First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) (31 page)

We had a
national
Basilica? What happened to
separation of church and state?

Wait, no, I was focusing on the wrong thing.
Why hadn’t Annie told Ian she wouldn’t be here? She really didn’t
want to meet me. My heart dropped. Ian’s family was important to
him. If they didn’t like me, how could we hope to be together?

“
Good for them. They deserve
to get away.”

A lady who’d been sitting at the front of the
church sprinted up the aisle, an amused expression on her face. I
assumed she was going to stop anymore of our personal business
airing over the speakers for the whole congregation, some of whom
were looking at me with interest. My cheeks were probably as red as
a tomato.

“
Uncle Ian,” Oh, good, he’d
used Ian’s name, so
everyone
would know who they’d been talking about. “If
you’re serious about wanting Mom to meet this girl, you’re going to
have to bring her to the house. Do you have any idea how much I
hear about this?”

“
I can only imagine. I
wanted to keep my relationship with Penny private while we got to
know each other. This is a first step, and a pretty big one. She’s
not religious, at all, but she’s here because she knows what this
means to me. She’s
the
one
, Danny.”

The one.
Ian thought I was
The
One
. Suddenly, his accidental public airing
of our private business didn’t seem that bad anymore. Neither did
the fact that his sister clearly didn’t want to meet me. I didn’t
know what that was about, but I didn’t care, at the moment.
He thinks I’m The One.

“
I’m happy for you. But if
she’s the one, you’ve got to bring her around to meet Mom. She’s
ready to put your tackle in a mason jar over this girl.”

There was a loud thump and crunch over the
speakers, and a few people covered their ears.

“
Oh no. Tell me that wasn’t
on,” I heard Ian say, then, after a pause, Danny said, “Oh, fuck
me.”

Gasps echoed all around the room. I pressed
my fingers to my forehead. So, cursing ran in the family. I filed
that away for when Ian and I had kids.

“
For Christ’s sake, turn it
off!” Ian shouted, eliciting more gasps. An old woman across the
aisle crossed herself. I guess they really took the whole “don’t
take the Lord’s name in vain” thing seriously.

The mic cut out then, and I
sat, staring straight ahead, totally aware of the eyes on me and
the murmurs of outrage from the parishioners.
Shoot me now.

No. I wasn’t going to be embarrassed. My true
love had just declared me his true love in return. Yeah, it had
been in the absolutely most inappropriate way conceivable, but it
had happened. When he slunk into the pew to sit beside me, he
whispered, “Sorry about that.”

We didn’t face each other but stared straight
ahead at the altar.

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I tried to
hold it in with my hands, but it ended up sounding like I was
spitting.

“
I’m glad you found that
funny,” Ian said, a note of humor creeping into his voice. “Danny
is going to get a lot of complaints today.”

I giggled and whispered, “Well, tell your
sister that if she puts your tackle in a mason jar, she’s going to
get a complaint.”

* * * *

I will
probably go to hell for even thinking it, but Ian was even sexy at
church. Maybe even a little sexier. The suit was a big part of it,
but most of it was how genuinely he believed. He wasn’t just
reciting words to say them, he truly believed them. Every now and
then, he would cast a glance at me, and I would smile to reassure
him that I wasn’t about to flee the building. When Danny delivered
his sermon—relating to the grim gospel reading about the earth
passing away and nobody knowing when it would happen—it was obvious
that Ian heard the words of his priest, not his nephew. And when
Danny said the gospel was a metaphor not only for living your life
free from sin but living your life to the fullest, Ian reached over
and squeezed my hand.

After mass, Ian and I bolted. The whole
“airing of our personal business over the church PA system” thing
was too big an elephant to ignore in the church’s tiny fellowship
hall. Once we were in the car, pulling out of the parking lot, he
said, “So…”

“
If your plan with the
microphone mix up was to make my first visit to your church even
more awkward, congratulations.” I drew a heart in the foggy glass
of the passenger window.

“
That bad?”

I looked over at him, and his jaw was tight,
like he was clenching his teeth. I shouldn’t have joked. “I’m just
teasing. It wasn’t terrible, at all. And I got some really, really
good news out of your nephew’s mistake.”

He flushed red and laughed nervously. “Well,
now that you know I’m spending my spare time doodling hearts around
your name in my notebook, I’m not sure I can look you in the
eye.”

“
It’s not necessarily a bad
thing to have the woman who loves you know how much you love her,”
I pointed out. “If you caught me talking about you without my
knowledge, you would probably want to change your
address.”

He took a quick glance away from the road to
smile at me. “It would be that bad, would it?”

“
Yeah,” I said, pleased with
the still growing grin on his face. “I have a lot of fantasies
about our future.”

“
So, you’ve picked out the
names of our children, then? Planned our wedding?”

He’d poured out his heart without knowing I
was listening, so I might as well share the depths of my new love
feelings, to even the score. “Have I named our children? Are you
kidding? I’ve seriously researched the benefits and risks of
epidurals on pregnancy websites.”

“
Yikes,” he
laughed.

“
Kinda makes ‘she’s the one’
seem less embarrassing now, doesn’t it?” I paused. “You like to
read, right?”

“
Aye, I do.”

Ah, that occasional “aye” that hadn’t been
fully replaced by American speech patterns. I was a sucker for
that. So much so, I almost forgot my original point. “Right. So.
Okay, are you ever reading along, and something happens, something
so earth-shattering for the characters that you can’t believe
they’ll ever recover from it, so you skip ahead to make sure that
everything turns out okay?”

“
Chapter sixty-nine
of
A Dance With Dragons
,” he answered without hesitation.

“
And when you saw that
whatever was happening actually turned out okay, you still wanted
to read the book, right? Knowing the ending at that point didn’t
ruin the rest of the chapters for you.”

