“She asked if I’d married you yet.”
Swallowing around the lump in my throat proves impossible as Emmett looks down at me with never-ending love and admiration. I take a sip of my wine, but it doesn’t help.
Somehow I manage to form words. Shocking, since my tongue is no better than a strip of leather in my mouth. “And what did you say?”
The pause before he answers feels like an eternity. “That I was working on it.”
He steps back a fraction of an inch, just enough to slip his hand into his pocket, where it stays. “She called me an idiot.”
A laugh slips out before I can stop it. “Your grandmother called you an idiot?”
“More or less.”
“What did she actually say?”
His mouth curves. “That I was old enough to know better than to let a good thing get away.”
“Sounds about right.”
“She wasn’t wrong.”
His hand reappears. In it, is a wooden box. Before I can react, he drops to one knee. My wine glass slips through my fingers. I barely catch it before setting it down on the railing where it’s safe. My hand shakes, and it takes me a second to make sure it’s steady.
“So, I showed her this.”
My hands cover my mouth, and the tears aren’t just stinging now, they’re falling freely. “Emmett,” I say softly.
“Yeah, Angel?”
“Is that . . .”
“Yeah, it is.”
The box opens, and the moon catches on the stone. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen.---a thin gold band and deep green stone, almost as if he somehow put this entire mountain with its pines into something I can wear.
“I spent a lot of my life thinking that loving people meant losing them.”
My vision blurs, but I blink through the tears so I don’t miss a thing. “Em.”
“And maybe that’s still true.” He reaches for my hand, brushing his thumb over my knuckles. “No one really gets forever. But I want every single day I do get to look like this.”
He licks his lips, gazing up at me. The way he looks at me makes the tears fall faster. “Aspen, will you marry me?
“Yes. Everyday, yes,” I say through my sniffles, dropping to my knees beside him and taking his face in my hands. “You’re mine and I’m yours until the end of time, Emmett Slate.”
His forehead falls gently against mine and his eyes close.
I smile through the sting in my throat. “Emmett?”
His laugh is quiet and raspy. “Yeah?”
“You gonna put the ring on me, or are we just going to stare at each other all night?”
A puff of air leaves him. “Right.”
His fingers are steadier than mine as he slides the ring onto my hand.
I can’t look away. It’s not huge or flashy—nothing about Emmett has ever been about proving anything to anyone.
