busy. I worked hard. I didn’t let grass grow under my feet when it came to things that had to be done around my house or any others that I was asked to help with. These days, I volunteered with children over the summer and school breaks, but I’d always done some kind of volunteer work whenever I had time off.
Sitting around, doing nothing just wasn’t me. A vacation every once in a while was fine, but now, with Colt back on the job, I was itching to do something useful again myself. It was hard watching him be so uber productive while the only thing I had to do all day was wander around, shop, read, and watch TV.
“Em?” he said gently, his voice knocking me out of my depressing thoughts. “Are you okay?”