“You’ve proposed marriage and I want your baby.” I’m panting. But it does feel soon, in some ways. Those declarations were about desire—chemistry—and circumstantial need.
Love,on the other hand, feels like a conscious choice.
At least, telling someone that you love them is a choice—and not one I’ve made yet.
Because you’re a scared little girl who needed to hear it first.
“Say it again?” It’s a plea. And my voice cracks.
“I love you, Abby. Like a lightning bolt from the sky, splitting a tree in half, my world was cleaved in two when I pinned you in that chair.”
I reach up and trace his mouth. His kind, talented lips, that give me so much pleasure, and find the right thing to say every time I need to hear that I am wanted.
“I…”
He shakes his head. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
I do, I want to say. But there’s a lump in my throat.
He groans and kisses me, lowering himself down to cover my body.
“I know,” he mumbles into my neck as he hitches my hips up and slides into me. “I know.”
It’s so good, and it gets better as he presses his hand to my belly. “We’ll find our way,” he breathes. “Because I’m going to make you a mother and claim you for life. We’ll have forever to figure this out.”
* * *
The next morning, I wake up first for a change. I pull on one of his t-shirts and make coffee.
I’m sitting on the porch, looking at a patch of lingering snow on the mountain ridge in the distance, and I’m rubbing my still flat belly.
A creak of the porch boards behind me alerts me to Justin’s presence. “You’re up early,” he says quietly.
I glance over my shoulder and catch him looking at my hand on my stomach.
For a moment, everything else fades away, and I think we’re both remembering the possessive words he growled at me last night. Does he know I can still feel the heat of his palm there? As long as I’ll live, I think I’ll always be able to feel it.
Even if we didn’t work out. Even if I didn’t get pregnant, I would always remember this week as those magical few days where someone wanted me so utterly and completely.
“Daddy wore me out last night.”
His gaze drops to my hand again. Daddy in more ways than one. “You racked out hard.”
My lips twist at the military slang. “You sound like my dad.”
His cheeks slash with color. “That a good thing?”
“It’s a great thing.”
He sits in the opposite chair and lifts my feet into his lap. “I don’t think I ever met him in person, or if I did, it would have been at the end of Hell Week when I barely recognized myself, but I know people who knew him well. If you’d like to hear stories from when he was younger, I can make that happen.”
I swallow hard. “You’re going to do a lot for me.”
His hand tightens around my ankle. “Nothing will give me greater pleasure.”
“But if we’re going to do…this…shouldn’t it be a relationship of equals? What can I do for you?”
He grins. “Abby, you make mehappy. You make me laugh, and challenge me, and help me.” He points at the pergola above us. “If you weren’t here, that would still be in pieces on the driveway.”