Autumn Adventure (Summer Unplugged #6) (5 page)

Since our sleep schedule is all kinds of weird, I wake up at four in the morning the next day. Not so surprisingly, Jace is awake too. He’s watching some show on the hotel’s television that’s about fixing up old cars. I roll over, snuggling up in our plush hotel comforter and rest my head on his shoulder.

“Good morning, beautiful.” I smile at Jace’s greeting but don’t say anything back due to a massive fear of having morning breath. He holds out a half-eaten Snickers bar. “Want some?”

I lean over and take a bite. As if on cue, Jace knows that the last thing I want to watch is a car mechanic show, so he begins flipping through the channels for something else to watch. Of course, being four in the morning, there’s not much on.

“Pretty Woman!” I grab his hand to stop him from scanning channels because the greatest movie ever just appeared on the screen. “Pretty Woman, yes or no?” I ask him, giving my best version of puppy eyes. “Yes?” I nudge him with my elbow. “Yes?”

“If that’s what you want,” Jace says, rolling his eyes.

Becca and I used to watch this movie all the time because it was one of the only VHS tapes that Mom and I owned when I finally got a TV in my room. I was twelve when Mom found a small TV with a built in VHS player at a garage sale for ten dollars. It was on that glorious day that I finally got a TV in my room. But we didn’t have cable, so we had to watch movies. This is where the dusty old Pretty Woman tape became our Friday night movie.

Now that I look back on it, a movie about a prostitute probably isn’t good for twelve year olds to watch. But I didn’t care about the first part of it. I loved when Richard Gere’s character started falling in love with her, taking her places and making her feel special. That’s what kept me coming back to watch it again and again.

“So where do we want to go next?” Jace asks, but it’s during the part in the movie where Julia Roberts goes shopping for nice clothes and the sales ladies are total bitches to her, so I don’t hear him. He asks again, this time waving his hand in front of my face. “Or do you want to stay here watching this movie you’ve seen a million times?”

I snap out of the movie’s allure, and turn to Jace. “Where do you want to go?” I ask. He shrugs. “Anywhere with you.”

“Oh, ha.” I lean forward and kiss him. “Now’s the time for making decisions, not for being romantic.”

Jace’s eyes drift off as he tries to think of a place to visit next, and I do the same thing. “Well, most of our trips have revolved around eating,” I say with a snort. “Let’s go to some famous restaurant or something, or—” My eyes light up and I sit up straight in bed, knocking Jace’s arm off my shoulder. “I’ve got it!”

In the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gere’s character takes her on a dinner date by private jet. They get all dressed up and then fly across the country, have dinner, then fly back to their hotel. I’d always thought the whole thing was flashy as hell—I mean, who has money to take a private jet around as if it were a taxi?—and that was also what made it so special. He cared about her enough to do something so extravagant for her. And, now that I think about it? Isn’t that what Jace has been doing for this whole honeymoon?”

“Are you going to keep me waiting forever before you tell me?” Jace asks, poking me in the elbow. “Could we maybe get breakfast first? I’m hungry and something has to be open by now.”

“No, you can’t eat yet,” I say, leaning back to snuggling against him. “I have the perfect idea. Let’s eat our breakfast, lunch and dinner Pretty Woman style.”

Jace slaps on his goofy joke face and says, “So you want to hire a hooker?”

I roll my eyes. “Nope. I want to fly somewhere different for all three meals today. And maybe tomorrow, too.”

He doesn’t even need time to think about my idea, which is yet another reason why I love him. “That sounds kickass. Where are we going for breakfast? Oh! Can I suggest somewhere for dinner?”

“I say we hit up a bed and breakfast for breakfast. Don’t they usually have really famous breakfast menus? And yes, what’s for dinner?” I can’t help but smile when Jace leaps out of bed and grabs the tablet to show me his idea for dinner. I love when he gets as into an idea as I am. While he’s searching for something on the tablet, he grabs his phone and calls Christopher, our pilot.

“Jace!” I hiss. “It’s four-thirty in the morning! You can’t call him!”

“Hey, man,” Jace says into the phone, blowing me a kiss. “I knew you’d be up since you always get up at four to watch the news,” he says into the receiver, more for my benefit I suppose. “We want to hit up a bed and breakfast for breakfast. Do you know any places?” He listens for a moment and then says to me, “Connecticut?”

I nod. “Perfect.”

He finishes his phone call, promising that we’ll meet him in the hotel lobby in fifteen minutes. I’m not so sure I can have everything packed and ready in that short of a time, but we’re both starving and want to get to our breakfast destination as soon as possible.

