Page 301 of Romeo

I was out of bed before my brain caught up with my feet.

“What?”

Jasper stayed exactly where he was, one arm behind his head as he watched me pace two steps away and turn back toward him. If anything, he looked pleased with my reaction.

“You heard me.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Nope.”

“Jasper!”

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Still sane, Ma Belle.”

“You just asked me to marry you.”

“I did.”

“An hour before your mother gets here.”

His mouth twitched. “Timin’ could use work.”

I stared at him, waiting for the joke that had to be coming. Jasper joked about everything. He could turn a threat into a punch line and somehow make flirting sound reasonable while surrounded by armed bikers. But the longer I looked at him, the more obvious it became that there was no joke hiding behind the question.

“You’re serious.”

“Completely.”

My pulse started climbing again.

Marriage.

Yesterday I had gone to work worried about telling Jasper I had given birth to Charlie. Less than twenty-four hours later, I was standing barefoot in New Orleans while the same man sat on the edge of a bed waiting for me to decide whether I wanted to become his wife.

There should have been more steps between those two things.

There should probably have been several states between them.

“You can’t just decide we should get married.”

“I didn’t.” Jasper leaned forward, forearms resting on his thighs while he watched me. “I decided a long fuckin’ time ago that you were it for me. The only thing I didn’t know was when you’d be ready to decide I was it for you.”

The answer stole some of the panic from my lungs.

I thought about all the conversations I had mistaken for jokes. The imaginary house. Christmas. Children. Nebraska. Him telling me he wanted to see me in one of his shirts as though he had already pictured me waking up beside him enough times to know exactly what I would look like.

Maybe Jasper had been talking about marriage for months without ever using the word.

He stood and came toward me slowly, giving me plenty of time to move if I wanted. I didn’t. His hands settled at my waist, and when I looked up at him, the amusement was gone.

“If you don’t want this, you tell me no and that’s the end of it. I’ll still want you, and I’ll still be a pain in your ass every day you let me.” His fingers tightened slightly against my waist. “But if what you told me yesterday is true, if you’re ready to be mine and you want me to be yours, there is nothin’ on this earth that would make me happier than puttin’ my name beside yours and callin’ you my fuckin’ wife.”

My heart hurt.

Not painfully.

I looked at the man standing in front of me and knew my answer was already there. It had probably been there before he asked. But Charlie rose between us again—not as an obstacle, but as the last door I had refused to open.