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Her fingernails dig into me as her hand tightens around mine. “About me?”
I’m trembling all over, but trying to contain it, trying to prevent the explosion from ripping out of me like a ticking bomb.
“Something happened when you turned eighteen,” I say. “One day, I visited your place, and there you were… no braces on your teeth. No awkwardness… or, if it was there, it was suddenly cute as hell.”
She grins, her eyes sparkling, as the fire crackles nearby and bathes us in its heat, but we’ve got enough heat of our own.
“I saw you, and I felt it, Harper.”
“What?” she whispers.
I could stop it now. Not erase everything I’ve said but undo it. I could steer the conversation in a different direction, but my instincts within won’t let me. The pounding. The roaring. The longing for the future… the never-ending need.
“I felt like I’ve been waiting my whole life for…”
The waiter appears, cutting me off.
“I’ll have the steak, medium rare,” I tell him, to make him go away, though I keep my tone as polite as possible.
Harper offers him a tight smile. “I’ll have the steak, too. Medium. Thank you.”
She turns back to me once he’s gone, eyebrows raised expectantly.
Our hands fuse together as if nothing could make us let go. Even if Adam walked in here….
“I’d been waiting my whole life for a woman I really wanted. A woman who would give me kids. A woman I could marry… have a family with.”
“You want kids?” she murmurs.
“I want them… with you.”
Her other hand flies across the table, so she’s clawing onto me with both hands. “Is this a joke?”
“Not even a little bit.”
I pause, our gazes fusing just like our hands, so much affection blazing between us. It’s difficult to believe I ever wondered if she felt the same. It’s difficult to believe I’d ever hold any of this back.
“I did my best to fight the feeling for weeks, did my best to tell myself I was going through a midlife crisis. Or anearmidlife crisis. Anyway, I couldn’t. Wherever I turned, there you were, my woman, so beautiful, so tempting, somine.”
She blinks, her eyes glistening. “Say it again.”
I smile, not smirk. I don’t have to hide any of this anymore… not from her, anyway. With Adam and the danger I’m feeling and thinking, I should hide it all, every last impulse, but I can’t, not with my Harper.
“You. Are. Mine.”
She makes the cutest, most endearing noise, a pleasure-filled sound trapped within happiness, with joy flaring in it, pure joy for our future bursting inside of her.
“I own you,” I go on, voice getting husky.
I didn’t plan on letting out the force of my need, the shivering certainty of it in my voice, the hunger plain, surging, and real—impossible to fight.
“Every part. Your body, your soul, your future, yourwomb. Maybethatmost of all. You’re going to give me at least three children.”
She quirks her eyebrow. “Only three?”
I laugh in a carefree way, despite everything that’s happened and might still happen. It’s the sort of laughter I hadn’t experienced in a long time, since before my woman turned eighteen, and this obsession gripped me.
I’m letting all the negativity go.
