Epilogue #2
Yes, they were learning lots of new things about each other every day.
Marie caught him staring and raised a slender brow in question. Instead of looking away, Lucas surprised them both by taking her chin and pressing a kiss to those gorgeous lips—the top always fuller than the bottom—and kissing her in a way that probably wasn’t suited for family.
He didn’t give a shit.
“Ew!” shouted one of the boys. “He’s sucking her face!”
“Ooooh,” called the older one, Tommy. “Dang, Auntie Marie’s getting it.”
“Don’t say ‘getting it,’” Lea chided him.
Eventually, Lucas stopped and touched his forehead to Marie’s.
“I love you,” he murmured, enjoying the way her cheeks had turned a pretty shade of cranberry. Then he shrugged at her family. “Sometimes I love her so much, I forget where I am.”
Marie blushed like a tomato, but instead of pulling away, she kissed him again, longer this time, her hands fisting in his sweater.
“Oh my God! Keep it PG, please!” shouted Lea.
“Don’t listen to her, Mimi,” Joni called out. “It’s giving Shmexy Noel. I like it.”
When they separated again, Lucas turned to the family and cleared his throat.
Making out with their sister probably hadn’t endeared him to Marie’s siblings, and under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have cared.
But she did. Which meant he needed to do his damnedest to get her brother to stop scowling at him like he planned to take a baseball bat to his knees the first chance he got.
“I owe all of you an apology,” he found himself saying
Every Zola in the room perked up. Including Marie.
“You’ve already heard this, sweetheart, but I’ll say it to them now, since they were the ones to take care of you when I screwed things up.
” He turned back to the four other pairs of unnervingly green eyes lasered onto him.
“What I did—the way I manipulated the situation with my brother, the way I twisted her feelings and hurt her—there’s no excuse for it. ”
“Damn right, there’s not,” Matthew muttered.
But Lucas continued. “I hurt the most important person in my life because I was doing what I’d always been taught: making money. It was only after I lost her that I realized how little any of that matters. She’s the only thing that counts.”
Marie’s hand landed on his shoulder with a soft squeeze. She’d heard him say this many times before and probably would again until Lucas finally convinced himself it was enough (she’d already assured him it was).
“I know I don’t deserve her. But I’m here because I want to spend the rest of my life proving that I can be the man she deserves. That I can be worthy of the love she gives me.”
“So how can we trust that?” Lea asked.
The others murmured and nodded.
It was a fair question. More than fair.
“Because I love her,” Lucas said simply. “I love her more than the air I breathe. More than anything I’ve ever known. More than all that money I made.”
“Which,” Marie put in, “he gave away to prove the same thing to me, by the way. A company worth, how much did you say, Lucas?”
Lucas turned. “My shares were worth just under four hundred billion dollars.”
Every mouth in the room fell open. Even Nina and Nathan looked surprised—two people who also originally came from extraordinary wealth.
“You can trust me because I’d rather cut off my own arm than hurt her again,” Lucas said flatly. “I’ve spent every day since we’ve been together trying to prove that, and I’ll do it every day moving forward too.”
“You’d give that up for her? And the lifestyle that came with that kind of money?” Kate asked.
Lucas shrugged. “What lifestyle? I worked eighty hours a week for twenty years, had no real friends, and a family that saw me as a piggy bank. If that’s success, you can keep it. I’d rather wash dishes in our kitchen and come home.”
Matthew studied him for a long moment. “That’s all very nice. But promises are easy to make. Easy to break, too. What are you actually going to do about it now?”
Lucas looked around the room, taking in the faces of the people who mattered most to Marie. Her siblings, her nephews and niece, the chosen family that had shaped her into the woman he’d fallen in love with. This was his moment—not just for Marie, but for all of them.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the small velvet box he’d been carrying for weeks, waiting for the right moment. Marie’s eyes widened as he slid off the couch and dropped to one knee in front of her.
“Oh my God,” Joni whispered.
“I was going to wait to do this,” Lucas said, looking directly into Marie’s shocked green eyes.
“I wanted to show you how dedicated I am to our life. Help you get the bed and breakfast going. Learn French. Get us through the birth and anything else you need. But I want our family to be whole when our daughter comes into the world.”
