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“Really?”
“It’s either me give you one or give you up and let some other man love you and give you a baby I was too damn closed-minded to have. I might complain about mine, but if there’s one thing I’m proudest of in this world, it’s my kids. I’d never regret having another. What I would regret is losing you.”
I throw my arms around him and hold him so tight that I might break his neck.
“You got a vise around my neck,” he states.
I pull myself up and kiss him. Unlike the night he caught me from the tree and stated that line, I’m not letting him go.
Not now.
Not ever.
“I love you, Rob.” I kiss him between words and grip him tight in my arms. “It took me nineteen years of dating frogs to find you, but I did, and it was worth the wait.”
His hand grips my head as he pulls me back to look at him. Warm brown eyes lock on mine as he says the words against my lips, “I love you too, Tara. Every crazy, wild ounce of you.”
We kiss in the kitchen and get a little handsy, trying not to wake the baby or the sleeping couple upstairs. I’d love to take this man to bed, and I know he wants nothing more than to undress me and ravage me on this floor. But we can’t.
Rob takes my hand and pulls me over to the living room. We sit on the sofa, our feet up on the coffee table, my head on his arm, his arm wrapped around me.
Even on a Friday night, babysitting a newborn, we find our moment to just be.
Love.
It’s groans, laughs, and a whole lot of yearning. It’s ups and downs and fights and make-ups. It’s grumpiness and sunshine, sass and crass. It’s pushes and pulls and everything in between.
Love … it’s wild. And it’s ours.
I’m so happy I waited for it.
EPILOGUE
My internal crystal ball was only six months out of becoming real. It was at that time that Rob turned the downstairs bedroom into my very own walk-in closet/home office.
A huge perk of living with a contractor is that he knows how to build things. I gave him my ideas, and he went above and beyond in creating built-ins along two walls of the room with floor-to-ceiling cabinetry to house not only my ranch wear, but my regular clothing too. Against the wall, near the window, is a new desk with a vase of fresh flowers on it.
I’m seated at my desk, looking at the dahlias that Molly picked for me this morning. It’s a new plant we added to the castle gardens. One the garden center said would have to be dug up in the fall and placed in the basement, only to be planted again.
I found that to be a lot like love.
You plant it and watch it bloom. When the weather turns, it won’t survive unless you protect it. Sometimes, you have to put it away for a while. Times get hard, life becomes chaotic, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there. You don’t stop caring for it. You just wait until the time is right for it to be planted again, watered, and given sunshine, ready to thrive once more.
This time, better and stronger than before.
It took six months for me to move in with Rob, but we kept my condo in Newbury because my roots are there, as well as the accounting office and gym I still work at. It’s nice to know I don’t have to drive the hour and a half to the ranch if I’m bone-tired.
We spend some weekends at the condo—with and without kids. When the school year is in session, they are back and forth between our place and Christine and Mike’s.
Surprisingly, Bob the fish is still alive and well, swimming in his upgraded tank because he’s grown two inches. I think it’s because I sneak him bits of pastry now and then.
Yes, I still bake. It’s mostly because I’m happy … nah, who am I kidding? I bake when Rob pisses me off, which is often. It’s never anything worth breaking up over. In fact, it’s normal couple things, like me failing to tell him I gave Jesse permission to use my car to go out with friends and whose parents we are seeing for the holidays and that one time I went out with my friends in a dress so short that I couldn’t bend over without someone seeing my thong. He’s a brute sometimes, but I like him for it. Turns out, that’s just what I’ve always needed.
I rise from my desk and walk over to my dressing closet, the one where I keep my dresses. I look at the wall and the painting Rob hung here last summer when he painted the walls a rose color and bought me a new bed. It doesn’t quite go with the aesthetic of the room, but I wouldn’t dream of replacing it.
After all, the painting is of me.
I didn’t realize it until Rob casually mentioned it soon after I moved in. The resemblance is now obvious to me. I mean, the woman is hella gorgeous even if you can only see her side profile. Now, I use it to tease him that he fell in love with me first. He’ll never admit it, but he never disputes it. Instead, he grunts.
