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“You think so?” he said. “Not what I’d call it. I’d call it falling in love, and being scared to death, because you know you’re going to do it anyway. And that’s why I love you. It’s the grit in you. It’s the guts. It’s the ticker.” Caution be damned. He’d been cautious so far, and where had it got him?
He thought she might be holding her breath. Finally, she asked, “You do?”
“Yeah. I do. I’ve only been showing you in a hundred ways. I finished your attic. I insulated your sun porch. Reckon I should’ve bought flowers instead. Tell me how to convince you, and I’ll do it.”
“Oh,” she said. And smiled. It was wide, it was glorious, and it trembled on the edge of tears. “Well … ditto.”
“Ditto?”
“Yes. What? I have to say it?”
“Yes, you bloody well do. If the bloke says it first—for the second time—you bloody welldohave to say it.”
“What second time? What was the first time?”
He felt stupid, like Janey at her most petulant. “Halloween?”
“You told me you loved me on Halloween?” Now, she just looked confused.
“Yes. I did. I distinctly remember it. I said you were created for a man to love, and I loved doing it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Does that count?”
“Yes, it bloody well counts!”
“You don’t have toyell.What did I do when you said that?”
He tried to frown some more. He couldn’t. “You fell asleep.”
She laughed. “Sorry. I guess I thought that was just the butterfly costume or whatever. That you were … particularly sexually attracted to me in the costume, so I was more … appealing.”
He fell onto his back and slapped himself in the chest. “Go on and stab me in the heart again. My declaration, rejected.”
She was laughing. “What? How was I supposed to know? When you tell a woman you love her, you hold her face, look deeply into her eyes, and say, ‘I am so in love with you.’ At least I assume so. It hasn’t really happened that way to me. More like, ‘Love ya, babe.’ But that seems to me like an appropriate way to deliver the message. Clear. Direct. Not open to misinterpretation as gratitude for her wearing some truly scratchy underwear and high heels that pinch her toes all night, not to mention the butterfly wings, which were—”
She broke off. That was because he rolled over again, all the way over her, held her face in his hands, and kissed her. Deeply, and hard enough so she’d remember it. Then he kissed her again, more softly this time, feathered a couple of kisses at the edge of her mouth and on her cheeks for good measure, and said, “Open your eyes.”
“Oh.” It was a sigh, and she did. Seeing those peat-bog eyes flutter open did something to him. A kick of lust, yeah, as always. And a twist of his heart, too.
“I am so in love with you,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s any going back.”
She smiled, and it was the butterfly again. Going over the edge, heart and soul and no holding back. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Because I’ve been in love with you ever since …”
“Since when? Tell me what I did, and I’ll do it again.”
“Since,” she said, because Quinn would always give her heart, even when she didn’t know she was doing it, “you watched me pack up the dentist’s paddleboard and told me I could wear my sweats to dinner. And talked about kissing me.”
“You said no,” he reminded her.
“I know,” she said. “So you didn’t do it. That’s when I really fell in love.”
45
BOLT FROM THE BLUE
Quinndiddo Beckett’s grocery shopping. She bought his small appliances the next day, too. “Not because I have any illusions that it’s my life,” she of course had to explain to him, “but because you only have two hands.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be careful not to read too much into it.”
