The jewelry box felt heavier than any other I’d ever held before.
Because what was inside it was heavy. With meaning. With hope. With love.
“Oh…” Shawn breathed out as her gaze landed on me. “Oh,” she said again, overwhelmed.
“You know me, love, I like to wax poetic. But I know you, and you like it when I get to the point,” I said, shooting her a smile. “Will you marry me?”
“You… you… are you sure?” she asked, her lower lip quivering.
“Love, I have never been more sure of anything in my life,” I told her, holding my hand out, urging her to move forward, giving me her hand.
“I… yes,” she said, struggling to get the words out.
“Yeah?” I asked as I reached for the ring.
“Yes,” she said, nodding, looking down at me with glassy eyes as I slipped the ring on her finger. “Wait…” she said, looking down at the ring. “This is my ring,” she said, brows furrowed.
“It is. That was part of the plan too,” I told her. I’d used her aunt to get that done. I didn’t know what kind of ring that Shawn would love. So I had her aunt go to her with a job to design an engagement ring for their “new line.” The only instruction was to design a ring that she could see herself wearing.
And that was what she’d made.
And then her aunt and I had it made for her.
“You know what?” Shawn asked, gaze slipping to mine.
“What, love?”
“I guess I was wrong all the times I called you a selfish asshole,” she said, beaming down at me.
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said as her fingers entwined with mine, then pulling me up onto my feet. “I love you,” I told her.
“I love you back,” she said as I pressed my lips to hers.
That was how I got the woman of my dreams, the one I never could have seen coming, to agree to spend the rest of her life with me.
Shawn - 17 years
“Sorry,” I said, rushing up to Bellamy who was waiting for me at the front of the school front doors. “I didn’t get the message until ten minutes ago.”
“Love, we give this school nearly a hundred grand a year. They can wait for us,” he said, pressing a kiss to my temple as I took a slow, deep breath.
“True,” I agreed, grimacing at the campus.
It had been a bone of contention between the two of us, the damn private school thing. I’d wanted our daughter to go to a public school. For a two-fold reason. First, because I knew that private school had put far too much pressure on kids to be the best of the best. Second, well, I didn’t want my kid to grow up to be an entitled brat. There was no nice way to put that.
Eventually, though, Bellamy had won me over with the fact that the school was safer.
I’d never even thought about that as a factor until he’d brought it up.
But kids who belonged to the ultra-rich were more at risk for shit like kidnapping and extortion. And most schools couldn’t keep kids from sneaking out, let alone someone from grabbing our kid and throwing them into a van.
The private schools had locked-down campuses.
They employed a dozen or more highly-trained security guards.
And, if it was deemed necessary, parents were allowed to hire their own guards to follow their children around as they went about their day. It sounded insane, but there were two kids in our daughter’s grade alone whose family needed to use that privilege.
So I’d kind of had to give in and agree to the private school.
Which meant I needed to double-down on making sure Maldi—yes, Bellamy had somehow convinced me to name our daughter Maldi (in my defense, I was whacked out on pain meds because she’d broken my pelvis at the time)—wasn’t a little rich jerk.
I may have gone overboard.
Because Bells and I practically lived at the damn headmaster’s office of the school.
“What do you think she did this time?” I asked as Bellamy pressed a hand to my lower back as we scanned our badges to be let in the front door. Where we met one of the actual guards as soon as we were inside who looked us up to make sure we matched the pictures on file.
Only then were we allowed to go into the headmaster’s office.
“So we meet again,” Dr. Jones greeted us as we made our way into his office, finding Maldi slumping down in one of the leather chairs across from Dr. Jones’s obnoxiously oversized desk.
“Dr. Jones,” I greeted. I didn’t add that it was good to see him. We would both know I was lying. “Maldi,” I greeted her, letting out a small sigh that she mirrored.
Maldi was an interesting combination of the two of us.