Page 115 of Marked By the Devil

Alone now, I grinned at him again, so giddy and full of love that I could hardly contain it in my heart.

“What took you so long?” I teased.

“Oh, I should have kidnapped you sooner?” he asked, hugging me close.

Maybe it was strange, but between us, the fact that he’d kidnapped me would always be part of our running inside joke.

Both of us mutually sarcastic—as a defense mechanism to the uglier side of life and the violence that was sometimes necessary to complement it.

“I wanted to wait to propose,” he admitted honestly, smiling down at me like I was the world’s greatest gift.

“We have such a bright future ahead of us,” I told him. “A baby. Our home…”

He nodded. “But there will be hardships, too.”

“Of course, there will be.” Peace would be a fleeting, fluid thing for me now, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. So long as I was with him and part of this family, I had my purpose at last. It wasn’t to chase down criminals my bosses told me to focus on. It was to be with this strong man and start a family while I helped them remove the threats against them.

“I planned to ask once we were home,” he said softly. “But when you said that about not living with me…” He growled, shaking his head.

I’d never tire of his possessiveness.

“I meant that as in we’d be living somewhere else while the house is worked on.” I knew better than to argue with him about how renovating was unnecessary on my behalf.

“We will live together,” he stated sternly.

I smiled. “We can have a long engagement, though,” I suggested. “Until more of this stuff to do with Gregori is over with.”

“That could take months.”

“Really? I feel like we’ve got to be closing in on him now.”

He smirked. “Yeah. That’s the one thing we don’t have. A location on him.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m not crazy about waiting to marry you.”

I laughed. “Yet you’d wait to propose?”

He shrugged. “It was driving me crazy. I wanted to ask you the second I got that ring out of the vault.”

“Well, a long engagement wouldn’t change anything between us.” I kissed him. “The end result will still be the same.”

He shook his head again. “Waiting until Gregori is caught and dead is too long of a wait. I don’t want to put our lives on hold because of him.” He seemed to struggle with a scowl but likely was determined to keep this conversation pleasant. Positive.

“I want you to be my wife sooner than later,” he added before dipping his head to kiss me deeply.

Before I could get carried away—which seemed too easy to let happen with what had to be a sudden increase of hormones from my pregnancy, if the last few days were any indication—I pulled back.

“Okay, then we do the opposite. Let’s elope.”

He grinned slowly. “Elope?”

I nodded, liking the idea more and more with how he gazed at me with so much love.

“You’d want to do that?”

“Yes. I’d like you to be my husband sooner than later.”

He kissed me softly. “But then you’ll miss not having a wedding and all the bells and whistles and pomp and⁠—”

“All that matters is that I’ll have you.” Now that the idea was getting in my head and sinking in, I couldn’t imagine what he was describing. I hadn’t ever dreamed about a fantasy wedding and all those sorts of “milestone” things. I didn’t have any family to consider and invite as guests to the ceremony.