“You made dinner?” I asked, walking out and looking down on him from the landing.
“Come eat.”
I joined him to find the table set with mismatched plates and candles stuck in empty wine bottles. The meal was simple—roasted chicken, potatoes, and a salad made from greens I suspected came from Whitmore’s garden. Nothing fancy. But the effort he’d put into it made my chest ache.
“This looks so good!”
“Don’t sound so surprised.” He pulled out my chair with exaggerated formality. “I have hidden depths.”
“Clearly.”
We ate by candlelight, talking about nothing in particular. The renovation progress. Whether we should get a dog once we were settled or wait until after the baby was born. Easy conversation, the kind that came from knowing someone so well that silence wasn’t uncomfortable.
But something was off.
Kick kept fidgeting. Adjusting his napkin. Reaching for his water glass, then setting it down without drinking. His knee bounced under the table, a nervous habit I’d never seen from him before.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said too quickly.
I raised a brow but didn’t push.
After dinner, we returned to the sitting room, where he lit a fire in the grate.
I settled onto the sofa, and Kick sat beside me. Close, but not touching. His hands clasped between his knees, his gaze fixed on the flames.
“You’re being weird,” I said.
He glanced at me. “Weird?”
“Not bad weird. Just…” I studied his face, the tension around his eyes, the set of his jaw. “Something’s going on. You’ve been jumpy all through dinner.”
He laughed, but it sounded strained. “That obvious?”
“To me? Yes.”
The fire popped and hissed in the silence that followed. Outside, the wind moved through the vineyard, rustling the bare vines.
Then he turned to face me fully, and the look in his eyes made my heart stutter.
“I’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do this,” he said. “The right words. The right moment. I’ve been carrying this around for weeks, waiting for some perfect opportunity that probably doesn’t exist.”
“Carrying what?”
He reached into his pocket and took out a small velvet box.
My breath caught.
“Isabel.” He sounded steadier, the nervousness replaced by something deeper. He shifted off the sofa and got on one knee. “You’re the only person I can imagine my life with. I fell in love with you in that bar two years ago. I just didn’t know it yet.”
He opened the box. Inside, a ring gleamed in the firelight.
“This was my grandmother’s,” he said. “Lucia’s mother.”
Tears blurred my vision. I blinked them back, not wanting to miss a single moment of this.
Kick took the ring from the box and lifted my left hand. “Isabel Van Orr, will you marry me?”
