When I’d married Marcy, the planning process had been a year-long nightmare that had nearly ended our engagement, relationship, and friendship more times than I could count, and we hadn’t even been the ones paying for the damn thing. To this day, the clearest memory I had of our wedding day was the two of us collapsing in the back of the limo after the reception and simultaneously muttering, “We should’ve eloped.”

Darren and I were a month into planning ours. We’d set a date for mid-December so my kids would be on break from their respective schools, but safely away from the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel rushes. That was still holiday party season, though, and we only had a venue because the wedding planner had pulled a miracle out of her ass and found us a restaurant that had had a cancellation. She’d also sweet-talked me into coughing up a grand to reserve the place. Thank God neither of us needed a wedding dress or this whole affair would bankrupt us.

Through all the chaos and headaches—not to mention our high-stress jobs—Darren and I were surprisingly civil. Well, to each other, anyway. My mother and I had almost weekly conversations that Darren referred to as “heated,” and he’d saved the wedding planner as “Satan” in his contacts.

We didn’t really butt heads with each other, though. If anything, we approached planning our wedding the same way we approached working together. We either divided and conquered or tackled something as a team, and when we disagreed, it just never seemed like something worth raising our voices over. I vetoed dress uniforms because they were uncomfortable, and didn’t argue when Darren insisted on cummerbunds with the tuxes. He thought engraved invites were nicer, I thought printed were more practical, and we let his mom decide. (She picked engraved because of course she did.)

We never forgot we were on the same team, and through it all, I couldn’t even count the number of times I heard the words of young me and my ex-wife coming out of our mouths: “We should elope.”

But we didn’t. Because we couldn’t disappoint our parents. His mother would be sad and mine would be insufferable, so the planning steamed on.

“For fuck’s sake,” Darren snarled at the three-inch-thick binder spread across his lap and let his head fall back against the couch. “Why is there not an ‘I don’t give a shit’ option on the floral stuff? I don’t even know what the difference is between a rose and a lily and a . . . whatever the fuck those are.”

I leaned over the couch behind him, resting my forearms beside his shoulder. “Orchids.”

He twisted around and eyed me like I’d spoken another language. “Huh?”

I nodded toward the colorful photos. “Those are orchids, Darren.”

He shifted his gaze back and forth between me and the flowers. After a moment, he shook himself. “How the . . . Since when do you know anything about flowers?”

Grinning, I pressed a kiss to his temple. “I’m not a total caveman, you know.”

That brought a smile to his lips. He reached up, curved a hand around the back of my neck, and drew me down. “But I like your caveman side.”

“Mmm, I know you do.” I gave him a light kiss, but didn’t pull away. “Just wait till the wedding night.”

His eyebrows flicked up. “Seriously?”

“Um, yeah? That’s the prize at the end of all the bullshit.” I gestured at the binders. “We appease everyone we know by jumping through the crazy hoops, and then we take off somewhere and fuck like bunnies until we can’t move.”

The way his head was tilted back emphasized the bob of his Adam’s apple. “I should probably be annoyed that you’re not getting all romantic about us saying our vows in there somewhere, but man, that last part sounds pretty good.” He absently nudged the binder forward, probably to make room for the distinctive bulge stretching the front of his jeans.

“Isn’t she waiting for an answer from you?” I teased. “I should let you get back to—”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled, and kissed me again.

Thunk. The binder hit the floor at Darren’s feet, and a few pages whooshed out. The rings had probably popped open, and getting it all back in order would be a nightmare, but . . . whatever.

“You’re gonna get a stiff neck like this,” I murmured against his lips. “Let’s go in the bedroom.”

He didn’t argue.

As we sank onto the bed, though, Darren sighed, and it wasn’t a horny sound so much as a dog-tired one.

“You all right?” I slid up beside him, draping my arm over him. We’d both stripped off our shirts on the way into the bedroom, but hadn’t gotten any further than that.

“I’m good.” He smiled but looked even more exhausted than he sounded. He ran his hand up my chest, his fingers warm against my skin. “I guess this has all been wearing me out more than I realized.”

I sucked at these conversations. I never quite knew what to say without making it worse. If I’d learned anything about Darren, though, it was that sometimes he didn’t need me to talk. Hoping this was one of those times, I pulled him closer, and he relaxed against me as I stroked his hair. This wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind when I’d brought him in here, but I went with it. And damn, as funny and cute as it was to watch Darren getting flustered over flowers and cake decorations, I didn’t like seeing him like this.

