Page 93 of Waiting for You

I kissed her bare knee and stayed put. She pushed harder. I rolled off the couch and stood, then leaned down to kiss her mouth. She made the face where her eyes narrow in disgust and her mouth twists sideways. I laughed and walked upstairs.

EPILOGUE

SLOANE

"Why are you getting a tattoo if you're scared of needles?" I'd asked my last client of the day two hours into the session.

She just blinked at me, with no logical answer.

A piece that usually took forty-five minutes stretched into three brutal hours. My lower back ached, my patience was gone, and all I wanted was to strip off my work clothes, collapse onto the mattress, and ignore the world until sunrise.

I pushed through the front door.

The house was pitch black.

I stood in the foyer and dropped my keys into the bowl. Xavier was supposed to be here. We'd moved in together a few months ago after he made New York permanent, and he'd promised to wrap up at the clinic early. It was past eight. The place was empty, except for a faint glow spilling in from the backyard.

I crossed to the patio door.

Through the glass, the yard was transformed. Dozens of candles lined the edge of the pool, their flames steady in the night air. Rose petals blanketed the path down to the lawn, floral arrangements anchored the steps, and the underwater pool lights threw a soft glow against the cedar fence.

It was usually a beautiful yard, but tonight every square inch had been curated.

The sight rooted me to the floor.

I slid the glass door open.

Xavier stepped out from the far side of the pool, walking toward me through the candlelight. He wore a tailored black suit. I had no idea why he'd chosen formalwear for our backyard, but the effort undid me: the crisp collar, the fitted jacket, the reality that he'd dressed for a moment that mattered.

He stopped right in front of me.

Then—just as he'd done years ago—he dropped to both knees.

That detail wrecked me. One knee was a question. Both knees were a declaration and a surrender at once. He wasn't asking out of casual expectation. He was asking as a man whose whole world hinged on the answer.

He popped open the velvet box. The sapphire and oval diamond sparkled against the dark lining. It was the same ring he'd proposed with years ago. The one I'd mailed back. The one he'd smuggled to Hawaii in his suit jacket while I wasted a week rearranging seating charts and telling myself I was over him. The ring I'd spent eight years pretending I didn't care about.

"I've spent months trying to draft the perfect speech for this," he murmured. "The truth is, words fall short."

His dark eyes locked onto mine. "Loving you stopped being a conscious choice a long time ago. It's the first thought I wake up to and the last thing I carry to sleep. You're the foundation of every plan I make and every future I bother to imagine."

My vision blurred. I was standing in my ink-stained work clothes after the worst client of the month, weeping in the backyard.

"You aren't just the love of my life," he said, his voice rough. "You're the life in it. I want every complicated version of you. The happy one, the stubborn one, the woman who thinks she has to shoulder the world alone. I want every ordinary day with you. I want the privilege of standing beside you until one lifetime feels too short.

"I'm going to spend the rest of my days loving you with the same devotion I have right now. You're my greatest certainty, Sloane. You're the one person I could never let go of. So stay with me. Stay when life is easy, and stay when it all goes to hell. Give me the rest of your years, and let me spend every one of them making this up to you.”

He paused, heaving a deep breath. "Sloane… Will you marry me?"

"Yes!" I replied, biting my lip, desperately trying to swallow my tears but failing.

He slid the cool metal onto my finger, and I hauled him up by his lapels and crashed my mouth against his. He wrapped both arms around my waist, lifting my feet off the patio, and a breathless laugh escaped my throat.

The sapphire was back where it belonged. Same ring, same man, but a wildly different version of us both.

I was never taking this ring off again.

"I love you," I whispered against his jaw. "I'm going to love you for the rest of my life."