A/N: Hmm . . . that last chapter gave me ideas. Like, I should write more mindfucking scenes. Whew! Okay. Onward with the fluff! And by fluff, I mean, set the stage for the proposal! I was going to do the proposal in this chapter, but it ended up way longer than I originally intended, so you'll just have to wait one more chapter! XD

Chapter 15

Shepard lay spooning behind her sleeping Liara, lightly running her fingers through the ridges in her crest. She felt such an overwhelming tenderness building up inside her that it was proving difficult not to wake her. During the war she so rarely got to wake up next to Liara that she cherished moments such as these. She loved the feel of Liara's naked skin against her own, the feel of her body softly rising and falling with every breath, and the feel of her heartbeat pulsing through her warm skin. She felt giddy knowing that later today, she was going to ask her beloved bondmate to be hers forever, that she would get to wake up like this next to her every day for the rest of her life.

"Mmmm, Shepard . . .," Liara murmured, though she was still very much asleep.

A huge grin forced its way on Shepard's lips. That was no-hands-down the cutest thing she'd ever seen. She couldn't help herself anymore. She began showering Liara's neck, crest, cheeks, shoulders, and lips with a barrage of kisses until her bondmate at last awoke with a protesting giggle. She planted Liara with an enthusiastic kiss then pulled back with a grimace when she realized her lip had split open from their "activities" last night.

"Aw, you poor thing," Liara crooned, lightly kissing Shepard's injured lip. "I think I need to be a little more careful until you're all healed up."

"Please don't," Shepard said with a smirk. "I enjoy your enthusiasm."

"Oh Shepard," Liara sighed happily. "Last night was amazing."

"Speaking of," Shepard said, suddenly remembering something Liara said last night. "I overheard you say you were going to ask Garrus to lead the new Shadow Broker team. What did you mean?"

"Oh. That," she said with a look of disappointment. "That was supposed to be a surprise. I offered the job to Garrus and a few others. I know you don't want me to be the Shadow Broker, especially since I'm pregnant, so I wanted to pass it on to someone else. It was to be a gift."

Shepard gazed at Liara for several moments, her heart once again overflowing with tenderness for the asari. "It is a very sweet gift. But . . . is it what you want? Do you want to quit being the Shadow Broker?"

"I'd be lying if I said I won't miss having so much knowledge at my fingertips, but I trust Garrus completely. Sifting through piles of data may be boring for some, but I find it rather therapeutic. I love that moment when I find the answer I've been looking for after hours, and sometimes days, of searching."

Another amused grin found its way onto Shepard's lips. "You are impossibly cute. Did you know that?"

Liara's eyebrow twitched and she gave Shepard a look of amused annoyance. "Cute?"

"What? You can be cute and sexy. I have found you blur the lines between them masterfully."

"Nice recovery, Commander," she said with a cheeky look.

Shepard leaned down and silenced her cheeky asari with another kiss. It began growing heated when the doorbell buzzed. Shepard was both disappointed and relieved. She had a feeling she should be saving her energy for what she had planned for the evening, but she found it pretty much impossible to turn Liara down when it came to intimacy.

She flipped on her omni-tool. "Who is it and what do you want?"

She heard Wrex chuckle over the comm. "Am I interrupting something? Well too bad. I'm here for the asari."

"What?" Liara said with a surprised giggle.

"I've been saying I'm going to take you to lunch for years. It's time I did before I get back to Tuchanka."

Liara blinked, then looked quizzically at Shepard. She shrugged. "Don't look at me. I don't know a thing."

Liara narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing Shepard suspiciously, but she didn't argue. Shepard hid her sigh of relief when Liara stood and covered herself in her robe, then headed down to let the krogan in. The biggest challenge in hiding a surprise from a nosy information broker was that she was a nosy information broker. Shepard chuckled at the thought. She put her robe on, grabbed her cane, then followed Liara downstairs.

