Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3)



A knock on the door jerked Emma awake and she blinked at the clock across the room, next to the bed where Sean was now sitting up straight. Six twenty-five.

“Are you both decent? I can’t wait to show you what I found!”

Oh crap. Gram wanted in. She scrambled off the couch. “Just a second!”

After draping the blanket in a half-ass way over the back of the couch, she grabbed her pillow and crossed to the bed in a tip-toe jog, dodging the squeaky spot in the floor. Sean pushed his pillow back to one side and lifted the covers for her and, even though she tried not to look, she caught a glimpse of gray boxer-brief-clad bulge as she slid between the sheets. She wouldn’t mind waking up to that every morning.

Instead, she was waking up to an impromptu visit from her grandmother. She gave Sean an apologetic glance and he flopped backward onto his pillow, throwing his forearm over his eyes. “Come on in.”

Gram opened the door and stepped in, carrying an old shoebox decorated with bits of lace and pink hearts cut out of construction paper. She smiled at them and held it up. “Your wedding box!”

Emma’s stomach dropped. She’d forgotten about the wedding box. For years she’d been obsessed with weddings—maybe because the only pictures she had of her parents together in the same shot were wedding photos. She’d cut pictures out of magazines and drawn primitive sketches of whatever she couldn’t find in the colorful pages. She’d written notes about her future wedding in a crayon scrawl and then penciled block letters. She’d even done a few in cursive with a hot-pink pen before she finally outgrew the box. She hadn’t thought about it in years, and she certainly hadn’t expected to see it at the crack of dawn on a Monday morning.

“It was in the back of my armoire, way down at the bottom,” Gram said. “I was going to start breakfast but I remembered it Saturday night while we were talking about what kind of wedding you want. I finally found it this morning and I just couldn’t wait to show you and I knew you’d be getting up for work.”

Emma rubbed her face, wishing the friction could jumpstart her brain. “You don’t have to make breakfast.”

“For the last time, I’m not a fan of instant oatmeal and I don’t mind doing it.” She walked over to set the wedding box on Emma’s lap and headed for the door. “I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes.”

She was almost to the door when Emma’s alarm went off. The alarm from her cell phone, which was across the room and plugged in next to the couch where she had been sleeping only a few minutes before. Emma watched Gram stop and look at it, frowning.

“I keep it over there because it’s too easy to hit Snooze when it’s next to the bed. If I get up to shut it off, I stay up.”

“Makes sense.” Gram smiled and left, closing the door behind her.

Emma groaned and climbed out of her bed—her wonderful, comfortable bed that she missed very much—and crossed the room to shut off the alarm and unplug her phone. When she turned around, Sean was sitting up, rummaging through the box.

He held up a small piece of paper she recognized with a pang as being from the pink stationery set her grandfather had bought her for her tenth birthday.

“I want to marry a man who will wear pink shirts because it’s my favorite color,” he read aloud and then he looked up at her. “Really? That’s your criteria?”

“It seemed important when I was ten.”

“Bouquet—pink gladioli tied with white ribbon,” he read from a torn piece of school notebook paper. “What the hell is gladioli? Sounds like pasta.”

“Glads are my favorite flower.” She grabbed her clothes and went into the bathroom, closing the door none too softly behind her.

When she emerged, he was still in bed and still rummaging through her childish dreams for her future. She watched him frown at a hand-drawn picture of a wedding cake decorated with pink flowers before he set it aside and pulled out another piece of pink stationery.

“If the man who wants to marry me doesn’t get down on one knee to propose,” he read in a high-pitched mock-feminine voice, “I’ll tell him no.”

“My younger self had very high standards,” she snapped. “Obviously that’s changed.”

He just laughed at her. “Were you going to put all this into spreadsheet form? Maybe give the poor schmuck a checklist?”

“Are you going to get up and go to work today or are you going to stay in bed and mock a little girl’s dreams?”

“I can probably do both.”

When he put the lid back on her wedding box and set it aside, she bolted before he could throw back the covers to get up. One glimpse of his boxer-brief-clad body was all she could take in a day.

Gram was making blueberry pancakes, which improved Emma’s mood drastically. She fixed two coffees and set Sean’s army mug in his spot before sipping her own.

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