The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 401

Liora’s POV

I turned around slowly, taking it all in.

The candles. The blanket. The food arranged neatly in the center of it all, and the movie frozen on the wall, waiting. Callum had done all of this. He had found a room and cleared it out and brought food and set up candles, and… The whole thing was so far from what I expected that I didn’t quite know how to respond to such a simple question.

I had to blink a few times to keep the tears that formed in my eyes from falling.

“Well?” Callum’s hands were still on my waist. “Do you like it?”

“This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

Callum’s head appeared in my peripherals. “Seriously?”

I turned to look at him over my shoulder, and our noses bumped. I gasped, stumbling back so abruptly I nearly knocked over a nearby stack of boxes. Callum caught me, of course. I knew he wouldn’t let me fall.

“Come on,” he said, guiding me toward the blanket. “Maybe we should get you off that leg.”

I blushed more deeply than I would have liked to as he helped me lower down onto the blanket. There were pillows scattered around, and I tucked one under myself, watching as he knelt and began to open the boxes sitting in the middle of the blanket.

My mouth fell open a little as the smell of pasta hit me, immediately making me salivate. “Is that from…?”

“Rosalia’s Bistro,” he said, shooting me a look.

“That’s forty minutes away!”

“I know,” he said simply, and opened the next box.

One by one, he lined them up on the blanket between us, and I stared at each one with a growing sense of disbelief. Delicious, saucy pastas. Spring rolls, glistening with oil. Fried rice, pizza…

“This is a fucking smorgasbord,” I muttered, rubbing the back of my neck. “Callum, how are we supposed to eat all of…”

I clapped my hand over my mouth as soon as I realized what I’d just done, and opened my eyes to find Callum watching me. His lips were curved in a way that made my cheeks feel suddenly very hot.

“I’ve never seen anyone that happy about a french fry,” he laughed.

“It’s not just a french fry,” I said, lowering my hand. “It’s a chili cheese fry. The mother of all fries.”

He shook his head, still smiling, and reached over to start the movie.

What followed was the kind of evening I hadn’t let myself hope for in a long time. The movie was something easy and funny, and we ate our way through the boxes while the projected light flickered across the walls.

It was… nice. Relaxed. There were no expectations. No outsiders to come barging in and ruin everything.

Just this. Just us. And chili cheese fries.

By the time the movie ended, we’d both migrated from sitting upright to lying on our backs looking at the ceiling, the food boxes pushed to the edge of the blanket and most of the candles burned low. The projector had gone back to its idle screen, casting a soft ambient glow across the room.