That’s one cool thing about having Christopher fly us around everywhere—Jace has gotten him a hotel room everywhere we’ve stayed. He said it’s customary for a pilot to follow the family they fly for, getting a mini vacation while they’re taking their clients on vacation. Apparently Christopher’s wife had work that she couldn’t get out of, or else Jace would have paid her way, too.

“Hey, can I see that tablet?” I ask all casually, trying not to give myself away.

“That depends…are you going to look up Facebook and see what people are saying about us?”

“No…” The only way I can say this lie is by making an exaggerated guilty face so he knows I’m playing around. Jace hugs the tablet to his chest. “You can look if you have to, but I don’t want you to read something stupid and then have it ruin your day.”

“You’re right,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t need to know. I’m having a blast with you and that’s all that matters.”

The bed and breakfast Christopher flies us to is absolutely stunning. The entire state of Connecticut in general is beautiful and I can’t believe I’ve never thought to visit it before. Unlike Texas with its hot, dry land, the bed and breakfast is situated between lush woods and cool mountain air. It is a beautiful manor, a mansion if you ask me, that was built in the late eighteen hundreds.

“New England is amazing,” I say as we walk up the pathway leading to the mansion’s front door. “It’s so old and full of history.”

“Yeah, Texas and Cali don’t have nearly the same feel as this old place.” Jace looks around, touching the wooden railing of the porch’s stair case. “I bet this place is haunted.”

“Maybe we should stay overnight and find out,” I say, kidding of course. There’s no way I’m sleeping over in a place that’s even remotely likely to be haunted.

“Yeah, right. I know you better than to believe you’d do that.” Jace shoots me a wink and it’s as if he knows what I’m thinking. I guess that’s what happens when you find your soul mate—your thoughts are no longer yours because someone else knows you well enough to guess them.

I’m starving by the time we are seated at a table near floor to ceiling windows with a view of the gardens behind the inn. Our table is an antique, with a table cloth and a vase in the center that has a single pink rose. Maybe it’s because we’re so hungry, but I swear the orange juice here is made from the most divine oranges on earth.

But the orange juice is just a prelude to the breakfast. Jace orders just about everything on the menu and although I’m tempted to join him, I settle for an English muffin with butter, two scrambled eggs, bacon, grits and sliced fruit.

And I eat every single bite of it. Yay for being pregnant!

After breakfast, Jace and I walk hand in hand through the gardens. I take pictures on my phone and hope they come out good enough to be printed and framed when we get home. We find a bench carved out of a fallen tree and we spend the next hour talking about where we should go for lunch. There’s so many more options when you get to choose from anywhere in the country.

My phone beeps while we’re using it to search for famous restaurants. It’s a text from Becca, and although Jace and I had promised we’d ignore our phones for the duration of our honeymoon, Jace nudges me and says, “You should probably see what he wrote. She made this big deal about refusing to text us on our honeymoon and all of that. Maybe it’s an emergency.”

I slide open the text and find that Jace was sort of right. It’s not exactly an emergency, but it’s pretty damn close.

“Uh oh,” I say, after reading her text twice to make sure I didn’t misunderstand it. “Becca and Park are um…” Jace’s eyes go wide and I show him the text.

Becca: Yeah so, I’m sorry I’m texting, but Park and I haven’t stopped hanging out since the wedding and well…yeah.

“Ah, shit,” he says, handing the phone back. “Tell her to run. Run far away!”

The quick rush of excitement I’d had over the idea of my best friend dating my husband’s best friend disappears as quickly as it arrived. “But I thought you loved Park? You talk about him all the time.”

“Yeah, I love him as a best friend. There’s no way in hell I’d let a girl date him though. Especially not your best friend. He’s kind of a womanizer who’s afraid of commitment.”

“Oh.” I frown and glance at the phone in my hand. How can I tell her something as crushing as that? Becca is definitely not a one night stand type of girl. She’s a commitment girl. A write a guy’s name all over her notebook girl. And they’ve spent the last week and a half together? “This isn’t good,” I say, and then I remember a very important piece of information. “They’re staying at our apartment. You don’t think they’ve…”

“No way,” Jace says quickly. “Park would have, but I know Becca and there’s no way she’d hook up with him that quickly. I mean, come on.” He makes a circular motion with his finger around the top of his head, indicating the imaginary halo that Becca always wears. She’s one of the good girls. There’s no way she hooked up with Park, because if she did, she’d be even more devastated to learn that he’s a player. I probably shouldn’t have made all those hints to her on our wedding night. I mean, I didn’t really think she’d take me up on the offer to flirt with Park, but it looks like she did.

