Epilogue

July 14, 2018

Six weeks later…

“Jon.  Tell me where we’re going!”

Jon angled a tan face toward the woman in the passenger’s seat of his SUV and grinned.  It was only the third time she’d asked in the thirty minutes since they came out of the tunnel from the city.   Delaney was showing some patience today.  That bode well for the day’s events. 

“You said you wanted to go rock climbing in the Adirondacks.  We’re finally going.”

Wedding season, taking occupancy of his (their) new apartment, beach trips, Independence Day, Zoi’s graduation, moving Zoi and Oliver from Chicago into Delaney’s old place, and the final hearing for his divorce had put the trip on one delay after another.  Today, though, they were on their way.

After a little pit stop.

“You just said to dress casual for today.  Rock climbing is not casual, and if we’re going all the way upstate that means we have to spend the night, right?  I didn’t pack a bag.”

But Petra did, and it was waiting at their pit stop.  Her sister had assembled an overnighter with all the essentials plus rock-climbing gear, a pretty dress and a swimsuit.  

The conspiracy came with a price tag, as usual, but he didn’t mind.  Jon had reached the point in his relationship with Delaney’s twin where he would’ve been disappointed if she hadn’t leveraged something for herself out of the deal.  That was just Petra, and once he realized she wasn’t a bitch at heart, he didn’t mind.  Everybody came with quirks.  God knew he had his share. 

Delaney Gardener was his biggest and favorite quirk.

There had always been a chance that, once the drama settled down, that they would tire of one another in the mundaneness of everyday life – even if his everyday life wasn’t quite as mundane as some people’s. 

Jon was pleased to find that hadn’t been the case.  Between his job and hers, things were always busy, but they managed to stay connected over a glass of wine nearly every evening. 

His favorite thing had become sharing that glass side by side in their apartment on the most ass-cuppingly perfect leather couch ever manufactured.  She’d done good with the furniture. 

FaceTime was okay, too, when he had to go out of town and she just couldn’t get away.  They’d sip and either talk or bitch, depending on what the day brought.  Sometimes they were left texting photos of wine glasses at different times of the evening, but that had only happened a couple times so far.   

Unlike other divorced men, he didn’t have to worry about coming home to an empty house.  He wasn’t forced to spend evenings contemplating all the ways he’d fucked up his marriage and family until it made him want to blow his brains out.   

As he’d told Matt, he had Delaney and she was everything to him.  He looked forward to coming home when she was there because the kinship he’d felt with her from the very beginning had melded into something unique and special. 

She taught him to rock climb, he taught her to play guitar, she told him his lyrics sucked and he told her roses stunk.  They’d refereed the confession/confrontation between Zoi and Max until nobody was yelling. They’d gone to visit Violet and to the beach with his kids, they had their crazy friends over for dinner.  He’d spent more time with her in two months than he had Dorothea the last year of their marriage. 

That would change.  Touring, football, and business would all take him away from home for short and extended periods of time, but he was confident that their relationship wouldn’t suffer for it.  There would be no more invitations for guys to grope her ass nor strange women in his bed.  Those things had been intended filled a void and now there was no void for either of them to fill. 

They had – and would have – their ups and downs, because, hey.  Shit happened.  Short tempers, misunderstandings and bad moods all came and went.  Today, the ring of coffee he left on the kitchen counter was wiped away without comment.  Tomorrow, she might lose her shit about it. 

It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was a fan-fucking-tastic life, the likes of which he’d never dreamed possible after Chelsea came knocking on his door. 

As for Chelsea, she was settling in at the Soul Foundation and had gotten accepted to NYU for the fall, while her nutcase cousin was looking at long-term treatment.  The kid wasn’t his daughter, but he still took her under his wing – without mentioning it to his kids.  It probably wouldn’t be an issue, but it was more important that they acclimate to Zoi than the kid who just worked for him.

As he’d told Delaney, one step at a time.

“Jon?” she huffed impatiently, making him realize he’d never answered.  “Are we staying overnight?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry.  I took care of everything.”

“This is starting to feel a lot like prom,” she drawled with an accusatorily arched brow. 