Wrex and Liara were in the kitchen, and the krogan was already helping himself to a pot of coffee. He didn't bother pouring it in a mug-he was drinking it straight out of the pot. Shepard shook her head with a grin. "Save some for me there, buddy?"

"Get your own," he barked. "I need something to tide me over while I wait for your girlfriend to get dressed." He looked Liara up and down. "Because something tells me she ain't wearing anything beneath that robe."

"Is this always going to be a thing?" Liara turned to Shepard with a mock-accusatory look. "Your team always making comments about our sex-life?"

Shepard blinked. That was the first time she'd heard Liara actually admit aloud that they did have a sex life. In fact, it was the first time she'd heard Liara use the word "sex."

"Yes," Wrex answered. "We all want to make sure Shepard's getting lucky after all that shit she's been through. Hell, both of you should be getting lucky. You taking care of Liara's needs, Shepard?"

Shepard coughed back a laugh. "I'm doing my best."

Shepard planted her hands on her hips and glared over her massively over-sized apartment. The gaggle of girls she'd invited along were playing around more than accomplishing things. She was beginning to question her decision to get a bunch of girls in on the plan. The only one who seemed even remotely interested in decorating was Ashley's sister, Abby. But she was also the only one getting paid, so Shepard supposed that was fair. Everyone else (Ash, Jack, Miranda, Kasumi, Tali, Traynor, and Edi) was chatting away or . . . well really just chatting. She was about to try and make them get something accomplished when she suddenly saw Jack grab Miranda by the wrist and haul her off toward the nearest bathroom. Shepard threw her hands up in exasperation. That was all she needed; having the two of them ruining her bathroom.

"Jack, Miranda!" she snapped. "Whereas I can certainly understand certain needs build up, can you please just focus on the task at hand?"

"What, us?" Miranda said, feigning innocence. "I needed to use the bathroom."

"You two are no longer allowed to work in the same room. Save it for the party I'm throwing this weekend. Then you can have all the sex in the bathroom you want. Just make sure you lock the doors, and make sure Tali isn't on the floor when you go in."

Tali about choked on the alcoholic beverage she was currently imbibing. When the girls got back to work, Kasumi came up next to Shepard and gave her a warm hug.

"It's good to see you smiling, Shepard," she said with a grin. "Thanks for inviting me along. I am quite the romantic, you know."

"I had a feeling," Shepard replied.

"Oh! I have something to show you!" She surprised Shepard by actually lowering her ever-present hood, then moved her black hair off her neck, revealing a black and red N7 tattoo. "I had Jack hook me up with a tattoo artist on the Citadel. How does it look?"

"Badass," Shepard said with an approving nod.

"It's not as big as Jack's but I didn't want to out-do hers."

"She hasn't shown me yet. I may have to corner her at some point and make her show me. I'm curious."

"Oh, well you didn't hear it with me. Anyway, I wanted to thank you, Shepard," she said in a more serious tone.

"What, for dragging you along into a suicide mission?" Shepard hazarded.

Kasumi grinned, but Shepard saw that it was laced with sorrow. "Thank you for trusting me. It's not something I'm accustomed to in my line of work."

"As long as you don't steal Liara's wedding ring, we're good," Shepard teased.

Kasumi giggled. "That is one item I can safely say I will never attempt to steal. I'd rather not have the full wrath of Commander Shepard reigning down upon me like the Apocalypse of old."

Shepard snickered. "Carry on, Miss Goto."

Shepard left the girls to the downstairs then made her way to her bedroom. This was one room she wanted to decorate alone. She pressed some buttons on her omni-tool and a minute later Bailey's face appeared.

"Hey Bailey," she smiled. "You about ready on your end?"

"I'm still pulling a few strings," he replied. "How much time do I have?"

"I think Wrex can stall her for a couple more hours at least. If he gets Grunt in on it, which he may have to, I'd say five more hours."

