Chapter Twenty-Seven
Best birthday present ever.
Jake sat down on the picnic blanket and tucked a visibly dazed and shaken Emma beside him gently. Still seemingly reeling from the cataclysm of discoveries and self-revelations, Emma wordlessly pointed at the bakery box she’d been carrying earlier.
“For me?” he asked, smiling over the extracareful way she slid the box over for him to look at.
“Happy birthday.”
Jake opened the box and stared down at the cake in quiet wonder. “Chocolate strawberry shortcake with whipped cream frosting.”
Of course she’d remembered.
“I thought that was a tradition we could bring back.” She gave him a trembling smile. “To celebrate every new year of this amazing life you’re leading.”
He stared at her for a moment, wondering how it was that she knew exactly why his mom stopping the birthday cake tradition had affected him so badly. It wasn’t just because he felt as though she’d written him off as a son. Or because he’d waited that day in juvie, hoping as each hour passed that she’d come with the cake and a hug. Or because he’d waited the following year, as well.
No, more than anything else, he’d felt as if his mom was saying that his life didn’t matter anymore. That it wasn’t worth celebrating. It wasn’t just that he was no longer worthy enough for her to bother baking him a cake, but no longer worthy, period. If your own mom doesn’t care about each new year of your life, then who does?
While his dad may have cast him aside so he no longer existed as a Carmichael, what his mom had done was, in a way, so much more hurtful.
“I never thought I’d ever see this cake again.”
Jake looked at the cake that, until now, had existed only in his pre-juvie memories. Until now, his pre-juvie life and post-juvie life had never really crossed paths. Until Emma. She was his past, his present, and now, finally, his future.
“Oh, shoot,” she cursed quietly. “I don’t have any candles.”
He shrugged and wrapped an arm around her waist to pull her closer. “Wouldn’t have any new things to wish for even if you did.” Kissing her softly on the lips, he murmured, “See, who needs a candle?”
Her cheeks colored. “I’ve missed your freckles.”
With a smiling head shake, she sighed. “What is it with you and my freckles?”
“I like ’em. And they like me, too.”
“What?” She laughed.
“When you blush, your freckles come out to say hi. And you almost always blush when you see me.”
“Do not.”
“Do so. Your freckles don’t lie.” He raised one wicked eyebrow. “It’s sort of like how around you, my—”
“Oh my God. Not in front of my brother!”
Chuckling, he pulled the cake out of the box and placed it on the ground carefully before dragging her into his arms. “I was going to say heart, you pervy hussy.” He placed her palm over his chest so she could feel what she did to him. “Around you, my heart never stops racing, and it always feels like it’s going to bust through my chest.”
She threw her arms around his neck and leaned in for a kiss, pressing the entire length of her soft, curvy body against his.
Until he raised the white flag.
“Okay, okay, so maybe it’s not just my heart that you can get stirred up.” He felt her shoulders shake with laughter. “That’s not exactly helping, sweetheart.” He pulled her off his lap and down onto the picnic blanket. “I think maybe we ought to start eating cake so we stay out of trouble while your brother is chaperoning us.”
“He probably is, you know,” commented Emma as she handed him a fork and a giant slice of cake. “Peyton actually knew that I had a huge crush on you, and he always used to tell me that he’d kick your butt if you did wrong by me.”
Jake beamed. Just when he thought he couldn’t love the little guy any more. “I think that’s earned Peyton the first slice of cake.”
“No!”
Jake froze. “What?”
“That’s your slice.”
“Okay,” he replied slowly as Emma quickly cut another slice for Peyton and then one for herself.
“Dig in,” she said cheerfully.
She even went so far as to push the plate closer to him.
Was it just him, or was she being even stranger than usual?
Putting a pin in that for the time being, he slid his fork into the moist cake and took his first unbelievable bite.
Holy crap. “That’s even better than my mom’s.”
Emma lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yeah? Okay, keep eating.”
Back to the peculiar behavior again. But an intriguing variety for sure. He just gave her a smiling headshake and went in for another bite.
Only his fork clanged against something hard inside the cake. He slid his fork out and tried again. Again it bumped into something hard, seemingly metallic, in his slice.
A shy smile bloomed across Emma’s face.
“Is this—” he began, too surprised and too at a loss for words to even finish his question.
He’d seen this very thing in a bunch of movies before. Never once did he imagine that he would be on the receiving end of it. Truth be told, he’d always thought the whole thing a little silly.
But it wasn’t silly. In fact, it was romantic as hell.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” said Emma in a quiet, contemplative voice. “If I could turn back time, knowing everything I do now . . . about you taking the fall for a stranger who I still don’t want to learn the identity of—just FYI—and about how our lives would play out, I’m pretty sure I’d do everything exactly the same way.”
“Yeah?” he asked as he hooked his fork on the symbolic little gift Emma had made sure he’d find, the reason she’d been so adamant that he have this particular slice.
“Well, except for one thing,” she amended, emotion-rich eyes watching his every reaction. “I’d make sure to visit you at juvie. Especially on your birthday.”
Even though Jake had been adamant about his siblings not visiting him in juvie, if Emma had shown up, he would’ve seen her in a heartbeat.
“You told that mystery caller you were talking to on the phone that if the woman you wanted to spend the rest of your life with couldn’t come to terms with your past, with the choices you’d made a part of your history fourteen years ago, if she couldn’t accept that part of you, of who you were, then there was no possible future there.”
Damn. She’d remembered it almost verbatim. He nodded, now seeing her gift, her loud-and-clear message to him in an even more meaningful light.
“So yes.” Her gaze held his. “To show you that I’m that woman, the one you should spend the rest of your life with, I’d make absolutely certain to visit you at juvie on your birthday.”
He pulled her closer. “With this cake?”
“Yup.”
“With this very romantic, very meaningful metal file baked into it?”
She blushed shyly even as her voice grew bolder. “Definitely.”
“God, I love you, woman.”