Twenty Minutes Later
A Bride’s Backup Plan Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North
This scene takes place the morning after Chapter 17. Cass’s POV. Contains explicit sexual content.
Emma woke up alone in Cass’s bed and her first thought was panic.
Not the muted, managed panic of the last year—not the kind she could tamp down with breathing exercises and a performance smile. This was the sharp, electric kind, the jolt of adrenaline that came from reaching across unfamiliar sheets and finding empty space where a warm body should have been.
She sat up. The bedroom was morning-bright—December sun cutting through the curtains in clean white lines. Cass’s side of the bed was rumpled, the pillow still dented, the sheets still holding her warmth. She hadn’t been gone long.
Then Emma heard it: music from the kitchen. Something jazzy and old. And underneath it, the sound of Cass singing.
Not well. Not even passably. Cass Harper—who did everything with controlled, professional excellence, who planned weddings like military operations and handled crises like a diplomat and kissed like she’d studied it as an academic discipline—sang like a woman who’d been explicitly told by someone who loved her that she should never do it in public.
Emma pressed her hand over her mouth and laughed. Then she slid out of bed, pulled on Cass’s henley from the floor—gray, soft, still warm—and padded barefoot into the kitchen.
Cass was at the stove in a white t-shirt and black underwear. Nothing else. Her hair was down, silver catching the window light, and she was cracking eggs into a pan with one hand while holding a spatula in the other and singing something that might have been Ella Fitzgerald if Ella Fitzgerald had been personally offended by rhythm.
Leonard sat on the counter, watching the eggs with the focused intensity of a cat who believed, against all evidence, that breakfast might include him.
“You’re staring,” Cass said without turning around.
“You’re singing.”
“I don’t sing.”
“You were very clearly singing. It was Ella Fitzgerald. Badly.”
“It was Billie Holiday. And it was fine.”
“It was neither fine nor Billie Holiday, but I respect the commitment.”
Cass turned. Saw Emma standing in the doorway wearing her henley and nothing else—bare legs, bare feet, curls wild from sleep, the hem of the shirt hitting mid-thigh.
“That’s my shirt,” Cass said.
“Our shirt.”
“Turn off the stove.”
“You need to eat.”
Emma’s hand slid from Cass’s waist down her stomach, past the waistband of her underwear, and pressed flat against the heat of her. Cass’s breath left her body in a rush.
“Turn off the stove, Cass.”
Cass turned off the stove.
Emma’s fingers slid through the slick warmth between Cass’s legs, and the sound Cass made—low, involuntary, caught between a groan and a surrender—was worth every burned egg in the history of cooking.
“Say it.” Emma circled Cass’s clit with two fingers, slow, deliberate. “We had a rule. You taught me. Say what you want.”
Cass’s head dropped back against Emma’s shoulder. “I was thinking about you on top of me. Riding my hand. The way you looked—above me, with your hair falling and your hips moving and your face when you came.” Her voice was shaking. “I was thinking about how you pinned my wrists to the pillow and I let you, and I never let anyone do that, and I let you because I trust you more than I trust my own composure.”
Emma turned her around. Lifted her onto the counter. Emma pulled Cass’s underwear down her legs and dropped to her knees on the kitchen tile.
“The counter is exactly right. Hold on.”
Cass gripped the edge of the counter. Emma pressed her mouth between Cass’s thighs and tasted her—salt and heat and the specific sweetness that Emma associated with mornings and this woman and the life she’d walked through fire to claim.
She licked her the way she’d learned to—flat tongue, steady pressure, building slowly from broad strokes to focused circles. When Emma slid two fingers inside and curled them, Cass swore loud enough that Leonard left the kitchen in protest.
“Don’t stop—right there—fuck—Emma—”
Emma didn’t stop. She sealed her mouth around Cass’s clit and sucked while her fingers worked in deep, steady strokes, and Cass came with both hands braced behind her on the counter and her head thrown back.
“Your turn,” Cass said, pulling her up from the floor, voice wrecked.
“The eggs are dead. Get on this counter.”
Cass kissed her collarbone. Her breast. Then Cass slid off the counter, knelt on the tile, and put her mouth on her. The counter was cold against Emma’s bare skin. Cass’s mouth was scorching. When she added two fingers and pressed deep, Emma came so hard she knocked the egg pan off the stove.
They sat on the counter side by side, naked, breathing hard, legs dangling.
“The eggs are definitely ruined,” Cass said.
“The eggs were a casualty of war. They died with honor.”
“Cass? The drawer. When did you clear it? Really.”
“The morning after you first stayed here. You left at midnight in a panic, and I sat on the bed and thought: she’s going to come back. And when she does, I want there to be room for her.”
“I’m a planner. I plan for the outcomes I want, not just the ones I expect.”
Emma kissed her. Sitting on a counter, bare, in a kitchen that smelled like burned eggs and sex and cedar.
“I’m filling the drawer today,” Emma said.
“I’m not a guest anymore.”
“No. You’re not.”
They made more eggs. Successfully this time. They filled the drawer, and the closet, and the weird shelf. And by the end of the day, the apartment that had been Cass’s was theirs, and the henley was back on Emma’s body where it belonged.
Home. Finally, irrevocably, home.