Page 100 of Just Come Over
“No. Nothing close. I thought it could be about Dylan.” His green-gold eyes looked into hers, troubled as the mountain air before the storm. “That it could be competition again. Some kind of claim I wanted to put on you. Some kind of stamp. That I want to put my baby in your belly for everybody to see. Foryouto see. For you to know. Like you said. Belly deep.”
The thrill she got from that resonated all the way through her, exactly the way she’d told him. “Maybe it is,” she said, “and maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with Dylan. Maybe it has to do with you and me. Maybe it has to do with riding your bike down that longest hill, lifting your hands into the air, and letting gravity take you over.”
“Roller coaster.”
“No,” she said. “That was how I felt with Dylan. Like I was carried away, almost... despite myself. This is different. This isright. This is us. I’ve got my hands in the air, but my legs and my belly are still working, and they’ve got me balanced. It’s too much of a thrill, it’s almost too much to take, but it’s right. It’s... inevitable. That’s how I feel.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then kissed her again and said, “Yeh. That’s it. Bathsheba. Like there’s no choice. But all the same...”
“Birth control,” she said, and sighed. “I know you’re right.”
“I was going to say,” he said, with the faintest of smiles showing around his eyes, “that I want to marry you first. Or during. Or now.”
What did you say to that? He was still over her, his hands in her hair, the energy all but pulsing out of his big frame.
And the tension, too. Just because you were used to putting your body and your heart on the line, digging deep for every bit of strength you possessed when everything inside you wanted to shut down—that didn’t make it easy.
If it were easy, everybody would have this kind of mana.
She said, “I love you.” It seemed like a pretty good starting place. It also seemed like what he most needed to hear right now. What he most needed toknow.
She was right. Some of the tension left him, and he lowered his head, gently touched his forehead and nose to hers, and left it there for a long couple seconds, both of them inhaling together in a hongi.
There was nothing he could have done, nothing he could have said, that could have made her feel more seen, or more respected. When he pulled back, she said, knowing her voice wasn’t steady and deciding it didn’t matter, “Thank you.”
“Not an answer.” He wasn’t going anywhere, either.
“I should say it’s mad,” she said. “I can see... issues. To say the least.”
“Maybe one of them is that the fella’s meant to do it better than that, and it doesn’t suggest that I’ll be brilliant going forward. It came out because I’ve had it there in my mind for weeks now, though that’s not much of an excuse. When I bought you these...” His hand traced over the pearls at her throat. “They were what I wanted to buy you, and they weren’t it at all. This feels sudden to you, maybe, but to me, it feels like a mountain I’ve been climbing forever. I’ve been going downhill almost as much as I’ve been going up, with no idea if I’d ever make it. Now, I’ve got to the top, and I want to do something about it. I’m hoping you’ll forgive me that I didn’t do it right. You’ve forgiven more than that.”
She said, “I don’t care whether you do it right.” And she didn’t. She’d had the big gesture. She wanted the small ones.
It was like he hadn’t heard her, because he was definitely looking worried. “I’ll give you everything. I promise. And I realize you’ve heard promises before, too. And I...” He rolled off her, onto his back. “I know my track record for keeping them isn’t what it should have been.”
Now, she was the one propped on her elbow, running a hand over his tattooed shoulder, down his arm, bending down to drop a soft kiss on his chest. “Lately, would you say?”
She felt him still. “No,” he said, and eased a little more. “Not so much lately. But I wasn’t the best husband. May as well say it now.” He turned his face to her, and his expression was sober. Nearly weary. “I didn’t cheat, I didn’t lie, and I brought my paycheck home. There’s more to marriage than not doing the wrong things, though. There’s doing the right things. I didn’t give Victoria enough attention, and I definitely didn’t give her enough sweetness. I could say I didn’t know about that. It’s probably more that I didn’t try.”
“Or,” she said, her heart filling up a little more, “that you didn’t know what that looked like.”
“No. It was that I focused on one thing, and it wasn’t her. I had examples around me of how to do it better. I’m not a stupid fella.”
“Despite what my parents seem to think,” she said, to tease him out of it.
He smiled. Reluctantly. “I’m going to be gone too much. And when I’m home, I’m going to work too much.”
“Yes. You are.”
His hand, which had been stroking her back, stilled.
“I’m going to miss you,” she said. “I already do. But I’d rather miss somebody I love than not love him at all.”
Rhys had her hand in his again, was running his thumb over that bare ring finger, thinking that he wanted to put a diamond on it almost as much as he wanted to put a baby in her belly. He knew what she looked like pregnant, and he wanted to be the one making it happen. Call him whatever you like. He wanted it.
She sighed, then asked, “What time is it?”
He had to laugh. “Sweetheart. Not the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
