He got me off the bench, both arms, carrying me the way he always did—like it was no effort, like I weighed nothing, like thiswas simply where I belonged. Laid me on the quilt. Came down beside me and pulled me in against his chest.
His hand found my stomach.
"Twenty-one minutes," he said, into my hair. "Just to be thorough."
I laughed. Exhausted and wrecked and completely, stupidly happy. "I knew you were going to say that."
"Mm." His thumb moved slow against my skin.
Outside the Hill Country was fully dark. Just crickets and the creek and the enormous quiet of twenty-four hundred acres that no one was taking from us.
"Gage," I said.
"Yeah."
"I think that worked."
His arm tightened around me. His hand pressed just slightly warmer against my belly.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
FOURTEEN
Gage
She was pregnant.
I didn’t have any way of knowing…no confirmation.Nothing. As far as I knew, her cycle was regular. As far as I knew, she was normal.
But something about the way she looked the next morning…I could feel it.
I lay beside her and looked at her face, at the dark curls spread across the pillow, the red lips I’d been so fixated on the first time I ever saw her at that fertility clinic.
A month ago…a month, I’d been in love with this woman.
And in six months, she would agree to be my wife.
I knew it the way I knew she was pregnant.
Deep and sure.Positive.
And Christ…I needed to kiss her.
She stirred just slightly as I pressed a gentle kiss to her lips…then she kissed me back, so I kissed her harder.
She made a soft sound against my mouth, still half asleep, and I swallowed it. Kissed her slow and deep until she woke up the rest of the way, her hands finding my chest, her body turning toward me on instinct.
I pulled back and looked at her.
Sleep-warm, hair everywhere, lips already swollen. The quilt had slipped and she hadn't pulled it back up and I looked at her the way I'd been looking at her since the parking lot—like she was something I couldn't account for, couldn't have predicted, couldn't imagine having gone without.
"Morning," she said, voice rough.
"Morning."
She stretched, slow and unselfconscious, arms over her head, back arching, and I watched every inch of it.
"Gage."