The corner of his mouth
twitched. “Yeah, after I saw that everything in
A Dance With Dragons
turned out all
right for Jon Snow in the end, I felt much better.”

“
Well, that’s how I feel
about us. No matter what happens between us between now and then, I
know that at the end, we’re together forever, and it takes the
pressure off. That’s what your nephew’s bad judgment with AV
equipment helped me realize today. So, don’t worry about it.” I
waited for the rush of fear I would inevitably feel, having spilled
all of that out. It never came. The pressure truly was off, because
Ian wouldn’t freak out to hear that.

He put his hand on my knee as we pulled up to
a traffic light. “So, epidural or no epidural?”

“
Oh, epidural all the way,”
I laughed. “But that’s a little ways off.”

“
Agreed. Right now, we
should be focusing all of our efforts on rehearsing the
conception.” He glanced in his rearview mirror to change lanes.
“Would you care to do that, right now?”

“
I think that’s a fine
idea.” I walked my fingers up his thigh, thrilling at the way he
visibly stirred beneath his trousers in anticipation of my
touch.

Practice makes perfect, after all.

Chapter Fifteen

It was too
bad I wasn’t religious. I could have used the power of prayer to
help keep my hands off Ian as we drove back to his apartment. He’d
stayed in the car when we’d stopped at my place for clothes, which
was good, because if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have left for a
while
. I wanted him so
bad, I was already wet and could feel the silky glide between my
thighs with every dazed step I took.

There was a high probability I hadn’t even
grabbed the stuff I needed in the morning; for all I knew, I’d
dragged sweatpants out of the hamper instead of a skirt out of my
closet.

But I was a good girl and exercised so much
self-control that I deserved a gold star. I even almost made it up
to his apartment in the elevator without jumping him.

Almost.

“
Easy now,” Ian said with a
bark of laughter. “If you want to fuck in an elevator, I have a
more private option upstairs.”

“
I know,” I teased to cover
up my frustration. “I just can’t keep my hands off you. Don’t
complain, just go with it.”

Even though I wanted to maul him with both
hands, once we were inside, the windows distracted me. Ian had
remarked more than once I was dating him for the view, but I
couldn’t understand how he’d become so used to just living in a
place with clocks for windows. It was amazing! I took my coat off
and rushed over to the one in the living room, like I always did,
and peered out between the Roman numerals. “Wow, it’s really
snowing.”

“
Maybe you’ll get snowed
in,” he said as he hung his coat in the closet in the entryway. He
came over to join me. “We could have a ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’
situation on our hands.”

Oh, that song was so gross. “I hope you don’t
drug my drink.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“
That’s a line from the
song. She’s like, ‘hey, what’s in this drink,’ or something. That
song is disturbing.” I gazed out at the blowing flakes with a pang
of homesickness. I remembered sitting at the kitchen table—I was
never allowed in the dining room—eating my grilled cheese and
tomato soup lunch as my nanny, Theresa, washed up the dishes,
watching the snow fall. Though I’d been only six or seven at the
time, I remembered thinking,
this is
normal. This is how other kids live
. Later,
I’d gone outside and tried to make a snowman, though there’d barely
been enough to cover the grass, let alone make into a
ball.

I looked at the man standing beside me, whom
I planned on being with for the rest of my life. Or…his life. I
didn’t like thinking about that. But here we were, watching our
very first snowfall together. I wanted it to feel as memorable and
as real as that moment at my kitchen table, when I’d felt a sliver
of normal. “You know what we should do?”

“
Fly to Miami and escape the
winter while we still can?”

I pulled a face. “I like the snow. I mean,
not this early. But after Thanksgiving, with the lights on
everything and the stores playing holiday music, I really dig the
snow. I was going to say that we should grab a blanket, go up to
the roof, and snuggle.”

“
In the snow?” he asked
incredulously.

“
Not in the snow. You have
that little roof thing.” I pointed up. “Come on, if it’s too cold
and you don’t like it, we can always come back inside.”

He was going to like it, though. Because I
was going to make it worth his while.

“
Coming inside is exactly
what I wanted to do today,” he said with raised
eyebrows.

Even though we had regular sex—and some
irregular sex, like when he’d had me bent over the kitchen counter
earlier in the week—I still blushed at all of his dirty little
insinuations. “Shut up.”

“
Fine,” Ian said with heavy
finality. “I’ll go upstairs and freeze my bollocks off, all in the
name of pleasing you.” He even sighed for dramatic
effect.

I rolled my eyes. “I promise I’ll warm them
back up for you.”

We wrestled the fluffy, down-filled duvet
from his bed into the elevator then rode up to the roof. The second
the glass doors opened, I realized I was an idiot. It was way too
freaking cold, and the weather, which had looked charming through
the window, now had sinister intentions toward us. The snow wasn’t
drifting softly down like in a Christmas movie, but blustering
sideways and scattering flakes all over the lovely covered seating
area.

The furniture wore snuggly waterproof coats
of its own. Ian leaned down to unzip the cover over the chaise
longue. “This is insane.”

I totally agreed. So, when the cushions of
the chaise were clear, I belly flopped onto them, mummified in the
duvet.

“
Could I get in there?” Ian
asked, pulling on a corner of the blanket.

I reluctantly gave up my sarcophagus of
warmth to let him in. “It’s way colder than I expected.”

He leaned against the chaise’s slanted back
and helped me settle in, my legs between his, my head low on his
chest. “I do think I mentioned the cold once or twice,” he reminded
me, playing with my hair.

I could lie on Ian like this for hours, or at
least until his legs fell asleep and then he limped around
dramatically to get the feeling back into them. Ian and I fit
together, and the addition of his body made any couch or chair or
bed ten times more comfortable than the factory standard.