A Is for Abstinence (30 page)

“The best morning of my life.”

I’d said it jokingly, but when Val laughed I realized it was the truth. It had been so long since I felt so content. Now I was happy—truly happy—for the first time in a very, very long time. Val made me happy.

“I want this,” I said, squeezing her to me as if holding her tighter would settle the sudden tingling in my chest. “I want to wake up with you like this every morning.”

“That is definitely not a good idea.” Val laughed. “A little temptation every now and then is one thing, but we wouldn’t last a week if we did this every day. Kyle, we almost didn’t last one night.”

“So marry me.”

The words were out of my mouth before I realized they were even in my head. Both of us froze, shocked. Val sat up and looked at me with wide eyes, trying to figure out if I’d actually said what I just said. “What?” she asked.

My brain was a scrambled mess, but as I sat there trying to figure out what the hell had just happened, I realized the feeling inside me wasn’t panic. It was excitement. I wanted this.

“Marry me,” I said. I sounded as astonished as she looked, but it felt right. It
was
right. When I spoke again, my voice went from surprised to insistent. “Be my wife, Val. Be the woman who wakes up in this bed with me every morning for the rest of our lives. Fight with me how Robin and Alan do. Make love to me. Have my children.” Her eyes popped so wide that I laughed and said, “You know, eventually, someday.”

“Kyle—I—are you serious?”

I hadn’t meant to ask her, but now that I had, if she said no, it would kill me. “I hate to admit it, but I’ve been through enough women to know there’s not another one like you out there. You’re the one, Val. Whether you accept me or not, there’s not going to be anyone else for me.”

It took her an eternity to say something. I waited, breath held in my lungs for her answer.

“But we’re about to say good-bye to each other,” she said, her brow crinkling in concern and her voice falling to a whisper. “Aren’t you a little worried about that?”

I’d feared that all summer long, but now I was sure. I grinned. “Val, how many times do I have to say it? You’re worth waiting for.”

She didn’t appreciate the joke. “I’m serious, Kyle.”

“So am I. We’ll get through the separation. It’s only a couple months while I’m touring and you can catch up with me every weekend if you want. We’ll schedule long breaks between the US tour and the different legs of the world tour, and I can make sure I have all the same holidays off that you do. You’ll be so busy with school the time will fly by.” I let out a scoff and added, “Besides, being separated through the entire engagement might be the only way you make it to the altar still a virgin.”

Val surprised me with a laugh. “That’s definitely the truth,” she muttered.

I didn’t know what to make of that. Was that a yes? I hoped it was a yes. I hoped I was getting through to her, because the more I talked about it, the more I convinced myself this was meant to be. I was practically giddy when I took her hands in mine and said, “Val, if we can survive a relationship without sex, we’re strong enough to survive whatever life throws at us. I love you so much. I want you to be mine forever. Say you’ll marry me.”

She still hesitated, so I arched a brow to let her know I meant business when I said, “Don’t make me do something drastic like ask you on live TV so that you have to say yes. Because you know I will.”

She let out a hysterical bark of laughter, and burst into tears as she threw her arms around me. “No!” she cried, and my heart skipped a beat until she said, “Absolutely
no
live TV proposals. I will kill you. This proposal was perfect and the only one you need to make.”

I pulled back so that I could look into her eyes. “Is that a yes?”

She grinned through her tears and laughed again. “It’s a yes.”

She started to say something else, but talking was not something I was in the mood for any longer. I was overcome with passion and overwhelmed with so much love for the woman sitting in front of me that I had to kiss her right that second.

I planned on never stopping kissing Val, but she kept ruining the mood by giggling beneath my lips. Before I knew it, we were both laughing too hard to keep up the kissing. “You like me,” I teased her, remembering a joke from ages ago. “You like me one hundred percent.”

She laughed again and shook her head. “I like you eighty-nine percent at best. But I love you one hundred percent.”

I tried to act hurt but couldn’t wipe the smile from my face. “Good enough.”

For a minute we sat there grinning at each other like idiots. Val covered a yawn with her hand and stretched. “Please tell me you have coffee around here somewhere.”

“I do.”

“Practicing?” Val snickered.

I rolled my eyes at the cheesy joke. Getting engaged had turned us both into mush brains. “So, Miss Not-A-Morning-Person, what would you like to do today?” I grabbed her hand and kissed it. “Want to go shopping so I can put a proper rock on this finger? It was bad form for me to ask you to marry me before I had one.”

“Hey, don’t knock my accidental proposal,” she said. “It was not bad form. It was perfect. Your heart spoke before your brain could stop it. It was actually very
you
.”

That earned her another kiss. “Coffee maker’s in the kitchen. Coffee should be right next to it. Why don’t you get it started while I get dressed, and then I’ll take you shopping. We’ll get you a change of clothes while we’re out too because I don’t want to take you home first.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Val smiled and wrapped her arms around me. After she kissed me again, I flashed her a wicked grin. “I get to pick out your underwear.”

She smacked me playfully on the arm, but I noticed as she left the room that she hadn’t said no to the idea.

. . . . .

Val was out on the deck with her cup of coffee when I found her. She stood at the balcony railing staring out at the ocean, still wearing nothing but my dress shirt. I took a moment to enjoy her mile-long legs, but that only made me desperate to touch them so I walked up behind her and did just that.

“You see, it really is meant to be,” I said as I ran my hands over her hips and down her legs. “You already know the routine. I drink my coffee out here every morning.”

She shivered again and leaned back into my chest. “It’s such a gorgeous view.”

“It’s improved vastly as of late.”