Bailey chuckled at the thought. "Yeah, I heard about the incident at the krogan statue involving the fellow named 'Grunt.' Well just give me the word when you're ready."

"Will do. Thanks Bailey."

"Anything for you, Shepard," he said, giving her a rare smile.

She turned off her omni-tool and set to work on the bedroom. The stage was set.

Liara was beginning to feel haggard and slightly harassed. Not only had Wrex taken her to lunch at the most expensive (and slow-moving) restaurant on the whole damn Citadel, but then he insisted on taking her to Armax to watch a hanar face down a small legion of mechs. It was quite an impressive display of battlefield prowess, but it certainly wasn't her idea of fun. She didn't actually enjoy fighting or watching it, but he seemed so happy about it that she went along with it. After two hours of humoring the krogan, though, her patience was wearing thin. He seemed to sense this, so he took pity on her, but still seemed reluctant to let her go, which she found she also knew the krogan had a soft spot for her, so she decided it wasn't so unusual. That and he probably didn't want to go back to Tuchanka just yet due to all the enthusiastic female krogan. She bit back a grin.

They were headed to the game arcade when they saw a crowd surrounding one of the game kiosks and none other than Zaeed and Grunt were battling it out in a game of Shattered Eezo. Zaeed was currently winning and Grunt looked like he was about two seconds away from going postal.

"What the hell are you pyjaks doing here?" Wrex asked, coming up to watch the game. Liara didn't say anything. She didn't at all trust the look of complete frustration on Grunt's face.

"Kicking this sorry krogan's ass from here to hell and back again," Zaeed boasted.

On cue, Zaeed's game avatar shattered the head of Grunt's and it fell to the floor. The game declared Zaeed the winner with an overkill of flashing lights and sound effects. It proved too much for the adolescent krogan. Without warning, he tackled Zaeed to the ground with a murderous growl of rage. The two of them started up a violent fight and within moments the crowd in the arcade was in on it. It quickly escalated into a full-blown riot.

Liara moved out of the way of the brawl, shaking her head in annoyance all the while. She activated her Omni-tool and dialed Captain Bailey. His face appeared a few seconds later.

"Miss T'Soni?" he said. "Everything all right?"

"You should probably send some C-Sec officers to the game arcade at the Silversun Strip. Zaeed and Grunt are fighting."

"Oh that's just great. Now I gotta make more red-tape disappear. It's not like I can just go around arresting friends of Shepard," he grumbled. "I swear, I'm beginning to think Shepard is more trouble than she's worth."

Liara gave him a slightly stern look and he held up his hands defensively. "Okay, okay. I'm sending some guys over now."

"Thank you Captain Bailey," she said with a patient sigh.

Half an hour later, Liara inexplicably found herself in a jail cell with the brawlers at C-Sec headquarters. She went over the events of the past half hour in her mind over and over and still couldn't find a logical explanation for her current predicament. C-Sec had shown up, broke up the fight, calmed the rioters, then arrested everyone implicated in the debacle. The C-Sec officer in charge of the arrests had been quite nice about it all, but he showed quite a remarkable lack in judgement by arresting innocent bystanders. And to top it off, the cell she and her friends shared had a tech and biotic dampening field surrounding it, making it impossible to call Shepard.

She felt a pang of guilt. She really didn't want to have to call the most influentially powerful woman in the known galaxy just to clear up a ridiculous oversight. She sighed in annoyance.

"Where did that C-Sec officer go? And why haven't we been allowed to call anyone?" she asked Wrex. "What happened to C-Sec since the war ended? Did they decide they no longer needed to do their jobs?"

Wrex shrugged. "C-Sec arrests me every time I come to the Citadel. So this is business as usual for me."

"Maybe the asshole in charge is just on a fucking power trip," Zaeed said, flipping off the security camera in the cell.

