Page 136 of At First Dance
I laugh, hand pressed over my heart. “You were so grumpy.”
“You were so lost.” He leans back, resting his arm across the back of my seat, eyes sweeping the empty stretch of road and overgrown grass. “You looked like a fairy tale in a car commercial.”
“I was a mess.”
“You were mine, even then.”
The words sit between us, tender and heavy and full of every mile we’ve traveled since.
Rowan turns toward me slowly. “I don’t stop here often. But every time I drive past, I think about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t come around that corner when I did.”
I squeeze his hand. “You did. That’s all that matters.”
He leans in and brushes a kiss over my temple, lips lingering against my skin. “I just wanted to stop. Remind you where we began.”
I smile, watery and real. “Like I could ever forget.”
We stay there for a moment longer, wrapped in morning light and memory, until the sound of a truck passing behind us reminds us we’ve got one more stretch to go.
Rowan shifts gears and pulls back onto the road, his hand sliding back to my thigh, grounding me the way he alwaysdoes. Otter Creek Farm is just ahead, and for the first time in weeks, my shoulders settle. The hum in my chest—that restless, electric pull that always buzzed under my skin when I was away—goes quiet.
Because we’re home, not just for a week or two, but for a while, and we made it back together.
We’re five minutes from the house when I catch Rowan glancing at me for the fourth time in a mile.
“What?” I ask, raising a brow.
He smirks, the corner of his mouth twitching like he’s holding in a secret. Which… he is.
“Nothing,” he says, but there’s too much warmth in his voice, too much tension in his shoulders.
I narrow my eyes. “Rowan.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re fidgeting.”
“I don’t fidget.”
“You do when you’re sitting on something big.”
He shrugs, impossibly nonchalant, but I can see the edge of a smile tugging at his jaw. The way his fingers tap the steering wheel. The way he’s fighting the urge to pull me across the seat and spill the thing that’s been sitting between us for the past two weeks.
I lean closer, letting my voice drop. “You thinking about telling them?”
“Hadley will freak,” he says. “Lila might cry. Crew’s gonna pretend he knew the whole time.”
“Your mom might throw another dinner party.”
“That’s the risk.”
I bite my lip to keep from smiling too hard. “So… this weekend?”
Rowan glances over at me. Really looks. And then he lifts my hand off my thigh and presses a kiss to the band on my finger—the delicate gold thing we picked up on a whim in a vintage shop just outside of Asheville that matches my engagement ring perfectly. But it’s still hidden, still ours.
“This weekend,” he confirms, eyes soft, voice steady. “We tell them we’re married.”
Just like that, my stomach flips in that breathless, delicious way it always does when he says something that feels like a promise.
