Lena laughed—genuine and bright and trembling with emotion—and threw her arms around his neck. His heart started beating again.
“Yes,” she whispered against his shoulder. “Yes, to everything.”
Relief flooded through him, so intense it nearly buckled his knees. He wrapped his arms around her waist, lifting her off thesand and spinning her around, and she clung to him like he was the only stable thing in a shifting world.
When he set her down, her cheeks were damp, her smile incandescent.
“Turn around,” he murmured.
She swept her hair aside and he fastened the necklace with careful precision. The platinum shell landed in the hollow of her throat, gleaming against her sun-kissed skin.
She touched it with trembling fingers and turned back to face him. “It’s stronger now.”
“So are you.”
“It’s perfect.”
“You’re perfect.”
“Liar.” She was grinning at him now, luminous and impossibly lovely. “I’m a mess.”
“You’re my mess. I love you so damn much.”
She kissed him then—slow and deep and tasting of coffee and promise. He cupped her face in his hands, memorizing the feel of her lips against his, the soft sound she made when he tugged her hair, the way she melted into him like she’d been custom made for him.
When they broke apart, breathless, he rested his forehead against hers.
“I’m terrified,” she admitted.
“Me too.”
“What if I wake up one day and realize I’m not good enough for this? For you?”
“Then I’ll spend every day after that reminding you that you are.”
She exhaled shakily, and her shoulders relaxed.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
They stood like that for a long moment, wrapped in each other and the sound of the sea, the pendant glinting between them like a beacon.
David had centered his life on certainty—on data and patterns and predictable outcomes. But this? This wild, unpredictable, irrational love for Lena Harris?
It was the best code he’d ever written. He wasn’t about to debug it.
“Come on,” he pressed a kiss to her temple. “Let’s go home.”
“Home,” she repeated, as if testing the word. She smiled—that brilliant, unguarded smile that had the power to undo him completely. “I like the sound of that.”
She took his hand, and they walked back up the beach together, leaving footprints in the sand that the tide would erase.
The marks they’d made on each other?
Those were permanent.
And David didn’t want it any other way.
Chapter 51