Liara looked around the cell and realized she was the only female present, though she didn't feel particularly threatened by the rioters. Sitting between Grunt and Wrex may have had something to do with it, though. Grunt was glaring the other men down like he was ready for another fight.

"And why did C-Sec put us all in the same cell . . .?" she wondered aloud. "Captain Bailey might want to rethink his choice in officers."

"Maybe he just knows that I'll tear any one of these idiot's entrails out through their assholes if they so much as look at you funny," Zaeed growled, glaring down the other rioters like they were all the worst rapists and murderers in the galaxy. He looked quite the frightening sight, too, with his face bleeding in multiple places from his battle with Grunt.

Grunt chuckled next to Liara. "You're all right, Zaeed."

"I want a rematch at Armax when we get the fuck out of here," Zaeed shot back. "It's nice to have a worthy opponent."

Liara placed a calming hand on the adolescent krogan's arm. She could tell he was moments away from another fight, but her touch seemed to make him reconsider. She sighed. She felt like a babysitter, surrounded by all these ruffians. She breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened and Captain Bailey appeared. He glanced over the crowd with a look of complete amusment, then looked at Liara.

"How in the hell did you get tied into all this, Miss T'Soni?"

"It's my fault!" Zaeed jumped to her defense.

"I dragged her into it!" Wrex added.

"It's Zaeed's fault!" Grunt growled.

Liara held up a patient hand to silence all three of them. "Captain, this is all just a misunderstanding. Zaeed and Grunt had a small disagreement over a game of Shattered Eezo and these lovely gentlemen-" she gestured to the rest of the rioters- "got a little over-excited. But no one was harmed, and the damage was minimal. I'd be happy to cover any expense for the damage caused at the arcade."

Bailey's eyebrow shot up in surprise. "You most certainly won't cover a single credit of the damage, Miss T'Soni," he said firmly. "If anyone is going to, it's going to be those two." He jerked his thumb in Grunt and Zaeed's direction.

"The damn krogan started it!" Zaeed barked.

Grunt snarled at him, but Bailey stopped another argument. "Shut it!" he growled. "You two, stay. The rest of you, get the hell out before I change my damn mind."

Zaeed and Grunt glared each other down as the rest of the crowd began funneling out. Liara waited until everyone was out then approached Bailey.

"Is everything okay, Captain?" she asked in concern. "Why did your officer arrest everyone like that?"

"Oh everyone's still a little on edge since the war," he brushed it off. "Sorry for the trouble. Let me give you a ride home."

"Oh that won't be necessary . . ." she tried but he held up a hand.

"I insist."

She looked at Wrex and he nodded. "It's all right. I need to get back to the Embassy anyway for some damn diplomatic shit."

"Very well. Thank you Captain."

Liara hugged Wrex goodbye then followed Bailey to the transit cars. He opened the door for her and she didn't miss the strange look he gave her. He looked . . . amused? Excited? She wasn't sure, but she did get the strong feeling he knew something she didn't. When they were airborne she decided to ask.

"Care to explain what that was all about?"

She saw his lip twitch in a smile. "Well hey, would you look at that?" he dodged the question, nodding his head to something out the window.

When she followed his eyes out the window, her hand fluttered to her mouth to catch the gasp that escaped her lips. The biggest, most beautiful display of holographic fireworks she'd ever seen was exploding in front of them over the Presidium. It was so large it could easily be seen by the entire Citadel, but that wasn't what had her so mesmerized. Shaped perfectly within the colorful explosions read the words, "I LOVE YOU LIARA T'SONI."

Bailey chuckled from the seat next to her. "I guess Shepard really wanted to make sure you knew she loves you."

"You knew about this?" she asked a bit breathlessly. She was feeling more than a little light-headed.

"I don't know anything. I'm just cop," he replied, his grin widening. She saw right through the blatant lie, but she didn't press him on the matter. She had a feeling that whatever Shepard had been plotting for the past couple weeks was about to come to fruition.