Yes. Right now. Forever.
He slides the ring on, looks at it, looks at me.
The creek bend comes alive around us. Remy makes a noise that starts loud and gets louder. June cries the good kind. Pearl says well done to nobody specifically. Silas says something that makes Remy laugh harder.
Maisie hits me around the midsection at full speed and wraps both arms around me and says into my shirt I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!
I put my arms around her and look at Beckett over her head with tears running down my face.
He's looking at both of us with his expression all the way up past his eyes.
"Welcome home," he says quietly.
I look at the ring. The ranch. The man who drove all night from San Francisco, the daughter in turquoise boots, the crew that became family.
Home.
He's right. It's always been home.
We make it back to the ranch house ahead of everyone else.
Not by much. The crew is celebrating at the creek bend with the energy of people who have been holding something in all day and have finally been given permission to let it out. Remy's voice carries across the ranch yard. Pearl is saying something to Wyatt that makes him laugh. Maisie is in the middle of all of it, exactly where she belongs.
But Beckett takes my hand, looks at me, I look at him and we catch a ride in the side by side back to the ranch house without discussing it because we have learned to read each other well enough that some things don't require discussion.
The ranch house is warm and quiet.
He closes the door behind us.
Looks at me in the entryway with the ring on my finger and the evening light coming through the windows and his expression doing the fully open thing that still catches me off guard even now.
I close the distance.
I kiss him first because I have been wanting to since the moment he forgot his speech and said I'm just going to say the true things and I am done waiting for things I want.
He responds immediately. His hands come to my waist, pulling me in with the unhurried certainty that has become one of my favorite things about being loved by this man.
He never rushes anything that matters. He treats everything he's decided matters with the same focused thorough attention and I am included in that category and have been for a while.
I feel it every time.
He walks me backward through the entryway, his mouth on mine, my hands on his chest, neither of us breaking the kiss for anything as unimportant as furniture or doorframes. We have navigated this house in the dark before and muscle memory handles it while the rest of us are occupied.
We make it to the bedroom.
The lamp goes on low. Amber light. The private warm version of the room that belongs to this specific hour.
He pulls back and looks at me.
Takes my left hand. Looks at the ring on my finger in the lamp light. Turns it slightly, watching the way it catches the glow, his thumb moving slowly across my knuckles.
He looks up.
He reaches for the buttons of my shirt with steady deliberate hands, his eyes on mine the whole time, unhurried, certain, the way he approaches everything he has decided is worth his full attention.
I reach for his simultaneously and we do this together in the warm lamp light, the good shirt coming off, the good boots hitting the floor, the careful Saturday presentation of both of us dismantled piece by piece until there's nothing left between us and the evening and the room.
He is unfairly constructed.
