Benny’s eyes looked at the calendar and his heart started jackhammering.

“And here,” she said, flipping back. “I put all my travel schedule in that I have set, all the times and flight numbers and hotel stuff and everything. You can write in the stuff that comes up.”

She stopped yapping, finally looked at him, and when she did, she went visibly still.

They stared at each other a couple of beats before she said hesitantly, totally not reading him, “The other present is a lot better, Benny.”

“Only one thing I want in my life,” he declared.

“Wh-what?” she stammered.

“All my life, didn’t have big hopes and dreams. Only one thing I wanted.”

“I…” She swallowed, kept her eyes locked to him, and asked, “What was that, honey?”

“A life that meant I’d have a calendar on my kitchen wall filled in with birthdays and anniversaries and parties and practices and special occasions. All the shit that makes a good life scribbled in the blocks printed on glossy paper hangin’ on a wall.”

Her eyes grew bright and her breath grew shallow.

“You gonna give that to me?” he asked.

“Yes, Benny,” she responded instantly.

Instantly.

Yeah.

She was going to give that to him.

And he was going to give it to her.

The…best…fucking…birthday…ever.

“No lip, no shit, come here right now, Frankie,” he ordered.

She tossed the calendar aside to land on the bed and she came to him immediately.

And Ben crushed her in his arms, rolled her to her back, and found reason again to get rid of her nightie.

In the end, she slept beside him in a hot pink one with black lace.

Her second present was an expensive, handsome watch that had an inscription on the back that said, For Benny, Love Frankie.

It was f**king kick-ass.

But it wasn’t better than the calendar.

Not by a long shot.

Chapter Twenty

Swingin’ in the Breeze

“You okay?”

I looked from the computer screen, on which I was obsessively watching the time change in the bottom right corner, to Tandy standing in the doorway of my office.

The answer to her question was, no, I was not okay.

It was Monday after spending the weekend with Benny for the sake of spending the weekend with Benny, as well as being there for the family celebration that consisted of him blowing out birthday candles on a pizza pie that he made and everyone on staff getting to suck back quick sips of Chianti while they worked. Ben opened presents in between making pies and getting out orders. Theresa, Vinnie, Manny, and Sela all were around, mostly being loud, giving Ben shit, and getting in the way.

I hung with Ben the entire night in the kitchen, my ass taking up counter space since I sat on one with a wineglass in my hand, and alternately gabbed with my man, gave him my own shit, and communed with what he called his “kids.” I took this time to get to know them, something I liked a whole lot since they were good kids and fun to be around.

In fact, Ben ran a fun kitchen. It was work, definitely—hot work with the ovens going and the stoves on, people rushing around, always busy.

But I’d been in those kitchens when Vinnie ran them, and although he wasn’t an ass**le, he was a taskmaster.

It was strange knowing a father’s way and then seeing his son’s.

They both took what they did seriously. They both communicated that. But Ben was far more laid-back about it and the kids responded to it.

Watching him work, firm in woman-in-love mode, I fell more in love, my already immense pride at being Benny’s woman growing, watching him run his kitchen. His kids liked him. He organized chaos without any apparent effort. He wasn’t about shouting and bossing. He was about quiet words and direction. And every pie or dish put on the warming shelf to be taken out looked mouth-watering because I knew it was.

It wasn’t like he was organizing a disaster relief effort.

Still, it was awesome.

Saturday during the day and Sunday before I left to drive home, Ben and I tackled his office. On Friday, Ben had called the cable company to have Internet jacks installed. On Saturday, we went out and bought a filing cabinet, shredder, and a desktop computer. It took us hours, but we got a system down that might (might) make the rest of our efforts throughout the house easier. We tossed a bunch of crap, filed some away, and in the end, the office looked more like an office and less like a dump. The kind of room you’d find in a home, not a bachelor’s pad.

In other words, I thought every minute was worth the effort.

The cool thing in doing this was that I found Benny wasn’t a hoarder. He just didn’t bother to throw shit away when it should have been thrown away. There were no battles about keeping stuff. He also didn’t get into the project for fifteen minutes, then get sick of it and try to find an excuse to escape. Except for me giving him guff about being a lazy ass and Benny grinning through it, we worked beside each other in harmony.

It was kind of fun.

Domestic bliss, Frankie and Benny style.

So now it was Monday. The Monday after being awed by Benny’s kitchen prowess and gaining another promise from Benny that a life at his side would be good, seeing as I wasn’t buying one with a hoarder or someone who would dump all the crap work on me and go his merry way.

It was also the Monday after I gave Benny what I considered lame birthday payback and he considered it something else entirely. And the something he considered it made me fall even deeper in love with him, because as simple as it was, it was everything to Benny and I liked that. A whole lot.

And last, it was the Monday after I gave a goof gift I expected Ben to laugh at and toss aside and it would be me who tacked it on the wall in the kitchen and wrote stuff on it, but it was very much not.

I liked that it wasn’t. Actually, I liked why it wasn’t.

It was a gift I had a feeling changed both our lives.

Because, unexpectedly, we’d made plans to move in together.

But when I gave him that calendar, we’d made plans to spend the rest of our lives together.

I was down with that. I didn’t think twice about it and I knew I didn’t in a way that I never would.

This was because Benny Bianchi was always going to be a promise at the same time Benny Bianchi was the prize at the end of a crazy life.

So there was no reason to think twice about it.

And I was also never going to feel stupid about my goof gifts again.

Now it was Monday and I had a four o’clock meeting with my boss to ask if there was a possibility the company would consider letting me work from a home office in Chicago starting in October.