“I spent all of high school listening to you tell me you’d never date a player.”
She chucked the pillow at my head. I caught it and threw it back. “You never asked if that included you.”
“Emmeline. Listen to me.” I leveled her with a gaze because we just couldn’t fuck around right now. “I have wanted you for half my life. I don’t remember what it’s like to wake up in the morning without thinking about you. Everything good in my life has your fingerprints on it and you’ve been there for me to lean on through all the bad times.” I grabbed my discarded shirt off the floor and held it out for her. “I buy shirts with little orange blossoms on them because I want all the reminders of you I can get. I don’t know who I am without you, and I don’t want to find out.” I rested my hands on the footboard again and leaned toward her as she swept her thumb over the delicate stitching on my shirt. “But I knew if I dropped all of this on you from the start, it would change things between us. I couldn’t risk scaring you off. I couldn’t risk losing you.”
“Were you ever going to share any of”—she skimmed a hand down my arm and that single gesture stitched my soul back together—“thiswith me?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She laughed. “Any time soon?”
Another nod. When she rolled her eyes, clearly not buying it, I added, “I was going to take you to the Seychelles for a honeymoon next week. I figured a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean was the safest place to confess fifteen years of secrets.”
“Because I wouldn’t be able to leave? Or no one would care if I strangled you?”
“Pick whichever answer you like best.”
She laughed then, loud and deep, and it reverberated like a crack cleaving through ice. I rounded the bed and sat in front of her, pushing aside my shirt and taking her hand in mine. “I went about this all wrong.”
“You did,” she agreed.
“I overthought and overcomplicated everything.”
“All of it.”
“I put you in a terrible position with your dad last weekend and I basically assaulted you tonight, and I swear to god, those are the last two things I ever wanted to do to you.”
She gave me an unimpressed glare. “I hope no one caught that tackle on camera because you’ll be laughed out of the League.” She ran a hand over my shirt again. “But it’s nice that I’m not coming down from an epinephrine injection right now.”
“Muggsy, what were you doing at anoyster bar?”
“I’ll have you know I had the entire situation in hand,” she said. “You were the one who caused a scene. Did you see yourself?You jumped over a table.Have you been working on your vertical conditioning? Because that was impressive. Insane, but impressive.”
We shared a laugh and I brushed my thumb over her rings. Quiet settled between us, and for a moment the only sound was the cry of crickets in the fields outside. “Will you let me have another chance?”
“A chance at what?”
A rush of emotion and exhaustion and blinding need welled up inside me, and instinct ordered me to wrap my arms around my wife and rest my head in her lap. “At being yours.”
An excruciating minute passed and then another before Emme moved so much as an inch. But then she huffed out a breath and her fingers speared through my hair, and it was like my parachute finally popped open. “I was specifically instructed to request a beagle in these negotiations.”
I turned my head to catch her eye. “A…beagle? You want a dog?”
“I was also told to ask for a trip to Paris, but I think the Seychelles checks that box pretty hard,” she went on as she traced the ink on my shoulder. “What’s this?”
Glancing back, I said, “Gemini, for my June baby.”
I watched as her teeth sank into her bottom lip. As she understood it was just another piece of her that I kept with me. Orange blossoms on my heart and stars on my shoulder. “I can’t believe I never noticed.”
“I’ve spent a long time making sure you didn’t.”
She swept her hand down my spine as she asked, “What are you going to do with all that time now that I know your secrets?”
“The beagle will keep me busy.”
She brushed her fingers through my hair again, up the back of my neck. It brought a shiver out of me, a blessed relief to my frayed nerves. I held her tighter as she said, “You’re on the road too much. We’ll get a dog when you retire. I’m not ready to be a single dog mom. Not in a high-rise condo.”
“Does that mean you’re coming home?”
