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“Is that the technical term for my condition? I have one much more descriptive.”
“Chad!”
He caught her behind the neck with his hand and brought her head down for his kiss. Without hesitation, her arms encircled his neck. His mouth tasted like the wine his mother had served with dinner and Leigh’s tongue savored the golden taste all over again.
“Damn!” he cursed the tiny buttons that refused to cooperate and pulled away from her in frustration. “I’m not going to get you out of this, am I?”
“Not too easily, no.”
He made an agonized face and growled menacingly. “Then I’ll have to content myself with memories. Do you still have that bottle of baby oil?”
“Shhhh,” she hissed and cast a guilty look over her shoulder toward the door.
He laughed. “What am I marrying, a closet pervert? In the light of day, don’t you own up to being kinky?”
“I am not kinky!” she protested indignantly. “That was a therapeutic massage I gave you. You said your shoulders were tense.”
“And by the time you got through plying your skills, not to mention the baby oil, it wasn’t only my shoulders that were tense.”
She shook both fists at him. “Oh, you’re terrible, horrible.”
“But you love me anyway,” he said, catching her hands and crushing them against his chest. “Don’t you?” he asked quietly, serious now.
“Yes.”
Their kiss was an avowal of that love.
“There’s something I always intended to ask you,” she said long minutes later. Her head rested on his shoulder while he idly toyed with the bow at her neck.
“Ask away.”
“That first day, just as Sarah was being born, you thought I’d never been married, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“But there was no judgment in your eyes, no censure.”
He shifted his weight so she’d have to sit up straight, then took her face between both hands. His thumbs settled at each corner of her mouth. “I loved you even then, Leigh. It wouldn’t have mattered to me what you were or what you’d done, what your past was. I loved you the moment I saw you. I’d have forgiven you anything.”
“Oh, Chad,” she breathed, leaning down to kiss him. A tear dropped from her misted eyes onto his cheek.
“Hey, hey, if I give you your Christmas gift now, will you stop crying?”
“My Christmas present? Now?” she asked, sitting erect instantly.
“It’s not wrapped. I wanted to carry it around with me all day and choose just the right time. I think now is that time,” he said, taking a small envelope out of his shirt pocket. He watched her carefully as she slit the envelope open with her thumbnail and then reached inside to find the two thin bands of gold encircled with sapphires. “They’re ring guards. A wide gold band goes between them. You’ll have to wait a week to get that. Do you like them?”
“They’re beautiful,” she whispered. “Just the color of your eyes.”
“I was thinking they were the color of yours.”
“No, no,” she shook her head. The sparkling facets of the gems blurred through her tears. “Yours.”
He slipped the rings onto the fourth finger of her left hand. They were a perfect fit. She raised inquiring eyes to his. “Lucky guess,” he answered her silent question, shrugging humbly.
“No. You’re a genius. I love them and I can’t wait to get the other band.”
“I didn’t know what you had before. I hope you like this. If you’d like something else, a diamond”