They’d been together long enough for her to understand that the whole prom thing was an aberration of his personality, so she wouldn’t necessarily complain if he something like that up his sleeve. 

Living with him taught Delaney that her Crown Prince of Attitude was half a slob, he recycled his jeans until they could walk Manhattan on their own, and routinely neglected to tell her he was going out of town or that he’d made plans for them.  As often as not, he was self-involved, just like he warned her.  Sometimes he spent the entire evening talking to his phone instead of her. 

She’d gotten used to him drinking the last of the coffee and kept an emergency stash in the back of the cupboard, but the next time he emptied a toilet paper roll and didn’t change it, Jon was a dead man.   

And Delaney wouldn’t trade him for anything in the world. 

Unlike the majority of the world, she got the real Jon, who loved the real Delaney.  When she got snarky, he snarked back and told her to calm the freep down.  When her daughter made her nuts by changing nursery paint color for a fifth time, he reminded her that she’d missed her kid. 

He wasn’t perfect, and it was one of her favorite things about him, along with watching him write songs.   That was an amazing treat that she hoped to never tire of.

When he wasn’t being a self-involved slob, though…. Jon was the same sweet and thoughtful guy that had gifted her maracas and a forget-me-not ring, glued the pieces back into her broken heart, gone after her estranged daughter and, yes, thrown a prom.

“No prom,” he denied now.  “Just a regular party.”

“Party?” She couldn’t even be surprised that he’d neglected to mention yet another set of plans.  Thank God she’d worn nice capris and sandals instead of her stretched-out yoga pants.  “Who’s having a party?”

The corners of brilliant blue eyes crinkled behind the newest of his eight thousand pairs of sunglasses.  “We are.”

“I’m sorry.  What?”

“We’re throwing a party.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” he countered with a careless shrug when signaling to exit the freeway in Newburgh.  “The divorce was final this week, Zoi graduated, Max doesn’t hate her, there's a grandbaby on the way, it’s summertime…. How many more reasons do you need?”

“It just seems to me that if ‘we’ are throwing a party, that ‘I’ should know something about it.”

“I wanted you to enjoy, not worry about details.”

She took a deep breath, reminding herself that he was just impulsive sometimes.   This was equivalent to him inviting her to move in or buying a cute blue jeep for her to drive around the Hamptons.  He wanted to do something and he did it.  End of story. 

How did Dorothea keep her sanity for so long?

“We really need to talk about communication more, Jon.  The first half a dozen times you neglected to tell me about a social event, I told myself you’d get better about it, but you’re not and it’s making me crazy.”

“Okay.  I’ll do better,” he promised without conviction.

Resigning herself to a life of impromptu parties, Delaney looked out the window with a frown and inquired, “But Newburgh?” 

“North of it, actually,” he corrected as they pulled onto a lesser state road and pointed at her side window.  “The Hudson’s right over there.”

All Delaney saw was trees and houses, so she took his word for it with a bland hum of acknowledgement.  She didn’t know anybody in Newburgh – or north of it – and the more rural the scenery became, the less it seemed like a celebrity gathering spot. 

“What kind of party is this?”

“I told you already,” he murmured blandly while taking a left turn onto a local secondary road.  “Ours.”

“Is it a sit-down dinner?  A pool party?  A hoedown?  What?  And who’s coming to ‘our’ party?  I sure don’t know anybody that lives in this part of the state.”

“It’s only an hour from Manhattan, Mou.  Not exactly outer Mongolia.”

“Okay, but still.  Who?”

The edges of his mouth tugged in way that was easily recognizable as annoyance.  “People.  Now be quiet and enjoy the ride, would ya?  We’re almost there.”

Delaney’s brows dropped low behind her sunglasses when she knit them in a frown.  Something weird was going on here.  She was starting to think this wasn’t just another neglected mention of a social obligation, and her mouth popped open to start with another round of annoying questions – that her mate completely ignored.

Jon nodded to the freshly painted sign marking the left turn he signaled for and talked over her to observe, “Nice artwork.”

Snapping her mouth shut, she irritably cut her eyes toward the artwork to which he referred. 