I sigh and stare at my phone, wishing for the perfect words to tell her that the guy she’s crushing on is bad news. After several minutes, I simply type
Be careful
and press send. Becca knows how to handle herself so I’ve just got to trust her on this one.

Our lunch plans come to me suddenly. One moment I’m walking with Jace down the trails behind the inn and the next moment I’m remembering a commercial I saw about a month ago.

“Babe!” I slap his arm in all my excitement and he flinches, making me realize I probably slapped him a little too hard. “I know where we should go to lunch—New York City!”

“Nice. There’s tons of places to eat there. What do you have in mind?”

“That place with Japanese food where they cook it in front of you? I heard about it on the radio. The chefs are all crazy about it, like they toss food in the air and stuff? Can we go?” I give him the puppy eyes even though I know he wouldn’t tell me no even without my begging face.

“Benihana?” Jace presses his lips together and nods approvingly. “You know that place is all over the country, not just in New York, right?”

“Yes, but I want to see the city,” I say, leaning against him as we walk back toward the inn.

“Your wish is my command,” Jace says with a cocky air in his voice. “Let’s go get some delicious Japanese food.

The New York City hustle and bustle is probably something I would love—any time that I’m not pregnant. But since I am carrying a mini-Jace in my body, walking through the crowded streets, with their varied and sometimes awful smells, really takes a toll on me. By the time we’ve eaten dinner, I am so exhausted and weirdly moody that all I want to do is go home.

But you can’t tell your husband on week two of your three week honeymoon that you want to go home. So I put on a smile and ask him if we can head to the airport to get some rest in the plane before we fly somewhere for dinner.

“You feeling okay?” he asks. Concern is written all over his face and I hate seeing him worry about me so I nod and roll my eyes like he’s crazy for even asking that.

“Of course. I’m just tired.”

“Me too. This flying thing is more exhausting than I’d thought it would be. It’s almost like we’re doing the damn flapping of our wings ourselves.”

I laugh at his stupid joke as we flag a taxi to take us back to the private airport just outside of the city. We had invited Christopher to come with us to lunch but he politely declined, saying New York was far too busy of a city for someone like him.

Back in the plane, I check the time—two-thirty in the afternoon. Because of the time zones, it could be lunch or dinner time in wherever we chose to fly to next. But as soon as we board the plane and head toward the bedroom, exhaustion takes over all five of my senses.

You know you’re tired when you can taste the sleep as it washes over you.

Jace’s laughter wakes me up. I’m in the plane, snuggled under the plush comforter. The smooth vibrations of the plane lets me know we’re in the air; which direction we’re headed is a mystery. I look over at Jace, who is sitting up in bed next to me, talking on his phone. He’s not wearing a shirt and my eyes get caught up in watching his tanned abs flex as he laughs.

Suddenly, without thinking, my hand reaches over and my fingertips slide across his muscular chest. Chills appear on his skin and I drag my hand up to his collar bone and then down his arm, which flexes at my touch. I could admire this man forever. Twenty four hours a day and I’d never get tired of it.

Jace pulls the phone away from his ear, leans down and gives me a quick kiss. “My parents,” he whispers, nodding toward the phone. He puts it back to his ear and wraps up the conversation. “I’ll tell her,” he says, followed by. “Love you too, Mom. Bye.”

“You’ll tell me what?” I ask, sliding over in bed so I can cuddle closer to him.

“Well,” he says, pointing to his fingers as if they are an itemized list. “Dad said to tell you hi and to make sure you’re drinking lots of water. For your health I guess. I don’t know, I didn’t ask. Mom said to tell you she said hi, and then she said I should wake you up so she can tell you herself, but I said I know my wife and she is not a cheerful person if you wake her up.”

“Oh,
ha, ha
,” I say, shoving him in the arm, even though he’s kind of right.

Jace brushes some hair out of my eyes and tucks it behind my ear. “And then Mom went on and on about the baby clothes she ordered online. She found some dirt bike shirts and like, a pajama set that looks like motocross gear or something.”

“Aww, that’s cute!” It dawns on me now that I have done very little shopping or planning for the baby. I had wanted to a few times but Jace always told me it’d be easier to plan for the wedding first, and then plan for the baby, so we wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Well, now the wedding is over.

“Shit, we should be planning for the baby,” I say. “We only have like, three and a half months left until he’s here.”

“That’s plenty of time to set up a nursery,” Jace says.

