Slow.
A perfect picnic kiss under the trees while butterscotch wafts around us and our baby sleeps on the quilt next to me.
This.
This is the life I want.
The family I want.
He’s the missing pieces that put my soul at ease.
He comes with complications, with hard work, with mountains between our lives that we’ll have to climb, but he’s worth it.
This man.
This kind, gentle, sexy, eager, funny, patient, beautiful man.
I don’t know why he’d chooseme.
But I’m done questioning my worth.
With him, I’m all in.
I can’t help myself.
And I don’t want to.
35
Jonas
I should not be nervous.
There’s no reason to be nervous.
I eat nerves for breakfast.
Okay, fine. That’s a lie. I don’t. I usually have—actually, it doesn’t matter, and thinking about my normal nutritionist-prepared breakfast that I’ve been skipping since I arrived in Snaggletooth Creek won’t abate my nerves.
Not over this.
Not when it’s so important.
And what isit?
A date.
An actual, honest date with Emma.
Before Bash woke up at our picnic, I had it planned in my head. Between the time we got signal back at the trailhead and the time we returned to Emma’s house, Begonia and one of Hayes’s security team had planned most of it for me.
Not that I couldn’t plan it myself.
It’s more that I was on a time crunch and knew Begonia could charm people faster and with fewer eyebrows raised.
“Why do I feel like I’m sixteen again?” Emma whispers to me in the back of the SUV as Robert, the other half of Hayes’s security detail who’s been with us all day, steers us around the lake beneath downtown.
I link my fingers through hers. “It’s going around.”
