“Mr. Mayor!” came a shout from the back of the room. The camera lights swept away from him.
Mutterings like “That’s her!” and “Miriam! Miriam!” crested like a wave.
He blinked the woman into focus. Miriam?
The same woman who’d won his heart...twice. But who was counting?
“Yes. The brunette in the back,” Chase said, enamored by her all over again.
“Are you single, Mr. Mayor?” Mimi called out.
“Pitifully so,” he said into the microphone. A few of the cameras swung back to him. “As a result of a recent tragic error.”
She pushed through the crowd toward him, her smile tentative. “What error was that?”
“I left the woman I was in love with in another state without telling her how I feel.”
Mimi stopped moving, her eyes trained on him, her mouth parting softly.
“That is tragic,” she finally managed.
Murmurings came from the crowd, but no one interrupted.
“If you have time,” Mimi said. “I have just one more question.”
Chase didn’t make it a habit of being thrown off-guard, yet here he was. What was she doing here? Why had she come? But instead of asking, he simply answered her question. “I have time.”
“Would you ever again consider dating a woman with a history of protesting the oil industry?”
The hope—the love—on Mimi’s face echoed his own so fiercely, the next word was hard to get past his throat.
“No.”
Her face fell, and the reporters around her strained closer with microphones and cameras, silent and slack-jawed with curiosity.
“I’d ask her to marry me,” Chase said, a smile inching across his face, “but only if she loved me as much as I love her.”
In the bright lights, he could make out tears shining on the edges of Mimi’s eyelids.
“Do you love me?” he asked, swallowing thickly. Risky, this, but he was now in the risk-taking business.
“I do.”
He more read her lips than heard her. His joy over those two words was so overwhelming that he leaped from the stage and rushed through the crowd. Cameras snapped; questions shot like cannons around him. He narrowed his focus on Mimi, kissing her for the world—or at least for Dallas—to see.
Three words echoed in his head as he met her mouth with eagerness.
She loves me. She loves me.
When he pulled away, she was grinning up at him, her arms around his neck.
“Mr. Mayor!” He recognized the voice of Channel 9?s premier reporter who’d long been one of his supporters.
“Yes, Phil?”
“Was that a real proposal?”
Chase turned to Mimi who was in his arms, a crease of worry decorating her brow.