“Mum, you’re incorrigible,” Christian chides.
“And where do you think you learned to be incorrigible from? The master.” She smiles at me, a hint of wicked delight in her eyes. “Just teasing about the baby,” she says playfully, then drops her voice to a whisper. “But not really. If he puts a baby in you, I’m not going to sit out the birth. I’ll follow you around till you pop.”
I laugh because there’s nothing to say to that. There will be no baby, no popping, and no true mommy/daughter-in-law bonding. Even so, I think I love her already, and since she’s been so blunt, I decide to assuage my own curiosity. “I have a question for you. Why did you say finally about meeting? Has Christian been telling you about me?”
“A year ago, he mentioned he’d met a woman on the boat tour and was very much looking forward to seeing her. And when he ran into you again at the garden bar, he called me and said, ‘You’re never going to believe it, Mum, but the little mermaid popped back into my life.’”
I rein in a grin as I make a check mark in a mental column of pros and cons about this man—told his mother about me the night we met again. Definite pro.
Christian slaps a hand on the table. “This conversation really ought to stop right now. The two of you are thoroughly embarrassing me.”
I smile and laugh, meeting her gaze with the sort of look that says embarrassing him is what a mother and a daughter-in-law should do, and in this moment, we are indeed bonding. As I drink my champagne, I’m happier than I should be that he’s introduced me to his mother.
I’m even happier that she’s known about me from the start.
On the spectrum of things I’ve never expected, stepping into a marriage of convenience would be at the top of the list. Spending my wedding night at an amusement park would be a close second.
The spinner ride whips precariously high and my stomach rises in tandem, lodging in my esophagus. The giant gold eagle we ride in flips over, leaving us hanging upside down, high in the sky. I scream, a blood-curdling noise. The sound turns into a screech as the eagle rights us again, then sends us downward in a fast, wicked whoosh. One exhilarating, heart-pounding minute later, the ride slows, and soon, it crawls to a stop. The world is still wobbly, but the bar rattles loose and lifts up.
Christian sets his hand on my arm, steadying me as I stand, emerging from Aquila, the golden eagle ride at Tivoli Gardens. I grab my purse from the locker and slide on my glasses.
He rubs his ear. “You are loud, woman.”
“So are you,” I say, as the attendant opens the exit gate, and we pour out along with a few dozen other sky warriors who braved the thrill ride.
Christian, still wearing his suit but with his tie gone and stuffed into his pocket, shakes his head. “No, I wasn’t. I was stoic and tough.”
I laugh as we walk the pathway that weaves through this festive park in the heart of the city. “You practically squealed like a little girl the first time the eagle soared upside down.”
He stares at me, his brow knitted. “Little girl? I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”
I pat his very firm bicep on his very strong arm and go along with him. “Yes, you’re right, dear husband. It must have been someone less manly and less tough.”
He smiles at me, mischief tap-dancing across his blue eyes. “Exactly.” He bumps his shoulder against mine and whispers, “Hey.”
That one syllable comes out sweetly, affectionately, and I add another pro in his column. That chart is weighted so heavily to one side, it’s toppling over. I should find a con. It’ll make the next three months easier. Not that I need to worry about that too much. It doesn’t matter how many pros I find, this has an expiration date.
I am resolved.
“Hey to you,” I say softly, then want to kick myself because that tone of voice won’t help me find a negative in him either.
He raises a hand, adjusts an errant strand of my hair that was stuck in the arm of my glasses, and slides the offending lock over my ear. “Are you doing okay?”
“Are you going to keep asking me that for the next three months?”
“I might.”
I stop, rise on my tiptoes, and kiss the corner of his lips. Oops. No luck finding a con there either.
“What’s that for?” he asks.
“Just marking you.”
“You want to pee on me next?”
“I might. Beware,” I say in an over-the-top nefarious tone as we pass the gift shops that edge the small lake, making our way to the Ferris wheel.
“Elise,” he says, his tone letting me know he’s serious.
“Yes?”
“Earlier today, during the ceremony, did you think about . . .?” His voice trails off as the unfinished question hovers like thick smoke.
“It’s hard not to think about Eduardo. But mostly, I thought about how incredibly different this is because we’ve been so open about everything. What about you? Did you think about Hannah?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he scrubs a hand over his chin as if in deep thought as we reach the steps of the Ferris wheel. “I don’t know if this makes me sound totally calloused, but I so rarely think about her.” I pump a virtual fist because surely that’s a con, that he doesn’t even think about his first love. “Sometimes it feels like what happened between us was so long ago, it’s like it was another lifetime.”
“And you were a different person?”
He nods as he holds open the gate at the top of the steps for me. “I think I was in some ways.”
The ride attendant says hello and gestures to one of the Ferris wheel cars. We go inside. “What’s the biggest difference between the Christian of today and the twenty-one-year-old you? Besides nine years,” I add, since I bet he’ll go for some sort of age punchline. Could that be a con? Maybe he’s not too serious about anything. Yes, that will definitely keep the chains up high around my heart if he’s simply a shallow fellow.
He wiggles his eyebrows and punches his stomach. “Abs are still chiseled.”
“I knew you were going to say something like that.”
