‘Valentine, what are we doing here?’
He turns into me, pulls me up against him. ‘We, my love, are taking a leap together.’
‘A leap?’
He nods and presses a kiss to the tip of my nose. ‘I want to prove to you I’m ready to live again.’
‘You’ve done plenty of that already; you don’t need—’
‘Shh.’ He kisses me quiet, his lips turning up into a smile as he looks into my eyes. ‘No more half-lives...for either of us. I want us to live it to the max.’
‘By jumping out of a plane?’ I say, feeling my pulse skitter nervously, my stomach doing another flip. ‘You do remember that I’m scared of extreme heights?’
He chuckles. ‘It’s as good a time as any to face that fear.’
I shake my head. ‘Why is it I feel like I could take on the world so long as you’re by my side?’
‘The feeling’s mutual.’ He strokes my hair back from my face, raises my sunglasses on my head and the look in his eyes steals my breath away. ‘Which is why the jump isn’t the only leap of faith I’m proposing.’
‘No?’
He presses a sweet kiss to my lips just as another aircraft zips past, whipping my hair up and around us.
‘No...’ He lowers himself to one knee as his hand lifts and in his upturned palm is an open box with a beautiful solitaire diamond at its heart.
‘Valentine?’ It comes out as a whisper. He can’t be. He can’t.
‘Olivia Carmel, I love you, I will always love you, and I want to live my life to the full with you by my side. Will you marry me?’
A sob chokes up my throat. I try to breathe, press my hand to my chest as my eyes well. ‘Yes, Valentine! Oh, yes!’
I drop to my knees, uncaring of my white jeans as I grip his face in my hands and kiss him. Once. Twice.
‘But, baby...’ I break away, stare up into his eyes that I have come to adore so much ‘...there’s no way I’m jumping out of a plane.’
‘Wanna bet?’
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Just One More Night
by Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER ONE
INDIANA MARCH, CALLED INDY by her loved ones and much filthier things by her lovers, landed in Prague on a gorgeous June afternoon, ready to face her destiny.
It had been two years since one night in Budapest had changed everything.
Two years since she had made a promise before flying standby back to New York, where she’d moved in with her far less free-spirited older sister—who never would have gone to Budapest in the first place and wouldn’t have gotten into the trouble Indy had no matter where she went.
Bristol was the good March sister.
She had recently gotten her doctorate after a lifetime of endless, serious, and committed studying. Indy, on the other hand, was committed to having fun. And while she was at it, living up—or down—to everyone’s expectations of the other March sister.
Not bad, she liked to say. But better.
Especially because when she said things like that, and vamped it up, it made her sister roll her eyes. And then laugh in spite of herself.
Indy and Bristol had settled on these designations for themselves when they’d still been little girls in small-town Ohio. And all these years later, Indy still thought she’d made the better choice. She’d decided school was boring in roughly the fourth grade and had decreed that she had better things to do, leaving Bristol to study away to her heart’s content while she danced and partied and ran around just being silly, because she could.
Bristol would probably be off studying right this minute—because there were apparently postdoctorates for people who felt the one PhD wasn’t enough—if it weren’t for the little summer adventure Indy had sent her sister off on. An opportunity to discover the parts of you that aren’t all about your mind, at last, Indy had told her—but that was another story.
Indy smiled at the notion of studious, killjoy Bristol getting her freak on out there as her plane taxied toward the gate, bouncing a little on the tarmac. She couldn’t wait to see if her big sister finally loosened up a bit—and couldn’t really imagine what a loosened up Bristol would look like. As the plane came to a rocking stop at the gate, she gathered up the small carry-on that was all she’d brought with her and held it on her lap, watching as all around her, people leapt to their feet and started dragging much heavier bags out of the overhead bins.
It always looked so unpleasant. And then the reward for all those heavy bags was that you then had to lug them around with you. Where was the fun in that?
Indy never troubled with much baggage, figurative or literal. After college she’d backpacked around for a couple of years, but never with one of those massive packs that some people toted across the planet that made them look like unfortunate tortoises. Their packs were always seventeen times their body weight, the better to mark them to all and sundry as a tourist, and barely fit in
