“And if you invite me in socially, maybe then you’d invite me into your heart.”
She shook her head furiously. Silly boy. After all this time, did he not know? She was ready to answer when a noise from behind caught her attention. Her customer. “Crap! I totally forgot I had a customer.” She whirled around but stopped when she found the woman in the doorway of the dressing room with a look of awe in her eye.
“Don’t worry about me. The best service you can give me right now would be to answer that man’s question.”
Carrie laughed and turned back to her man. Her man. This time giving him that title didn’t seem so impossible. “I don’t need to invite you in, Aleks.”
The little bit of hope that he held in his expression left his face. “Oh.”
She walked closer still. “I let you claim my heart when I was ten years old. You were invited in a long time ago. I’ve just been waiting for you to walk through the door.”
A smile lit up his face. Aleks grabbed her by the waist and pulled her to his body. “Consider the threshold crossed. And I will never take a step back for as long as I live.”
Carrie looked into the eyes of the man she would spend the rest of her life with. She had no doubt about that. Not this time. “You do realize that the busier I am, the less you’ll get to see me.” Aleks shrugged. “Just as long as at the end of the day you come home to me. Nothing else matters.”