It featured a field of forget-me-nots as the bottom border of the sign.  Along the left edge was a fruit tree in bloom, with some of the blossoms “blowing” in the wind and yet more assembling to advertise “DJ’s Farm”.   A smaller sign hung from hooks at the bottom, stating that the farm was closed for a private event today. 

Evidently, Jon rented a farm for this party she knew nothing about.

“Pretty,” she agreed distractedly as he accelerated with a crunch of rock under tires. 

It may be a dirt and gravel road, but it was wide and well-maintained, flanked on both sides by trees.  Not the big fifty-foot shade trees that would shadow them from the July sunshine, but more modest ones that were full and round on their compact trunks.  Among the branches, she could see peaches that were approaching the final stages of ripeness.

Peering across him toward the other side of the road, she inspected the trees there to find…

“Are those plums?”

“I dunno.”  He brought sunglasses low on his nose to better see what she was pointing to.  “Looks like it.”

“Neat.” 

She’d never been to one of these pick-your-own fruit places before.  The peaches looked good.  Maybe she’d try her hand at a pie when they got home. 

Jon preferred cookies, but there was no doubt in her mind that a fresh peach pie would get eaten, even if she had to enlist Jake’s help to do it.  The kid was a bottomless pit whose appetite was only matched by Romeo’s.  Those boys could eat.

The road widened into a gravel parking lot, and as they drove in, she saw that one end of the lot was occupied by a big one-story building.  It was probably a store, but Delaney was too distracted by the familiar cars surrounding them to be sure. 

Petra’s Mercedes was parked in the back corner of the lot along with Pearl’s Prius.  As she went down the row of vehicles between here and there, she spotted David’s car, Matt’s, Max’s, and her parents’ in the midst of a handful that she didn’t recognize.

“My family is ‘people’?”  she asked.  “We could’ve just had this in the city rather than everybody schlepping all the way out here.”

Jon’s earlier annoyance was replaced by an easy grin as he put the car in park but left the engine – and air conditioning – running.  “Nope.  Had to be here.”

He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate further, and it earned him a half-hearted scowl before Delaney noticed the field adjacent the store.  Curiosity had her straightening in her seat for a better look at the two huge white canopies that screamed party. 

“Is that where we’re going?” 

“Eventually.”

Slumping back against the SUV’s leather seat, Delaney popped her sunglasses on top of her head and sighed, “Okay, dude.  This cryptic garbage has lost its charm.  Cough it up.  What the freep is going on?”

His teeth flashed with a laugh, and Jon tossed his own sunglasses on the dash.  She could now fully see that his baby blues were shimmering with amusement. 

“You saw the peaches and plums.  Did you notice those?”  He nodded to the rows of trees lining the far side of the parking area. 

She’d noticed the rich blue of the sky and the single cloud that floated along in it, but no.  Delaney hadn’t paid any attention to the trees.  At this distance and with the row of vehicles blocking most of the view, all she could do was take a shot in the dark. 

“Cherry?”

“Nope.”  He hiked a thumb toward the left.  “Cherry’s that way.  Pears, too. Guess again.”

“Did I mention that this cryptic thing is getting old?” she grumbled when unlatching her seatbelt so that she could scoot useless inches forward to inspect the sturdy row of fruit-bearers. 

“Did I mention that’s too fucking bad?  Humor me, Mou.  Guess.”

Okay, fine.  He wasn’t lost in self-absorption and wanted to play.  Since she happened to like him playful, Delaney opted to do as he suggested and humor him. 

New York was too far north for lemons, limes or oranges.  They’d already mentioned peaches, plums, cherries and pears…  What else was there? 

“Apples.  They must be apple trees.”

“That they are,” he approved, and the wrist hanging over the steering wheel lifted so that he could point to the ones under her scrutiny.  “Honeycrisp there, Braebern beyond that, Fuji and Rome on the other side of the store, Pink Lady past the party tents, Red Delicious in the next field.  Scattered around, you’ll also find Granny Smith, Winesap, Golden Delicious and about five other kinds I can’t remember the goddamn names of.”

“Well, thank you Johnny Appleseed,” she laughed, bewildered at his sudden fascination with any apple that didn’t sync to iTunes.  “Are you branching from wine into hard cider for your next booze venture?”

