“You’re crazy,” she whispers.
“I’m sure of you.” I trace the silky dark arch of her eyebrow. “Are you sure of me?”
And I see it. I see the calm, the certainty, thelovesuffocate her doubts, smother the hesitations. She leaves the rickety chair, goes down on her knees to face me on mine, and scatters fleeting kisses across my face. They ghost over my lips and eyes like butterflies that float out of reach before I can grab them. I want to capture her face again, make her be still so I can kiss her back, but my hands hang at my sides, numb from the magnitude of what’s happening. Finally, she takes my hands in hers and looks directly at me. Tears pool in her eyes and slip over her cheeks.
“Yes, Josiah Wade,” she breathes. “I’ll marry you.”
My body comes back to life and I pull her into me by the curve of her hips, press my palms into the warm suppleness of her back. She’s all tight heat and temptation. In the absence of a ring, I seal our pledge with a slick tangle of tongues and tears.
The kiss is hot and sweet and ravenous. This,thismust be how forever tastes.
I’m sure of it.
Chapter One
Yasmen
You rarely see good things in the rearview mirror.
A lesson I should have learned by now, but I flick a glance to the back seat anyway, watching my daughter break the rules. Her brother in the passenger seat beside me is just as bad.
“Guys, you know it’s not screen time.” I split my attention between the interstate and the two of them. “Put your phones away, please.”
“Mom, seriously?” My daughter Deja’s sigh is heavy with a thirteen-year-old’s exasperation. “I just finished schoolanddance lessons. Gimme a break.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Kassim says, lowering his phone to his lap.
Deja expels another breath, like she’s not sure who irritates her more, me for making the rules or her brother for following them.
“Brownnose,” she mutters, gaze still fixed to her screen.
“Deja,” I say. “That phone is mine if you don’t put it away.”
Her eyes, dark and gold-flecked, clash with mine in the mirror before she sets the phone aside. It’s like staring back at myself. We’re so much alike. Skin as smooth and brown as polished walnut. Her hair, like mine, prone to coil and curl, always contracting at the slightest bit of moisture in the air. Same stubborn chin hinting at a will to match.
“She’s just like you,” my mother used to say when as a toddler Deja barreled into mishaps despite my warnings to take care. When she’d pull herself up to run off again with fresh scrapes and bruises. “Serves you right. Now you’ll see what I had to put up with raising you.”
I always thought it would be a blessing, mother and daughter, two peas in the proverbial pod. And for a long time, it was…until thirteen. God, I hate this age. I can’t seem to get anything right with her anymore.
“So how was your day?”
I ask because I want to make good use of all this time we have in the car commuting. They’ve only been back in school for two weeks, and I should start this year as I mean to go on.
“Jamal brought his lizard to school,” Kassim says, his amused eyes meeting mine in a brief sidelong glance. “And it crawled out of his backpack in class.”
“Oh, my God.” I laugh. “Did he catch it?”
“Yeah, but it took like twenty minutes. He’s fast. The lizard, I mean.” Kassim twists a button on the crisp white shirt of his school uniform. “Some of the girls started screaming. Mrs. Halstead stood on her chair, like it was a snake or something.”
“I might have freaked out too,” I admit.
“This one was harmless. It wasn’t like a Gila monster or a Mexican beaded lizard,” Kassim says. “Those are two of the poisonous types found in North America.”
I catch Deja staring at the back of her brother’s head like he sprang from Dr. Who’s TARDIS. With Kassim’s constant stream of factoids and fascination with…well, everything…it probably sometimes seems like he did.
“Never a dull moment with Jamal,” I say with a chuckle. “What about you, Deja?”
“Huh?” she asks, her voice disinterested, distracted.