Blaze chuckled. “I’m still milking her. Most of them are too nervous to ride Charlie, too, so they’re leading him in circles in the paddock.”
She gestured in the general direction of the outside. “I have a saddle. It’s in the barn.”
“Maybe we’ll pull that out tomorrow. I think they’ve had enough excitement for today.”
From her vantage on the countertop, Sarah could see Marcy, a soldier who’d done tours in the Middle East and Africa and was more twitchy than the average soldier, curled up on the couch in the living room with Muffintop on her lap, gently stroking the cat between the eyes.
Muffintop was dazed with ecstasy, gasping purrs.
Sarah asked, “But we’re going to have everyone inside the house tonight, just in case we can hear the fireworks from Cedar Rapids, right?”
Blaze nodded. “No use taking chances.”
Sarah turned back to her pies. “We can start taking bids on the barracks and cabins tomorrow. This is definitely the direction I want to take the farm.”
He settled around her again like a big human shield, rocking her as she made the pies.
“Oh, and by the way,” she said. “I talked to the counseling and social work department at the University of Iowa over in Iowa City this morning. They said as a local, I can start classes next month.”
Blaze kissed her temple again. “I’m proud of you.”
His words warmed her because she didn’t think she’d ever heard them before in her life.
She was holding the piecrust in her hands, thinking about it, and she finally worked up the spirit to say, “I’m proud of me, too.”
“Marry me,” Blaze sighed.
She leaned away from him and stared at him.“What?”
He stepped back and then lowered himself gingerly on one knee, holding onto the counter because she knew his leg was still sore from where he’d been shot. “Sarah Nevaeh Bell, I know it’s too soon, but I am ready to make changes in my organizational philosophy at a moment’s notice. I am begging you to be my wife. I love you more than the whole world. When we were held prisoner at Logan’s apartment in New York, I was obsessed with getting you out. I didn’t think I would survive, and I didn’t care about anything other than you. I needed you to survive. Make me the happiest man in the world, and allow me to obsess over your safety for the rest of our lives and burn down anything that threatens you, whether it’s a Russian Vor or a vole in your garden.”
He had been shot in the leg only a week before, so she didn’t make him wait.“Yes.”
Blaze pulled a black velvet-covered box out of his pants pocket and flipped open the top, showing her a blazing white heart-shaped diamond set on a gold band.
Thathad not come from the Zales in the Coralville Mall.
Sarah gasped. “Where the heck did you get that?”
“Micah knows a guy in the diamond trade.”
She laughed at him. “Well, at least you’re calling on your community.”
And he settled the ring on her finger and kissed her.
38
FORETELLING THE FUTURE
SARAH
But that didn’t mean Sarah gave up doing her tarot card readings.
The community she’d founded online was indeed important to her, and so twice a week, she dressed up as Madam Belova, summoned her spooky voice, and made up stuff about the tarot cards.
The next week, when she was reading the cards for Lindsay over in Peoria, California, the door to her social media studio creaked open.
Sarah dared not look at it because Lindsay was deep in the middle of the story about her fairy spiritual guide, a thing that Sarah had never heard of but was doing her best to look interested in.