“I love you,” he whispered. “And I’m glad we’re doing this. I’m just . . . stressed.”

“I know.” I kissed the top of his head. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”

He grinned. “It already is.”

I snorted. “Sap.”

“Uh-huh.” He lifted his head, perfect hair mussed and just ridiculously adorable along with that smirk. “Says Mr. Romantic-Proposal-in-a-Fancy-Restaurant.”

“I don’t know how romantic it was, considering—”

Darren cut me off with a kiss, but then laughed. “It was perfect and you know it. It wouldn’t be ‘us’ if there wasn’t some sort of chaos attached to it.”

I laughed too. “Chaos does kind of follow us around, doesn’t it?”

“It really does.”

I touched his face and sobered as I really saw the fatigue in his eyes. “You know, there is a little bit of a silver lining to all the prewedding stress.”

He eyed me with a mix of uncertainty and hopefulness. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s like putting up wallpaper with your partner—if you can get through it without killing each other, and you still like each other when it’s over, you’re probably in for the long haul.”

The uncertainty faded away. “We’ve been doing okay, haven’t we?”

I nodded, caressing his cheek. “More than okay, I think. We’ve only fought over this shit, what, twice?”

Some color bloomed in his cheeks, and his sheepish smile melted my heart. “To be fair, we probably shouldn’t have been trying to settle on a photographer after eighteen hours at work.”

“No,” I said with a quiet laugh. “But if that’s as bad as we get when we’re both tired and bitchy and stressed, I think we’ll be all right.”

“Yeah. Me too.” He smiled, but it quickly turned into a frown. “Does it at least get easier after the engagement party?”

I groaned. That was coming up this weekend. We’d held off on doing it right away because my parents had wanted to be there, and they’d needed some time to make travel arrangements.

“You don’t sound very hopeful.” Darren’s voice was tight with uneasiness.

“It’ll get better. It really will.” I ran my fingers through his hair. “I’m just dreading having my mother and my ex-wife in the same room.”

He grimaced. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Should we bring popcorn?”

I laughed and pulled him closer. “Yeah. Good idea.”

He gave another quiet chuckle and cuddled against me. He’d long ago given up on worrying that I’d get tired of his clinginess in bed. Okay, it sometimes got too warm, but we both slept naked these days, we had halfway decent air-conditioning, and I could always kick off the covers if need be.

Cling away, sweetheart. Cling away.

Darren sighed after a while and pushed himself up on his elbow. “I could’ve sworn we didn’t come in here to talk about being stressed about wedding planning.”

“We haven’t been talking about that for a good ten minutes.”

“No.” He trailed his fingers up the middle of my chest. “But we’re not doing what we came in here to do, either.”

“Is that a subtle hint?”

He pressed his hips against mine. “I’m not sure how subtle it was.”

I grinned and drew him in for a long kiss. The way his fingers were sliding up into my hair gave me goose bumps, and I ran a hand down his side before curving it over his ass and pulling him closer. Ah, now this was why we’d come in here. Between work and the wedding, we hadn’t been doing nearly enough of this lately.

I let my fingertips dip beneath the back of his waistband, and he moaned into my kiss. Oh yeah. Forget the wedding. Forget work. Forget everything that wasn’t getting Darren to make those needy little sounds he made when he was turned on.

He pushed me onto my back and straddled me. I hated that we had all these clothes in the way, but damn if there wasn’t something excruciatingly sexy about this—about a half-dressed Darren pinning me down and claiming a hot, hungry kiss while two layers of denim kept our dicks apart. He could be almost timid at times, but in the bedroom, he was an animal. Dominant. Demanding. Toppy as fuck. When the switch flipped between puppy-dog-eyed Darren and “get those pants off before I tear them off” Darren, I was putty in his hands.

I squeezed his ass and broke the kiss enough to—

Muffled music made us both freeze.

Muffled, coming from somewhere on the floor . . . “Bad Boys.” The goddamned COPS theme.

Darren groaned. I swore.

We could—and did—ignore a lot of calls, but not when that particular ringtone came from Darren’s phone. “Bad Boys” meant a call from the captain, and a call from the captain meant we needed to get our asses to work. Stat.

Because of course it did.