Page 109 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Yes,” I said again, because once was not enough. “Yes, Sawyer. Yes.”

He slid the ring onto my finger. His hands were still shaking. Mine were still shaking. The ring fit perfectly, which meant he had figured out my size without asking, and I did not know how and I did not care because he was kneeling in front of me in a candlelit cabin with tears in his green eyes and the most beautiful, unguarded smile on his face.

I pulled him up. Kissed him. Deep and slow and tasting like salt and wine and the future, and he held my face in both hands and kissed me back with a tenderness that made my knees give out, which did not matter because he was holding me.

The front door opened.

“DID SHE SAY YES?”

Emma’s voice exploded through the cabin like a small, purple-jacketed bomb. She was through the door before anyone could stop her, crutches abandoned in the hallway, hopping on one good foot with the speed and determination of a child who had been waiting outside for this moment and had run out of patience.

Behind her, Dollie and Josh. And behind them, two figures I recognized from the visit months ago. Sawyer’s parents. His mother already crying. His father standing with his hand on his wife’s shoulder and a smile on his face that looked exactly like Sawyer’s, the rare one, the real one, the one that changed everything.

“She said yes!” Dollie shouted, and the cabin erupted.

Emma crashed into us. I caught her and Sawyer caught both of us and the three of us stood in the middle of the candlelit kitchen holding each other while the people we loved poured through the door with hugs and tears and the kind of noise that only comes from genuine, uncontainable joy.

Dollie hugged me so hard she lifted me off the ground. Josh shook Sawyer’s hand and then pulled him into an embrace that Sawyer accepted without protest, which was how I knew how happy he was. His mother held my face in her hands and said welcome to the family with tears running down her cheeks. His father crouched down and asked Emma if she approved, and Emma said she had approved months ago and what took everyone so long.

In the middle of all of it, Dollie pulled me aside.

“Emma is sleeping at our house tonight,” she said with a grin.

“Dollie.”

“The man proposed. You need a night alone. You are welcome.”

“You planned this.”

“I helped plan this. Sawyer did the hard part. Do you know how many times he practiced the speech? Josh heard it fourteen times. The man was pacing in our kitchen for an hour.”

I looked at Sawyer across the room. He was holding Emma, who was examining the ring on my finger with the critical eye of a jeweler, and his parents were beside him, and Josh was clapping him on the back, and he looked like a man who had just been given everything he ever wanted and was still trying to believe it was real.

He caught my eye. Held it. And across the room full of people and noise and candlelight, he smiled at me. The real one. The full one. The one that used his whole face and made my heart stop.

I smiled back. And the ring on my finger caught the light from a dozen candles and the room was warm and my family was here and the answer had always, always been yes.

39

SAWYER

The cabin was quiet.

Everyone was gone. Dollie had taken Emma, who had fallen asleep on the couch with Sir Chomps-a-Lot in one arm and Captain Fluffington wedged against her other side, and Josh had carried the bear to the car while Dollie carried Emma, and the logistics of fitting a sleeping child and a human-sized stuffed animal into a truck had been the kind of comedy that I would have enjoyed more if I had not been counting the seconds until the door closed.

My parents had left earlier. My mother had hugged Chloe four times. My father had shaken my hand three times. Each goodbye had been accompanied by more tears and more congratulations and more of the warmth that filled the room like extra candlelight, and I loved them for it but I needed them to go because the woman I had just asked to marry me was standing in my kitchen wearing my ring and I had plans.

The door closed. The truck pulled away. The gravel crunched and then went quiet and the cabin settled into the kind of silence that was not empty but full, full of the candles still burning and the warmth still lingering and the woman standing beside the table with her hand raised, turning the ring on her finger, watching the stone catch the light.

“They are gone,” she said.

“They are gone.”

She looked at me. Blue eyes. Bright from hours of crying and laughing and the particular glow that comes from a woman who has just said yes to the man she loves and is still feeling the aftershock of it in every part of her body.

I walked to her. Slowly. Not because I was being deliberate. Because looking at her in the candlelight, with the ring on her finger and the flush on her cheeks and the soft curve of her smile, was something I wanted to take my time with. Something I wanted to remember in detail for the rest of my life.

I pulled her against me. Wrapped both arms around her and held her with her back to my chest, my chin on top of her head, our bodies swaying slightly in the kind of rhythm that does not need music. Her hands came up to cover mine where they rested on her stomach, and the weight of the ring, small and new and real, pressed against my skin.