I snorted a laugh and shook my head a little, tears pricking the edges of my eyes. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Butt talk?”
“The butt talk isn’t quite what I was hoping for.”
“Okay. I can take criticism. Less butt talk more heart talk. Got it.” He cleared his throat. I thought I heard someone make a dreamy sigh, but really, it seemed so far away it wasn’t worth paying attention to.
Right now there was only Ryder, only his hand on mine, only his smile crinkling his eyes. He looked happy. Nervous, but happy.
He’d never been more handsome than this moment.
“Delaney, I’ve wished on a lot of stars, but I never thought you’d come true. Please let me be your husband.” He opened the box. The thin gold band winked like a drop of honey and sunlight nestled against black velvet. “Please be my wife.”
“What about Mithra?” I whispered. They were not the words I expected to come out of my mouth. From the look on Ryder’s face (and the muffled tittering from the crowd), they were not the words he expected either.
“I’m not proposing to Mithra,” he said.
“This will give him what he wants,” I said. “Us, in a contract. Him, trying to get a piece of Ordinary so he can rule over all of us. You said you would never marry me.”
“Not while I was connected to him,” Ryder said, calm but so sure. He shrugged. “So we’re going to have to find a way to end my connection to him.”
“We?”
“I want to be in every part of your life, and want you to be in every part of mine, Delaney Reed. Even if that means I’m dragging you into a fight with a god.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good, because I’m out of ideas of how to deal with that problem. Shouldn’t have even tried to do it alone.”
“I’m not agreeing to the god stuff—I mean I am, of course I am—but I’m also saying yes.”
He blinked. Then he held up the box just a little. “To?”
“Yes. To that. To you being my husband. If I can be your wife.”
And oh, the smile he gave me as he stood, sand shushing off his suit.
He pulled the little gold ring from the box. He kissed it, his gaze on me. Then he placed the ring on my finger. His hand was shaking. My hand was shaking.
More than that, everything in me was shaking, tremors strumming through me like sheets of rain against window glass.
I was crying, the tears warm and swift, but my heart beat loud, louder than the ocean, so loud I didn’t know how the whole world couldn’t hear it.
Then Ryder Bailey leaned forward, tipping his face down, just as I lifted up.
“I love you,” he whispered against my lips. I exhaled a small, held breath.
“I love you.” I kissed him, and he kissed me back, soft and promising at first, then his hands cupped my face, and I was sheltered there, in his kiss, in this private world created between us.
My hand slipped down to his butt, and I gave it a squeeze, eliciting a huff of laughter from him, before he doubled down and kissed me harder. Kissed the breath out of me, kissed the tremble away until I was lightness, I was air, I was joy.
The world was cheering. But that was far away, that was some other reality.
Mine, the real world, was the man smiling down at me, his hands still cradling my face.
“How’d I do?” he asked.
“Ten out of ten,” I whispered. “Want to go for eleven?”