“Nah, but there are grapes out there, too.  Makes me wonder if a new wine might be fun.” 

“I’m sure Jesse would love that.”

“Yep.”  His smile faded to an expression of thoughtfulness.  “You said you’d rather have an apple tree than a ring, Mou.”

Delaney’s heart slammed against her sternum for one fierce beat before stalling.  She didn’t draw a breath as her eyes skimmed back and forth along the row of trees that he’d identified as Honeycrisp.  There were at least fifty that she could see.  Who knew how many of those other varieties lurked out of sight? 

Surely he hadn’t….

“Uh.  So you adopted a tree here for me?  Like that thing where they name a star after your loved one for fifty bucks?”

“No,” he denied softly, reaching for her hand and linking his fingers with her ringed ones.  “I didn’t adopt a tree.  I bought you an orchard.  Farm.” 

Goose pimples shivered on her arms, and it had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

He remembered the apple tree, but did he remember why?  Did he know what a freeping orchard said to her and – oh God.  Her family.

As if God Himself was nudging it, the sun shifted.  Dazzling rays bounced against the windshield of her father’s Ford and into her eyes as chastisement. 

Her dad was going to lose it.

“Jon, my parents are here.”

Questioning fingers lifted a little as he tilted his head to one side.  “Yeah?  So?  Mine are here, too.”

He didn’t get it.  He had no idea what he’d done.  Jon thought it was cute to buy her an orchard.  Kind of like a couple dozen roses. 

Her parents wouldn’t think it was cute.

“Apple trees are a big deal in my family, Jon.  It’s not a traditional Greek thing but it stemmed from one, and my parents have made the apple tree in their front yard…  Well, let’s just say his name is Agamemnon and we’ve always referred to him as our older brother.  Apple trees are equivalent to Giannopoulos children, so buying an orchard made them grandparents a hundred times over.”

“More like two thousand, but okay.”

Two freeping thousand apple trees.  Oh, sweet Jesus.

She didn’t know whether to choke or kiss the man that was so incredibly over the top sometimes. 

Neither.  Make him tell you he gets it.

“What do you mean, okay?”

“I mean okay,” he repeated calmly.  “You do realize I love you, right?”

She leaned a heavy shoulder against the seat back and hit him with an aggravated scowl.  “Don’t be dumb.”

“From where I sit, it’s not me being dumb.”

Rather than engaging in that particular debate, Delaney dropped back to answer his original question.  “Yes, I realize you love me – just like you realize I love you.”

“Right.  And now that the divorce is final, I’m free to offer you more than a place to live.  I’m free to offer you the commitment your apple trees symbolize.  So I am.”

Her scalp tingled.  Her pulse quickened.  Her palms grew clammy, which is probably why he eased his hand away from hers.    

Oh my stars.  He gets it.

Yes, logically, she’d known they were together.  Even together together, but the man had just “put a ring on it” in the precisely the way she’d asked him to.

Petra’s going to drop a load when she finds out there’s no diamond.

She perversely looked forward to Petra’s pouting over a silly diamond.  It would be the second highest point in Delaney’s day, because nothing would top a freeping orchard.

“Frankly,” Jon sighed and stretched out a leg to dig into the front pocket of his jeans.  “I imagined this going better, but maybe these will help.”

He reclaimed her abandoned hand, turned it palm up and deposited two drawstring pouches in the center.  Made of velvet, one was black while the other was navy blue, and neither was bigger than a matchbox.  They didn’t weigh much more than that figurative matchbox either.

“It’s not how I wanted to do this part, but since you’re being classically stubborn, I guess your family will understand if they miss out on the real reason for the party.”

Her eyes snapped from the fascinating little pouches to his eyes.  “What do they think now?”

“That DJ’s Farm is a new business venture we’re celebrating.  Please note that you got top billing there, by the way.  I haven’t given away top billing since the early eighties, so this is serious shit.”

Mention of the farm name was a reminder that he’d specifically called her attention the sign when they arrived.  DJ’s Farm.  Delaney Jon’s Farm.  Written in apple blossoms and adorned with forget-me-nots.

