The Way Home (22 page)

He helped her out and up onto the dock, then followed. “So what do you think?”

“It was fun. I admit it. But I still don’t understand why you’d want to buy it.”

He took her hand and led her to a log bench that faced the water. “What if I said I wanted to start a fishing charter business up here?”

She hadn’t fully processed the implication of his words when her heartbeat spiked, her hands started to tremble, and a light-headedness hit her hard enough to make her dizzy.

He was talking about much more than purchasing a rickety six-seater float plane. He was talking about a commitment. He was talking about a future.

“Whoa. I recognize that look. Take a deep breath. Let’s back up a second.”

Now she was confused. He
wasn’t
talking about a commitment?

“Look. I’ve blindsided you twice. Once in the dead of winter. Once in July when I showed up again unannounced. It’s not my intention to do it again.”

“Too late.”

He smiled and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “OK. So I have a little trouble in that area. But there’s no pressure here, Jess. I want you to know what’s on my mind. And I want you to think about how you feel about it.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I want to make a life up here. With you.”

Heart racing, she looked up at him.

“I want to marry you, Jess. I love you. I think I fell a little bit in love with you the first time I saw you.”

Her voice got trapped somewhere in the wellspring of emotions
knocking around inside her. Elation. Fear. Excitement. Fear. Joy.
Fear.

She didn’t want to be afraid. Not of him. Not of them. And yet . . . was she ready for this? Was she capable of this?

“Like I said, I didn’t want this to be another blindside, but sweetie, I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m crazy about you.”

He tipped her face up to his, and she could tell he was doing his best not to laugh at her.

“Not talking, huh? That’s OK. I know you need some time to process the idea.”

She needed more than time. She needed oxygen.

“So . . . I’m going to fly the plane back to Vermillion, OK? I need to get her back before sundown, and it’s about a thirty-minute flight. How long is it going to take me to drive back to Kabby? Hold up your fingers if you can’t talk.”

“Thirty-five . . . forty minutes,” she said numbly.

“OK, then. I’ll see you in a little more than an hour. I’ll stop and pick up something for dinner, so don’t cook. Jess?” he added when she stared at him. “See you in an hour?”

She nodded, leaned in to him as he pressed another kiss to her forehead, then watched him walk to the plane.

She was still watching the sunlight glint off the wings in the far, far distance when Shelley walked up beside her.

“Hey,” Shelley said in that quiet way she had of hinting that she knew something was up.

“Hey.”

“You OK?”

She breathed deeply and looked at her hands clasped together on her lap. “I’m not sure.”

Shelley sat down beside her. “Is that a
good
not sure or a
bad
not sure?”

She looked at her friend. “Not sure about that, either.”

N
o talking.” Ty grabbed her
hand when he finally arrived at the store shortly after closing time and led her straight up the stairs.

It had taken him more like two hours to make the drive from Vermillion to the store. Judging by the look on his face, she suspected he’d timed it that way.

He wanted to be alone with her. He wanted her in bed.

“No talking,” he growled again, dropping their takeout dinner onto an end table and walking her to the bedroom, where he stripped off his clothes and hurriedly helped her out of hers.

“Only this,” he murmured, lowering her onto the bed and covering her naked body with his. “Only this.”

Only
, however, did not belong in the same breath with the
this
he had in mind. Because he didn’t
only
make love to her. He didn’t
only
drive her to the brink of madness, then shove her over the edge into free fall. He didn’t
only
do anything.

He destroyed. He possessed. With his hands. With his mouth. With the strength and the fire of a man who would do anything to please his woman.

When he knelt between her thighs and ran his hungry hands from her breasts to her belly and finally to the heat of her, he demanded, “Open for me.”

A thrill shot through her, and she opened her legs and let him pull her to the edge of the bed, let him drape her thighs over his shoulders as he knelt down to the floor. Let him devour her with his mouth and his passion as he brought her to a lush and powerful climax that both shattered and restored her and had her screaming his name as pleasure so exquisite it scared her fired through her body.

She was still coming down when he dragged her to the floor with him, positioned her over his heat, and took her there again, only then giving in to his own release.

W
HEN THEY
’
D RECOVERED
enough strength to move, they crawled back into bed and burrowed under the covers, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Several long, luxuriant moments passed while their breathing settled and their heartbeats slowed.

“OK,” he whispered against her hair. “You can talk now.”

“Easy for you to say.”

She felt his smile before he tipped her face back so he could look into her eyes. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

“So. How are things?”

She laughed. “
Things
may never be the same again.”

