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Unexpected tears filled her eyes as she nodded. No one other than her family had ever wanted to keep her. She was the poor, scrawny woman with a big nose and oddly pale hair and eyes who was good enough for a fumble in an alley, but not to love. Not to take home and make their wife. One of the older ladies that worked at the factory with her told Rowan once that the best she could hope for in life was to be a rich man’s mistress, or a beggar’s wife.
Garret reached out and brushed a tear off her cheek with his thumb. “Why are you crying?”
“It’s just…” Her throat closed up on her tears, and she had to struggle to clear it. “No one has ever wanted me like you do. No one beside my family has every looked at me like I was someone important, treated me like I was worth something. When you look at me, I feel…” She hesitated, not wanting to use the ‘l’ word. “You make me feel cherished.”
Edward’s brawny arms wrapped around her from behind as he gently rolled them back onto the bed, with Garret following them.
“Rowan, Rowan, Rowan,” Garret chided her softly as she lay on her back with Garret and Edward looking down at her. “You don’t know your own worth. You are a treasure unlike any other, the kind of women men fight wars over. I just thank the good Lord that we were the blokes lucky enough to claim you for our own. Will you be ours, Rowan Larsen? Wear our ring in truth?”
“But my brother…” she tried to grasp onto the excuse, and that’s just what it was. An excuse.
“Your brother,” Edward said in a gentle voice, “when he comes back for you, will find his sister happily married and well cared for.”
“What if he still wants me to come to California with him?” She reached out, placing a hand on both of their arms. “I can’t abandon him.”
Garret stroked her cheek with the back of his hand, his gaze kind as he gently said, “Rowan, your brother is a grown man. He is free to choose his own path in life, and while I’m sure he would like to have you with him, he doesn’t need you. Not like we do.”
“You are the missing piece of my heart,” Edward murmured as he leaned down and gave her a brief kiss on the tip of her nose. “I always imagined what it would
be like when we finally found our future wife, but I didn’t anticipate how quickly you’d become an essential part of my life, of my heart. Your brother will always be welcome in our home, and we can always go visit him in California, but I beg you to please choose us.”
The pretty blue stone on her ring sparkled as she laid her fingertips against Edward’s lips, the sadness and desperation in his words and eyes touching her deep inside her heart. “I feel like I’m abandoning my brother.”
“Like he abandoned you,” Garret muttered, barely loud enough to hear.
Before Rowan could defend Ted, Edward said, “Your brother loves you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” she replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“And you love him and want him to be happy, correct?”
She nodded, the skin of her arm growing sensitive as Garret slowly stroked her. “Yes.”
“Then wouldn’t he want the same for you? For you to be happy?”
She turned that thought over in her mind. “I guess so.”
Edward leaned down and brushed his lips over hers, a delightful wave of warmth rushing through her blood. “And do we make you happy?”
Unable to face the intensity of their combined gazes, she turned so she could bury her face against Edward’s furry chest. “Yes.”
Garret took the opportunity to kiss her exposed shoulder, his voice gentle as he said, “Then stay with us, be our bride, our wife, and someday the mother of our children.”
An image flashed through her mind, so real it almost felt like a memory even though it had never happened. She pictured herself sitting before an unfamiliar hearth, a beautiful little babe nursing from her breast while Garret and Edward looked on with proud smiles. Oh yes, she wanted that.
“I’ll stay,” she whispered.
Both Edward and Garret froze, then smiled so big she couldn’t help but smile back as their pure joy washed over her like a physical touch.
“You mean it?” Garret asked with both hope and vulnerability shading his low voice, “You’ll be our wife? Stay with us in Bridgewater? Let us both love you with everything we have?”
“Yes,” she nodded, trying to ignore the small pang of guilt, the lingering feeling that she was somehow betraying her brother. “Yes, I’ll be your wife.”
Edward took her hand in his own, kissing her fingertips as he said, “Little tigress, you have made us the happiest men in all the world.”
Garret pressed his hip against her, the hot length of his erection leaving a kiss of moisture where the tip pressed into her skin. “Now let us show you how good our life will be together.”
He leaned down and, when their lips met, she wrapped her arms around Garret’s neck, both of them smiling as they kissed. Happiness blossomed within her, and a great sense of relief and contentment filled the empty space in her heart with an ocean of love. She didn’t have to hear the words out loud to know that he loved her, it was a feeling as powerful as being struck by lightning. When Edward began to caress her breasts—he really did seem obsessed with the small mounds—she moaned into Garret’s mouth.
