Knight & Day
Page 42“I can’t believe I’ve only known him a few months,” Kara said. Then, more seriously, “Is it too fast, Soph?”
Sophie laughed softly. “There isn’t a rule book, Kara. You could spend your whole life looking and never find anything close to how you feel now ever again. You remember how it was for me with Lucien? He came out of the blue and totally blindsided me. It was like love on fast forward, and look at us now. Look at us today.”
Kara nodded, drawing in a deep breath.
“I… I love him.”
“I know you do,” Sophie said, as if Kara had just told her that the sun rose in the east. “And I know he loves you right back.”
“How can you know?”
Sophie sighed. What was it about love that it could make nervy, moonstruck teenagers out of two usually confident, self-assured adults?
“Because it’s written all over his face every time you’re in the same room. He can’t take his eyes off you.”
A slow tingle of happiness ran deliciously through Kara’s body. She knew that Sophie was right. She could feel Dylan’s love all around her, and it was time for them to act like grown ups and talk about it. This wasn’t like all the other times in her life. He wasn’t like Richard, some selfish prick living two lives just so he could have his cake and eat it. He wasn’t like her father, someone who always put his own happiness first at the expense of the people who loved him.
He was Dylan-fucking-yankee-doodle-Day, resident of the floating shag palace, world-class kisser, and the owner of her heart.
“I’m going to tell him tonight.”
“The best, Soph.” Kara squeezed Sophie’s shoulder then laughed a little, breaking the emotional charge.
“Now pull yourself together, you daft cow. Those baby hormones have a lot to answer for.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sometimes, very rarely, there are perfect days in our lives. Sometimes they happen unexpectedly, they start out normal and then something happens to make them burn brightly in our memories forever. And sometimes they happen because there’s no way they could be anything but perfect, because they are so jammed full of special moments that thinking back over them warms our hearts even on the coldest of days.
Lucien and Sophie’s wedding was always going to be one of those days.
The afternoon sky seemed a little bluer and the sun a little brighter to Sophie as she stepped out of the villa with Kara and Tilly at her side. She’d grinned with delight as she’d dressed her daughter in her meltingly gorgeous white cotton bridesmaid dress, every inch her daddy’s little girl with her blonde locks and his blue steel eyes.
Sophie saw in Tilly the child that Lucien must have been, precocious and funny, as happy to run in the arctic snow as she was to play on an Ibizan beach. Already well travelled, Tilly was destined to grow up a cosmopolitan young woman with the world at her feet. Sophie pitied her boyfriends in decades to come; it was hard to imagine a more formidably protective father than Lucien. She imagined the boys quailing under his gaze. He was protective of all of them. Of Sophie, and Tilly, and of the unborn child who had already begun to weave its gossamer thread into the fabric of their family.
She turned as Kara squeezed her elbow, beautiful beside her in a bias cut, calf length nude pink dress that suited her sun-kissed complexion perfectly.
“Time to go,” Kara said, propelling her gently forward towards the waiting car.
“I know,” Sophie said softly, breathing in the scent of the wild flowers she held, a larger version of the corsage on Kara’s wrist and the tiny posy clutched in Tilly’s hand. She kissed her daughter’s apple cheek as Esther, her nanny, appeared and scooped her into her arms to go and secure her in the car.
“Don’t you dare start crying,” Kara warned. “Lucien is expecting radiant, not the bride of Dracula. I’m not bringing any fresh mascara.”
“I’m not going to cry,” Sophie said. “Not yet, anyway.”
She looked out beyond the villa at the lush Ibizan landscape. “This place has been good to all of us, hasn’t it?”
Kara nodded, suddenly nostalgic even though the summer wasn’t quite at its end. The day was heavy with portentous, magical romance, of lifetime love being sealed with a promise, and of precious new love being acknowledged for the first time.
Despite her stern warning to Sophie, tears lodged in her own throat and she resolutely swallowed them down.
“Come on, lady. We need to get you to the beach on time.”
Dylan drove Lucien to the secluded private cove in Kara’s red Mustang, roof down, shades on, a whole lot of handsome that turned the head of every woman they passed along the way.
Lucien’s perfectly tailored black-blue suit followed close against the lines of his body, his open necked white shirt an elegant contrast with his golden skin. He epitomised laid-back glamour in the way only a beautiful, self assured man can.
At the wheel, Dylan was a different kind of sexy. A little more subtle maybe, a little less intense, yet no less capable of commanding any room he walked into. They made a formidable duo as Dylan parked the car at the top of the cove, flicking his phone onto silent when it buzzed for the third time since they’d set out. He wasn’t in work mode today.
“I’m guessing there’s no need to say it’s not too late to back out,” he said with a grin, getting out of the car and running his hand over his inside pocket for the tenth time since that morning. Yes, the rings were still there. “You’d have to be one crazy fool to not marry someone like Sophie.”
“I used to think you’d have to be a crazy fool to marry anyone.”
Dylan looked out across the still, blue sea, keeping his personal feelings towards marriage firmly out of the conversation.
“So what changed?”
Lucien shrugged. “I still think everyone else is a crazy fool to do it.”
“But not you?”
“Hell, yeah. I’m as much of a crazy fool for Sophie as the next guy. Whatever love is, it’s what I have with her.”
Around them, the sounds of nature filled the quiet air. The chirp of crickets, the light breeze moving through the leaves, the distant lap of the Mediterranean.