Oh, Jon.

“I don’t need whatever’s in these cute little bags.”  She pushed both of them back into his hand.  “I have the world’s sweetest man and a frazzle snapping orchard.”

Planting one palm on each of his ears, Delaney leaned in to kiss him stupid.  Excitedly, hotly, wetly, overwhelmingly stupid.

“Fuck, I really do love you,” he laughed breathlessly when she finally let him come up for air.   

The man was handsome with three days’ beard and bedhead.  With fresh-kissed lips, eyes glittering like pale sapphires and pink cheeks, he was freeping gorgeous.

And he was hers.

“Of course you love me.  Two thousand times over,” was her sassy rejoinder before easing back to her side of the car.  “Now, before we go out there and give my family the big birth announcement, you have to tell me what you want as a show of commitment.  What would mean something to you?”

“Besides you?”

She loved it when he got that look in his eye.  This wasn’t self-absorbed Jon.  This was his polar opposite, who made her feel like the best and only thing in his world.  She liked this guy, but there were more practical matters to attend to than her ego.

“Besides me.”

“You sure you wanna know?  ‘Cause I’ve got a list.”

Delaney lifted both eyebrows high with surprise.  Honestly, she’d expected him to say he didn’t want anything, so to find out he had a list…

“Go ahead,” she instructed with confidence and the belief that he was being melodramatic.  For a rock star, his needs were simple, so he probably didn’t want more than weekly blow jobs.

“Alright.  Just remember, you asked.”  He took her hand in his and restored possession of the navy bag.  “First thing I want is for you to earn this.”

Earn? 

Puzzled, she untied the drawstring drew the top open before turning it upside down to dump the contents in her other hand. 

“Oh my God.  No.  Seriously?”

A host of little diamonds winked up from their bed in the background of a gold pendant shaped like the Superman logo.  Summer sun caught every facet of the jewels as well as the two gold streaks shaped in a lazy, double-S.

It was the infamous Slippery When Wet charm given only to those on the inner circle of Bon Jovi.  When Delaney flipped it over and found “Mou” engraved on the back, she nearly peed her pants.

“Seriously,” he affirmed.  “That one’s yours, but nobody wears one unless they’ve done two tours.  You never answered me about Japan and Australia, but if you go on that leg and then to Europe with me, you can wear it as early as next summer.”

What fan didn’t want this piece of jewelry?  This was the Holy Grail of Jovidom.  Yeah, yeah, it was the man who held her heart and not Bon Jovi, but she couldn’t be expected to shed all those years of fan mentality and this was cooler than even her maracas.  Heck, it was cooler than Jon’s guitar being parked by her bed at night. 

The fan groups were going to start throwing darts at her picture, and Delaney wouldn’t blame them.  She was the luckiest Jovi girl in the world. 

“Sign me up,” she chirped, throwing her arms around him with a squee of delight.  Her reservations about Japan and Australia had just become irrelevant.  “I have no idea how I’m going to staff the shop, but I’ll figure it out.  I’m going on tour with Bon Jovi!”

Setting her away to look down his nose, he warned, “Yeah, well it ain’t glamorous, but at least you’ll see it for yourself.” 

Lack of glamour didn’t bother her, and Delaney had always been wildly curious about the behind-the-scene stuff.  The only reason she hadn’t leapt on the opportunity when he first offered was because of Pearl.  It remained to be seen if he could keep from killing her, or if anybody could keep Petra from wanting to tag along. 

“I don’t care about glamorous, but Petra may whine and beg until she gets to come along.”

“She already has,” was his unsurprised and wry response.  “I needed her to pack your bag for this weekend, so she bartered for Europe.  I figure I’ll throw the other in since she’s missing out on the presentation of jewelry.”

“You really are the sweetest jerk alive.”

He laughed without remorse.  “Some days I’m really glad you don’t cuss.  It saves me from being a prick or an asshole.”

“But not an anus,” she retorted cheekily.  “You’d better get on with that list of yours, because Petra’s headed this way.”

