Page 108 of Chasing Dreams
“No?”
“No.”
“Getting you to teach me isn’t really the reason I came,” she confessed.
He’d wondered. But he’d been too glad to see her to care why she’d come.
Shaine admired his chiseled features in the scant light from the window. She hadn’t traveled all this way to chicken out.
“There’s something else I want, too.” Her heart hammered against her ribs.
“Something I can give you?”
“You can. I just don’t know if you’ll want to.”
“What is it?”
Shaine stiffened her spine and looked him in the eye. “I want you.”
His expression flattened with surprise, then slowly, his brows lowered in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I want to marry you. I want you to marry me. I want us to be together. Always.”
“But—” He looked hopeful and wary at the same time. “But you know I won’t leave here,” he said. “I can’t live like you do.”
“I know that. It doesn’t matter.”
“But your inn, your friends...”
“The inn is a job, Austin. It’s a place, a house full of things. My friends are my friends, but they’d be my friends if I lived somewhere else, too. Jack is the only person I have to have with me. And you. And you’re here.”
“You mean you’d be willing to live here?”
She nodded. “I loved it here. I didn’t miss anything while I was gone. Except pizza.”
He ignored her jest. “I told myself I wouldn’t love you, that I wouldn’t love anyone, because I couldn’t bear to love and know when something awful was going to happen.”
“Because you saw your mother’s death in advance?”
He nodded.
“You loved her, even though she exploited you, and you suffered when she died. Everyone feels guilty and responsible when a loved one dies. Remember how horrible I felt about Jimmy Deets? And I didn’t even know him. You showed me I wasn’t responsible, and you weren’t responsible for your mother’s death, either. Austin, you’re not God.”
He shook his head sadly. “When I left you in Omaha I hadn’t realized that yet. Being me—being like we are—I tend to forget that I’m not entirely different from everyone else, and everyone loses people they love, too. You lost Maggie. I had a lot of time to think this last month. And I figured out that the only real certainty in life is death.”
She braced her palm on the stones and leaned toward him. “Nobody ever knows how much time they’ll have together,” she said. “The important thing is what we do with the time we have between now and then. Do you want to waste what happiness we could have together worrying about something in the distant future that’s out of your control?”
He shook his head. “No.” He moved to kneel in front of her. “Are you serious about living here? You’d leave people behind and come live with me? How can I ask that of you?”
“You didn’t ask it of me. You big jerk. I asked you. Besides, you go out occasionally, right? We’d take trips, visit friends?”
“What about school for Jack?”
“They send buses from Gunnison, don’t they? If you don’t trust ’em in bad weather, we can take him on the snowmobile. Or I can homeschool him.”
“Shaine, you want to marry me?”
Seeing the hope and joy in his eyes, she nodded, her heart close to bursting. “I love you,” she whispered.
