Page 304 of Romeo

That one word held enough guilt to make me laugh for real. “You could have mentioned it.”

“I could’ve.”

“You let me spend almost a year thinking you were just incredibly persistent.”

“I am incredibly persistent.”

“And apparently cursed.”

“Blessed,” he corrected. “Depends who you ask.” He shrugged.

I shook my head, but I couldn’t stop smiling. “She told me La Croix men know.”

“We do.”

“And you knew when you met me?”

His eyes held mine without hesitation. “The second I saw you.”

There was something terrifying about being loved with that much certainty. And something equally terrifying about realizing I didn’t want him to love me any other way.

Jasper brushed one last tear from beneath my eye, then glanced toward the clock beside the bed. Whatever he saw made him grimace.

“What?”

“My mama.”

I laughed. “What about her?”

“We’re runnin’ out of time before she gets here, and if I don’t have an answer when she walks through that door, I may not survive long enough to ask you again.”

The absurdity of the morning finally caught up with me. Yesterday I had gone to work. Last night a man attacked me. Jasper appeared out of nowhere, killed whatever distance I had been pretending existed between us, hauled me across several states, brought me to New Orleans, and now stood in front of me asking me to marry him before his mother arrived.

It was insane.

Maybe I was insane too.

Because when I looked at Jasper, I didn’t feel rushed. I didn’t feel trapped. I didn’t feel like last night had stolen the choice from me.

I thought about yesterday morning instead.

About every morning before it.

About the house that didn’t exist yet. The children we had joked about. The shirt I still hadn’t gotten to steal. The way his voice sounded when he called me Ma Belle and the way he’d waited for me through every uncertainty I placed between us.

I had been falling in love with him slowly enough to mistake it for friendship until there was no safe place left to land.

Now there was.

Him.

I slid my hands up his chest and around his neck.

“I love you too, Jasper.”

His eyes closed for half a second, and the happiness that crossed his face when they opened made my heart squeeze.

I smiled through the last of my tears.