“Ah, fuck.  Okay.  I respect that you don’t want to get married,” he assured.  “It’s too soon, we don’t know each other well enough and all that happy horse shit.  What I personally want is to do the first tour leg, football season, Christmas and the Super Bowl together.  If we make it through those okay….  Well, I thought maybe we’d come back out here in the spring and get married in the middle of the blooming apple trees.  And that you’d wear this.”

Jon pressed the black pouch into her hand, and she folded mindless fingers over it to stutter the dumbest ever response to a marriage proposal.  

“But… but… don’t you have allergies?”

“Yeah.”  His closed fist edged along Delaney’s jawline as he regarded her with affectionate amusement.  “And the fact that you thought of it is part of why I want to get married.  I’ll take a couple extra allergy pills, bring a box of tissues or maybe get a shot beforehand.  Whatever it takes if you say yes and wear the ring.”

The ring. 

Until that moment, Delaney had believed she didn’t want or need one, but now that she knew….  Now that she held it in the palm of her hand, there was nothing she wanted more in the world – besides Jon, an orchard and a Slippery pendant, of course.

It didn’t even bother her that Petra was going to gloat over the diamond. 

Don’t you think you should look before you start calling it a diamond?

With unsteady fingers, Delaney unknotted the bag’s strings and burrowed into black velvet to find metal predictably cool to the touch.  There was the expected circular band, but the pads of her fingers encountered a different shape, too.  Something that didn’t feel quite like a traditional solitaire.

When the ring came into the light, it twinkled with a dazzling brilliance that belonged in a showcase at Tiffany.  That alone would’ve been enough to steal Delaney’s breath, but the stunningly unique design guaranteed her lack of oxygen.

This was very definitely a diamond.  She didn’t possess the expertise to guess how many carats, but the focal point of the piece was big.  Ridiculously big.  A split shank of diamonds supported a single diamond of maybe three carats – which was nestled in a bed of six platinum petals bearing three diamonds each.

Her engagement ring was a flower.

“Holy shit, he did it!”

The loud exclamation at the passenger window startled Delaney so badly that she almost dropped the ring.  It actually slipped from her fingers, but she managed to catch it with her other hand as Jon’s chin fell to his chest with a sigh. 

“Your sister is a pain in the ass.”

“Ya think?” she huffed, catching a breath before growling over her shoulder.  “Petra, go away!”

“No way!  Let me see that thing.”

Impatient hands gestured for her to roll down the window, but Delaney just flipped up a middle finger and turned back to her souley. 

“You’re sure you want to be related to that?”

“Like I have a fucking choice?”  Good humor sparkled in the shades of blue that colored her life happy.  “No matter what your answer is, I’m not letting you go.  So I’m stuck with her, too.” 

“Wow.  You must really love me, then.”

She was only joking, but sparkling irises darkened from sky blue to midnight, with his voice following suit as Jon solemnly recited, “S’agapo.  Eísai i psychí mou.  Eísai ta pánta gia ména.”

I love you.  You are my soul.  You are everything to me.

A fat tear plopped onto Delaney’s cheek, trekking down into the deep dimple that only revealed a fraction of the joy she felt in side.

“How can I say no to that?”  Stabbing the button that would lower the window, she passed the ring over to her sister.  “Show that to whoever you want, just make sure I get it back.  We’ll be along in a little while.”

The glass silently slid back into place amid Petra’s protests, but Delaney turned her back on them in favor of the man who was snorting with nerdy laughter. 

“You really don’t care about the ring.”

“The heck I don’t!  But she’ll take better care of those diamonds than most people do their kids.”

A lock of silver slid over his forehead as Jon shook his head with resignation.  “Your sister –“

“Is not here,” she interrupted and fisted the front of his shirt to yank him close.  “I am.”

“So you are.”

His slow grin was almost as hot as the palm that came up to cradle Delaney’s cheek, and his smell filled her nostrils with a fragrance sweeter than a flower-filled Madison Square Garden.  It didn’t matter how many parties he forgot to tell her about, how many times he left the toilet seat up, how many hit singles he had or if he ever wrote another song.  She wanted to share this life with him. 

“S’agapo Jon Bon Jovi,” she whispered as their mouths met in a sizzling serenity that she only found when their souls connected.  

Luckiest  Jovi  girl in… the… world.