“Can’t tell if that’s a complaint or—”

“We’ll go with
or
.” She lifted a hand that felt like lead and caressed his cheek. “We will definitely go with
or
.”

He tucked her head back beneath his chin and held her close.

How she felt lying here with him, naked and spent and steeped in the wonder of his strength and heat, was something she treasured. Nothing else mattered but these moments. Nothing else counted but this feeling. She didn’t want to catalogue or define it. She didn’t want to think outside this little pocket of intimacy. She wanted to live it, breathe it, be lost in it. For a long time, that’s what she did. Until it occurred to her that he was probably starving.

“Are you hungry?” she whispered into the silence.

“You think I’m lying around like a slug because you wore me out? Hell, no, woman. I’m weak from starvation.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you have a teensy-weensy theatrical streak?”

“Minored in musical theater in college.”

That brought her up onto an elbow. “Seriously?”

“I’m liable to break out in show tunes at a moment’s notice.”

Now she knew he was kidding. “I’ve heard you sing in the shower. I was not impressed.”

“You were impressed a minute ago.”

She laughed. “Yes, I was. And I hope to be impressed again after I feed you.”

“Count on it.”

She leaned in and kissed him, then got out of bed and reached for her robe.

By the time he joined her in the kitchen, she had the food on the table.

“Looks good,” she said.

“Kentucky Fried. Nothing but the best for my lady.”

He’d pulled on his jeans and shirt but hadn’t bothered to button it. His hair was mussed, his eyes were sleepy, and his lips were swollen from kissing her—and other things.

And he really was hungry. He dug in as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.

Soon, however, the elephant in the room refused to take a backseat to polite table talk.

“You know, you’re killing me here, Jess. Say something.”

Suddenly, they were back on the bench by the lake, and he was wanting to make a life with her.

“Yes,” she said, feeling and sounding breathless, as if she’d just stepped off a cliff.

“Yes . . . what?”

A nervous laugh burst out. “Well, I may be a little slow on the uptake, but wasn’t there a proposal mixed in somewhere with wanting to buy a plane?”

A slow, pleased smile spread across his face. “No. That wasn’t a proposal. That was a preamble.”

He shot up from the table, disappeared into the bedroom, and came back with a small blue box in his hand.

He got down on one knee in front of her, opened the box, and held it out to her.

She pressed a hand to her chest, stunned by the extravagant emerald-cut diamond that winked at her from inside the Tiffany box.

“This is the proposal. Although, I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t imagine myself half-naked when I made it.”

She lifted the ring out of its satin mooring with trembling fingers. Met his eyes.

“I love you, Jess. Will you marry me?”

“You’re really sure about this?”

“Never been so sure of anything in my life.”

“Then yes.” She threw herself into his arms. “Yes, I love you, too. And yes, I’ll marry you.”

“D
ID YOU EVER
think about having kids?” Ty asked later, after they’d made love again. “You and J.R.?”

It was a fair question. “J.R., well, he’d seen a lot of ugly things. A lot of troubling things. He didn’t want to bring a child into the world he knew.”

“What about you? What did you want?”

“I tried not to think about it.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You want to know what I think? I think you’d make a great mom.”

She turned her head on the pillow so she could see his face. The expression she saw there told her what she wanted to know. “And I think you’d make a great daddy.”

He grinned. “I hope so.”

So easy. Again, everything was so easy with him.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. “And I don’t want you to think that I’m speaking badly of J.R.”

“I know you’d never do that.”

“I loved him. I did. As best as I could, at least. But I never really understood him. You know, growing up here, it’s pretty confining. You’d be amazed how many married couples started out as high school sweethearts. You might say it’s a tradition.

“Anyway, that’s how it was with J.R. and me. We fell in love as kids and never really got to know each other as adults. It
seemed like he was deployed all the time. And when he wasn’t, he was still all about the Army. It took me a while to realize that no matter what, I’d always come second with him. I’d reached a point before he died where it wasn’t enough.”

He remained silent, giving her time to get this off her chest.

“We fought before his last deployment. I wanted him to resign after his hitch was up. I told him I wanted us to be a couple, that I was tired of leading two separate lives and that if he didn’t resign, I was leaving him. I don’t even know if I meant it, but when he made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, I started seriously thinking about leaving. We went to bed angry. In the morning, he was gone. I never saw him again.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too. I did love him. And in his own way, I know he loved me. But it was never easy. He was a good man. I want to make that clear. A good provider. A good soldier. A good friend . . . to everyone but me.”

The truth was, he had often shut her out, and the deep connection she’d always thought they would make in time had never come. She’d tried. She’d followed him from post to post, but when his deployments became more frequent, his emotional distance became more pronounced.