“Daughter?” Kate asked with interest.
“We don’t know yet,” Marie said quickly, though her hands had flown to her mouth.
“She’ll be perfect,” Lucas said with absolute certainty.
“Because she’ll be just like her mother.
” He took a breath and continued, his voice steady despite the magnitude of what he was doing.
“Baby, I know I hurt you. I know I’m not the man you thought you wanted when you were younger.
But you changed everything for me. You made me want to be better, to build something real instead of just accumulating power and money. ”
He opened the ring box, revealing the simple diamond that had caught his eye at an antique shop in Bordeaux. Beautiful but modest, with none of the ostentation that had characterized his former life.
“I gave up everything I was told mattered to build a life with you, but that’s not a sacrifice—it’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done. You want me to throw away the rest, I will.”
“The rest?” wondered one of the kids—Tommy, he thought. That kid seemed cutthroat, even at twelve. “How much are we talking about?”
“Hush,” said his mother.
“Enough to take care of my family,” Lucas said, though his eyes hadn’t wavered from Marie’s face. “I’ll be honest, I don’t really want to get rid of it because I want to be able to take care of you and our babies for the rest of our lives. But don’t marry me for money. Marry me for love.”
Marie was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Marry me because we taught each other how to love, sweet girl. Marry me because you’re carrying our child, and we deserve to be a real family. Marry me so I can spend the rest of my life making you as happy as you make me.”
The room was completely silent except for the sound of Marie’s muted sobs.
“So?” Lucas asked, his voice rough with emotion. “Will you marry me, my sweet Marie?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
For a moment, his heart stopped. He had just asked the woman he had been curious about—no, obsessed with—for eight years to marry him, and he was sure he was having a heart attack.
Had he heard her right?
Then she said it louder. “Yes, I’ll marry you, Lucas Lyons. Of course, yes!”
The room erupted in cheers as Lucas slipped the ring onto her finger and pulled her into his arms. Over her shoulder, he caught Matthew’s eye and saw something that looked like begrudging acceptance.
Or, at least, something besides a broken jaw.
Later, after breakfast had been eaten, and the children had been bundled outside to play in the snow, the adults settled around the living room again with coffee and the comfortable exhaustion that came after a successful Christmas morning.
Lucas had spent the rest of the morning observing.
This was what a real family looked like.
The way the sisters bickered was obviously out of love.
The casual intimacy between all the siblings, in the way they tugged each other’s hair or playfully pushed someone’s shoulder.
His own family had never been like this.
Even in Arizona, when he was around his mother.
There was never this kind of playful dedication.
The closest he’d gotten were those two years after Daniel was born, before he’d left for school.
His brother had been a damn cute baby.
Before he could think otherwise, Lucas pulled out his phone to send a quick text.
Merry Christmas, Daniel.
The response came quickly.
You too, brother. Drinks before you leave town?
Lucas sighed.
How about coffee instead?
It was a start. Maybe that was all they could hope for right now.
“I hate to be the bearer of more change,” Kate interrupted a lively debate about whether bachata was better than salsa. “But I might as well share my news while we’re all together.”
Beside him on the couch, Marie’s whole body tensed. Automatically, Lucas looped an arm over her shoulders and pulled her into him.
“I’m selling the shop and moving to LA full-time,” Kate said. “I have enough clients there now that it just makes sense. I’m leaving as soon as the sale goes through. May not be back for Christmas next year either.”
“Congrats, Katie,” Lea said. “As it happens, the kids and I won’t be here next year either. The guy I do bookkeeping for has asked me to manage his ranch full-time and his books. In Idaho. The kids and I leave after New Year’s.”
The explosion of voices was immediate and overwhelming.
“Idaho?” Joni’s voice rose above the others. “Ranch? What do you know about horses?”
“They could be cattle,” Nathan pointed out.
“He raises alpacas, actually,” Lea shot back. “Among other things.”
“Even fucking worse,” Matthew snapped, causing his wife to put her hands over their baby’s ears. “What do you think you’re going to do in Idaho, Lea? You don’t know anyone there.”
Lucas realized then that one day, he and Matthew Zola would probably get along just fine. He recognized in the man the same tendencies, the same needs, to take care of others that he had himself as another older brother.