Page 162 of Here and Now
My hands cup his cheeks, staring into his eyes, looking for any glimmer of hesitation, but it’s not there. All I see is love.
“I’ll marry you,” I tell him. “Also, it’s Penelope Miller.”
I kiss him again, until I hear my brother gagging, and then I smile and bury my head in his neck.
I’m sitting on Miles’s bed—well, our bed, I guess now—drying my hair with a towel after taking the longest and best shower of my life, in his robe I found hanging.
Miles called Eloise when we were driving back from Virginia Beach, asking if she would go to the store to bring me some necessities and some clothes she had that she thought would fit. Since Ethan and Kai are the same size, she grabbed some of his stuff as well. She had everything in bags when we arrived home, because I have nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
They cleared out my house and destroyed all my belongings, leaving me and Kai without a thing.
It’s a funny feeling, being completely without. A lot of the things I owned I didn’t have an attachment to anyway. The furniture was used and there when we moved in, but Ember Falls, and that house in particular, became a home.
It was where Kai and I would laugh as we danced around the table where he did homework, and it was the first place I felt safe in. It’s where I first made love to Miles and where we spent most of our nights. That house held a lot of memories, and a part of me feels as though it’s been stripped from me.
I squeeze the excess water from my tresses, trying not to let my mind get hung up on things that don’t really matter. I have my life. I have my son and I have Miles. The rest is just stuff.
“I’ll trade you a penny for your thoughts,” Miles says as he’s leaning against the door, the light behind him making him almost look angelic. He enters the room, closing the door behind him. “Although, I already have the only Penny I want.”
“You do?” I ask with a grin, instantly feeling better just from the sight of him.
“Yes, you are the only Penny I want or need.”
He comes to the edge of the bed and scoops me up in his arms. I wrap my arms around his neck. “Well, you have me.”
“I do.”
I do.Those two words strung together mean something monumental. I want nothing more than to be with him for the rest of my life, but I worry that his proposal was a spur-of-the-moment, we-almost-died kind of thing, and now that the dust has settled, maybe he wants to take it back?
I would completely understand, and it wouldn’t change anything, but I want him to be sure.
He sits down, keeping me in his lap, and I decide to give him the out if he needs it. “Miles?”
“Yes, love?”
“Are you sure about ... what you asked me on the plane?”
I feel him tense a little, and then his eyes meet mine. “Of course I’m sure. Are you having second thoughts?”
“No, nothing like that. I just ... it’s a lot and it’s fast and we almost died and ... you know. Sometimes people make really bad decisions in the heat of the moment.”
I would know, I’ve done it enough.
He reaches over, grabbing something out of the bedside table.
“What did you get?”
He places a velvet pouch on the bed and then with one hand opens it.
I gasp when I see the ring resting in his palm.
“Penelope, I knew I wanted to marry you after our third coincidental date. I knew there was no other woman in this world who could make me as happy as you did after our first real date. I would’ve married you the night we made love, but I knew that might scare you a bit. This was my gran’s ring that she wore until my pops died. It’s been in my family for a long time, and I went to her after our first official date and told her I met the woman I wanted to marry.”
Tears spring to my eyes as I look at the ring, not sure what to say. “Miles ... you don’t ...”
“I planned to do this right, take you and Kai somewhere, ask him for his permission to marry you. Clearly that went a little sideways.”
