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“I mean, if you think about it, it is kind of archaic,” I countered, smiling. “You want to make someone be with you, so you get the government involved to make it harder for them to leave.”
“Cynic,” he shot back, but he was smiling. “You want to give it some thought?” he asked, the slightest bit of a guard back in his voice.
Did I?
I mean, shock aside, did I actually need to think about this?
About marrying this man who had started to mean so much to me.
About continuing to build a life with him.
Maybe a family with him.
Did that actually require more than a second’s thought?
The answer to that was simple.
“No. I don’t need to give it any thought. Of course I want to marry you,” I told him, lacing my arms around his neck, pulling his body flush to mine, crashing my lips to his, trying to make him see how I was feeling since I didn’t quite know the words to describe it.
“Love you, duchess,” he said as his forehead pressed to mine.
“I love you too,” I told him, from a deep place I never knew existed until he had unearthed it for me.
Sloane – 4 years
“Stop staring at me like I am about to explode,” I demanded, knowing my tone was surly, and just this once, not particularly caring.
I was fat.
I was swollen.
I had a nose that didn’t look like my nose.
I had skin that decided to start getting all splotchy.
And I had something pressing on my bladder twenty-four-freaking-seven.
He could take a little snippy.
“You’re working too hard,” he objected, watching as I walked across our New York apartment. In my heels. No matter how many times he told me to take them off.
Gunner, usually the most laid-back, easy-going, mind-his-own-business man had become a freaking helicopter, hovering around me every moment of every day since the stick turned blue.
It should have been sweet.
And, really, at the beginning, it was.
He refused to even let me bring my own clothes to the dry-cleaner, insisting that was too much for me to carry.
While the doctor said I was perfectly healthy, he had me on practical bed rest right from the first trimester. And, well, I didn’t mind it then. Since I was sick all day and night those first three months or so.
But now, now that all that had passed, I was sick of bed. I was sick of him lecturing me about not eating enough – even though I was clearly putting on plenty of weight if the basketball under my shirt was anything to go by. I was sick of him jumping if I so much as slid a little in my sock-clad feet like I was going to fall, whack my head against the counter, and also spontaneously go into labor.
It was too much.
He was being too much.
It might have come from a place of love, but he was going to love me right into the nuthouse at this rate.
“Gunner, I have to get this line of diaper bags out,” I objected, waving a hand at the sketchpad I had set up on an easel because sitting down was giving me a stabbing in my back lately. “We promised them by fall. I have about half a day left to get this design to Mateo before he has a stroke.”
“Let him have a stroke. You need to rest.”
I needed a martini, that was what I needed.
Just another four weeks, I reminded myself.
“Sloane, you have been…”
“Oh thank god,” I said when my cell started ringing. I practically dove for it. And, as expected, he did his jumping thing like he was ready to catch me if I fell. I took it with me toward the bedroom, needing some space. “I’m gonna kill him,” I informed Auddie as a greeting.
“Uh-oh. What now?” my best friend – and business partner – said.
“Apparently, sketching is too strenuous an activity for me,” I told her, rolling my eyes.
“It’s funny.”
“What is?”
“How these big, tough guys turn into these anxious messes when they become dads.”
“I’m not delicate,” I objected.
“But to him, you are,” she reasoned.
“I need to work.”
“You want to work,” she corrected.
“Hey, whose side are you on?” I shot back, smiling because she just was able to calm me down like that.
“Give him a little slack, Sloane,” she said, sighing out a bit wistfully. “He’s out of his depths here. His life has been all hard. He never had much exposure to softness. And there’s nothing softer than a baby.”
“The baby isn’t here yet!”
“Right, but you are. And you are y’know… growing it inside you. He is worried something could happen to the two of you. He wants to make sure you are taking care of yourself and the little one.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“So, I can just hope that when I push the baby out, that he transfers all this overprotective, overbearing part of himself onto him or her, right? And I can go back to wearing heels without getting side-eye from him?”