She smirked up at me. “Let me guess, because my just-rolled-out-of-bed look is sexy?”

“You know it is. And you know I have a weakness for these legs. You should wear nothing but this from now on,” I said, making her kiss me again. I was never going to get tired of kissing her. Not even those quick little pecks. Fifty years from now, I was still going to make her kiss me every time I saw her.

We took our steaming mugs over to a patio couch and sat quietly for a moment, simply enjoying the peace between us. Val broke the silence first. “So,” she said, “I was thinking about this whole getting married business.”

“Cold feet already?” I teased. “You chicken.”

She smiled but kept herself on track. She had something on her mind and she wasn’t going to let me make her lose focus. “What’s your take on weddings?”

Ugh. The wedding talk was starting already. I held back a groan and reminded myself that Val was worth it. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have a preference? Big, small, destination…theme?”

Theme? I shuddered and cut a glance at her. “I want whatever you want.”

She snorted. “Spoken like a true man.”

“No, spoken like a man who’s known a few brides. A wedding is for the woman. It’s your day, Val. We can do whatever you want.”

We fell quiet again and I cast my gaze out to the ocean as I tried to figure out what kind of wedding Val would like. I didn’t think she’d be as crazy as Adrianna was, but after watching her work the crowd with my mom yesterday, I could see some big political event-type wedding in my future with a high-profile wedding planner and my mom calling all the shots. Hell on Earth.

On the bright side, I’d be away on tour for most of the planning, so hopefully I could just let them take over and I wouldn’t have to do much.

Val pulled me from my nightmare thoughts. “What if I don’t want one?”

I didn’t know how to respond. What did she mean? I’d been teasing her before, but was she actually backing out? My pulse sped up at the thought. “What do you mean? You don’t want to get married?”

When she laughed, my chest loosened up.

“I want to marry you,” she said, “but what if we just skipped the wedding part? Would you be disappointed?”

No wedding? Just get married? Was she kidding? I was afraid to answer. “Is this a trick question? Some kind of girl test?”

She laughed again and shook her head. “It’s not a test. I just know how much you hate all the fancy stuff, which I’m assuming includes weddings. Plus, you said you wanted to wake up with me every morning and it sounds like a good plan to me. Why not just make it happen?”

“Wait, are you saying we should elope?” There was no way in the world she really meant that. I am not that lucky.

Val shrugged. “Do you know what will happen if you and I announce our engagement? It will be a complete media circus. People would follow us around the entire time, wanting every detail and judging us on the decisions we make. They’d probably ask us to make our wedding a reality show. I want my wedding to be
mine
. I don’t want to share it with the entire world.”

Actually, I could totally see that happening. And Val had a point. She would hate all that attention.

“We could do something small,” I said. “You don’t have to elope. If you want your family and friends to be there, I’m sure we could find a way to keep everything private.”

Val shook her head and sipped her coffee again. “I’m
Virgin Val
, Kyle. Do you know what a marriage would mean to the world? It would mean the virgin is finally going to have sex. People will go crazy over that. Even if we managed to keep the wedding private, people would be in my face every second until the wedding day asking me all kinds of personal questions that I wouldn’t want to answer. And then they’d find a way to stalk us after. The paparazzi would follow us to our hotel suite that night and camp out in the lobby in order to get the first interview with The Virgin post sex.”

I sighed because she was right. I wished I could tell her we could keep that from happening, but I knew better. I’d been dealing with the paparazzi for way too long to be naïve about what they were capable of. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone were able to figure out which room was ours and find a way to snap pictures of us in the act.

Val was going to be nervous enough about her wedding night. She didn’t need that added stress. I wanted her to enjoy her first time, not dread having to face the world the morning after.

“I don’t want that,” she said. “I don’t want the media to ruin the first time we make love.”

My brain went completely haywire again. She said “we.” She said the first time “we” make love. She was talking about us having sex, and suddenly I could think of nothing else. All I could do was sit there and picture exactly how that was going to go.

“I know they’re going to ask,” Val said. “I know I can’t run from the press forever. I’m Virgin Val. I will have to talk about it at least a little. But if we just go get married and don’t tell anyone, we could keep it a secret for a week or two. We could give ourselves some time to enjoy each other before the media circus starts.”

She kept talking like she didn’t realize she was preaching to the choir. She’d had me convinced way back at the “skip the wedding” comment.

Val set her mug down on the ground and turned to face me. She took my hands in hers and looked at me with so much intensity I could feel it. “When I give myself to you, I want you to be the only person in my head. I want to be able to think about nothing but you and me. Forget the world. This is about us. I may be a role model for a lot of people, but I saved myself for you, not them. I saved myself for
me
. This is what I want. As long as you’re okay with it. As long as it’s what you want, too.”

I don’t think I’ve ever cried. Not once in my whole adult life that I can remember. And I didn’t cry now, but this was the closest I’d come to it. My throat felt as if it had closed up, my eyes burned, and my nose tingled. She was perfect. She was absolutely perfect, and she was mine. Or she would be, very, very soon.

I covered up the emotional attack with a laugh. “Val, you’re asking me if I want to skip months of centerpiece crises, my fiancée becoming a bridezilla, my mother transforming into something a million times worse, and a party where I’d be forced to wear a tuxedo all day—all so that I can have you to myself and not have to share you with anyone. Are you crazy? I’m still waiting for the punch line.”

Val thought for a minute, searching my eyes for any hint that I wasn’t excited. She didn’t find it. Once she finally believed I was on board, her lips quirked up into a wicked smirk. It was the kind of look I gave her on a regular basis, but I’d never seen it on her face and it got my blood pumping like crazy.