Chapter 1 #2
Ordinarily, if someone offered to share the contents of their bucket list with Sean, he’d suddenly realise he’d left the oven on, or the surf was too good to miss, but this was different. Hell yeah, he wanted to see what was on her list.
‘Is swimming with dolphins on it? Visiting the Taj Mahal?’
She laughed. ‘Nope. But sleeping with a man in a kilt is. All my non-Scottish friends think it’s outrageous that I’ve never done that.’
This got Sean’s attention. ‘Right.’ He lowered her arm but not her hand. ‘Let’s get a drink and sit down.’
It was strange to think that, less than two hours ago, he was innocently sitting at this table listening to his brother Jamie give a best man speech.
It was brilliant, full of laughs – wry observations and funny anecdotes about family life.
When there were seven siblings, there would always be stories, and the Butler family had plenty of those.
And now here was a new chapter. Was it daft to think like that? He’d known this woman less than ten minutes, but in that time, he’d been more stimulated – physically and mentally – than in any previous relationship. The plates of the planet were shifting.
Sean’s planet at least.
‘Drink?’ He grabbed a champagne flute from a server and placed it in front of Cherry.
‘Thank you. So this is your family?’ She surveyed the large ballroom, apparently awestruck.
‘Aye, not all of them.’ There were at least one hundred people in the room. ‘Bea is American, so most of these folk are her friends and family. And there’s a fair few oldies back in Kinshore who couldn’t make the journey. We’ll have a wee Scottish shindig for them.’
‘Kinshore? Where’s that?’
‘Kintyre. Wee village, about 2000 folk. Near Campbeltown.’
‘Ah, the home of Butler’s Whisky.’
‘Aye, that’s us. My dad ran the company until he passed away recently.’
‘Oh, wow. I’m sorry to hear about his passing. Butler’s is great stuff, and I’d have loved to tell him.’
‘Thank you. He’d have loved to hear that. Now, tell me about your hopes and dreams.’ Sean nodded to the piece of paper still wedged between Cherry’s cleavage and her dress.
‘Ah yes, those.’ She retrieved and unfolded it. ‘Here we go. Oh, and if you can help me achieve any of these, let me know.’
‘Will do.’ Sean winked, and the temperature of the smile returned his way nearly knocked him off his chair. He took the list and flattened the paper onto the table with his palm.
‘You could use your notes app on your phone for this,’ he said.
‘Ah, where’s the fun in that? Plus, you’d never have asked me about it if it was there.’
‘Very true. Okay, what have we got? Let me check for dolphins and the Taj Mahal.’ Performatively, he ran his thumb down the page.
Cherry giggled, a cute contrast to the bold-as-brass exterior she’d exuded so far.
‘I see you’ve got “crash a wedding” on here,’ he noted. ‘Guess you can cross that one off. Okay, wait… Is there anything on here that isn’t about sex?’
‘Crashing a wedding isn’t about sex. At least not yet.’
Sean whipped his head up. Bloody hell!
‘You’ve got having sex with a man in a kilt, an NYPD officer, an FDNY officer, a Canadian Mountie, a cowboy, a younger man, under a waterfall and in an elevator. Am I missing anything else?’
‘Not on the sex front, I don’t think.’ Cherry sipped her champagne. ‘Do you like the list?’
‘It’s entertaining. What else have we got? “Get married in Vegas”, “marry the love of my life”. And what does the wee star next to that mean – hung like a blue whale?’
‘Exactly that.’
This got another powerful laugh. ‘I presume all the cowboys, NYPD, kilted men, etcetera, have to meet the same criteria?’
She shrugged. ‘Preferably.’
Sean shook his head, but the grin on his face betrayed how amusing he found this. ‘Okay, to the less X-rated section of the list: learn to surf, adopt a cat/kitten, learn to cook, write a book, sex in a vineyard… I must have missed that one. “Win the World Series”… Are you a baseball player?’
‘No, poker.’
‘You’re a professional poker player?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that makes sense.’
‘Does it? How so?’
‘You don’t strike me as the type to have hot chocolate and Hobnobs in the office at eleven every day. I mean, you could be blowing off steam from all that, I suppose.’
‘No, poker’s been my full-time job since I was twenty-five. Twelve years. That’s what I want to write a book about.’
Sean did the calculations in his head. She was thirty-seven.
She didn’t look thirty-seven. Five years older than him.
It was nothing. Before now, he might have considered it something, because the last older woman he’d dated hadn’t exactly worked out, but things had changed. In the last twenty minutes.
‘Is poker what brought you out here?’ he asked.
‘Kind of, yeah. I mean, you can’t stay in the States because you like to play poker, but I’ve had enough money to support myself and got visas that way. And I was in a relationship with an American guy.’
‘I’m guessing not a cowboy or NYPD officer?’
‘No, another poker player. So I stayed. When I’m not travelling around the world playing, this is where I spend most of my time. I’ve come close, but the World Series has eluded me. Any woman, actually.’
‘Sorry to hear that. But there’s still time.’
‘There is, although I’m not sure it matters all that much to me now. I might scrub it off the list. Replace it with something more important.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. What can you offer me?’
Sean angled his chair facing Cherry’s, his feet planted apart, the heavy weight of his kilt preventing things getting explicit, although he already knew he wanted explicit with this woman.
He wanted everything with her. The sex, the dances where he held her, watching her win poker games, taking her home to meet his family.
Hell, he was ready to take her around this room and meet them right now.
‘I’ll tell you what I can offer you, Cherry.
Instead of kicking you out for crashing my brother’s wedding, I’m going to ask you to stay as my plus-one.
We can talk and dance some more. Maybe we’ll find a quiet elevator.
Tomorrow, I’ll take you for breakfast. Then, if you’re lucky and I’m lucky, you can marry the love of your life, who will also be wearing a kilt.
Not in Vegas but at City Hall, which is like Vegas but with more class and fewer Elvises.
’ Sean worked hard not to mirror Cherry’s smile.
Did that mean she was keen? Who knew he did such a fine line in romantic hyperbole?
He continued, ‘Then you can move back to Scotland with me, where I’ll teach you to surf, take you to a secluded waterfall that I know and get you a kitten.
’ Possibly he was going over the top, but she was enjoying it.
‘That’ll cover about five points on your list. Oh, and you can put a wee star next to all of them, in case you were wondering. ’
She burst out laughing. ‘If you do say so yourself.’
‘I’m only going on what I’ve been told.’ Did that sound big-headed? Hopefully, she would know he was playing it for laughs.
Cherry shuffled her seat close to Sean’s, so her knees were hitting the front of his chair. She leaned her hands on his knees, her own apparent delight mirroring the amazement Sean was experiencing.
‘I have a hunch it’s the truth,’ she said. ‘Guess I’ll find out in the elevator or on our wedding night – whichever comes first.’
Holy smokes. She wasn’t exactly batting back his idea.
‘If we get married, I’ll keep my surname,’ she added, jumping way ahead of any considerations Sean had.
‘Of course. Why leave paradise behind?’
‘I should have put “sex with a whisky heir” on my list.’
‘Ach, I’m not a whisky heir. I just make the barrels they put the stuff in. My brother Jamie runs the show now.’
‘Ah, a cooper. That would explain the biceps.’ Cherry leaned forward and squeezed Sean’s arm again, the heat from her small hand shooting to behind the scenes of his sporran. He would need to be careful, although something told him Cherry wouldn’t mind if it became obvious what she did to him.
‘I could marry a man with arms like these,’ she said.
‘If you’re lucky, I might let you,’ Sean joked, knowing that he’d be the lucky one if anything as outrageous as marrying this woman came to be.