“You sound pretty confident,” I say, giving him a look that I didn’t know I was capable of until I became a wife. “Exactly how many children have you set up nurseries for?”

“Zero, but, I mean how hard could it be?”

I shrug. “Guess we’ll find out.”

Jace lifts his arm and wraps it around my shoulders while I snuggle closer, lying on his chest. There’s a small flat screen TV facing the bed and he has it on a motocross race on ESPN with the volume down. It’s weird to think that if it wasn’t for me, Jace would have continued to work hard with his racing and he would have gotten his sponsorships back and continued to be a professional racer. He would have probably been in this race on TV if he had never met me. Motocross is his passion and he had the skills to be one of the best racers in the world. But instead, he chose to settle down in the middle-of-nowhere Texas and just teach motocross to others.

“Do you miss professional racing?” I ask, staring straight ahead at the television. There’s no way I could look him in the eye after asking a question like that. “Do you wish you were out there right now in that race?”

“Nope. I’ll never quit riding, but I’m not sorry I quit racing.”

“Why? You could have been super famous and rich.”

“I’m famous and rich enough.”

“Yeah, but you could have been more—”

“Bayleigh, there’s two things more important in life than being more rich and more famous than I am now.”

I look up at him. “What two things?”

“You,” he says, leaning down to kiss me. “And our baby.”

Even though we’re married now, I still feel myself blush. I think he notices it, too, because he kisses my cheek and pulls me into a horizontal bear hug, making me roll on top of him against my will. I have to stay kind of sideways though because my stomach is getting so big. But lying on top of him and his rock-hard chest, with his strong arms wrapped around me completely even though I’m a fat cow right now, is the greatest feeling ever. I feel protected and loved and safe and happy.

My mind wanders back into baby territory. “Now that the wedding is over, I’m kind of super excited to start baby shopping.”

“Me too,” Jace says. “I didn’t realize there was so much dirt bike themed baby stuff until Mom told me about it. Don’t hate me for this, but I’m glad we’re having a boy.”

“Me too,” I say with a sigh of relief. “You can raise him to be an awesome man like you are. I would have no idea what to do with a girl. Except, you know, lock her in her room until she’s thirty.”

Jace laughs. “I think you’ll be a great mom no matter what. But if we were having a girl, I’d probably never let her on a dirt bike. Now I can get our son a bike the day he turns three.”

“Three? Um, hell no! Maybe when he’s ten he can get a dirt bike.”

“Ten? Are you kidding? I was winning national championships at that age.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” I say with a smile. I always knew we’d raise our son to be a dirt bike kid, but three years old is a little too young to give a kid a motorized bike in my opinion. But this is our honeymoon so I’m not going to get in an argument. “So where is this plane headed?”

“You were sleeping pretty hard, so I had to make the choice for us,” he says. “You probably don’t remember this, but there’s this place in Louisiana that—”

“Big Al’s Seafood,” I say with a laugh. It’s a restaurant in Louisiana that Jace’s parents always went to when he was a kid and had a race in New Orleans. Jace has talked about their shrimp po’boy sandwiches so many times that he’s insane if he thinks I don’t remember.

“Is that okay?” he asks. “If not, there’s tons of places to eat in New Orleans…”

I nod. “Baby, I love being treated like a princess all of the time,” I say. “Trust me, I do. But you’re an equal member in this marriage and you can totally pick the places we go to. So stop looking so worried about your decision. I love it. Let’s go.”

“You’re the best wife ever,” he says.

I smile. “You’re the best husband ever.”

From somewhere in the ceiling, the voice of our pilot crackles through a speaker, “Oh my god, would you two stop being so sappy? I’m getting diabetes by listening to all the sweetness.”

Heat rushes up my face as mortification fills every cell of my body. “Wait, you can hear us?” I say aloud, to wherever the microphone is in this room.

“Just for the last minute or two, whenever one of y’all hit the intercom button.”

Jace starts laughing and apologizes to Christopher. I jump up out of bed and sure enough, just above our heads is a red button with a label that says intercom. We must have hit it when Jace pulled me on top of him. “Oh my god, I’m so embarrassed,” I say, covering my face with my hands.

“I can still hear you,” Christopher says. “Hit the button again.”

I practically dive through the air to punch the button again, while Jace erupts into laugher. My face is beet red and yet his eyes fill with tears because he’s laughing so hard. I grab the pillow and throw it at him.

“You remember that best husband thing I just said? Well, I take it back!”

Jace gives me a seductive look which sends a tingle down my body even though I’m still mad at him. “Imagine if we had hit that button a few hours ago.”

I throw the other pillow at him for good measure.