“Thank you, sir,” Whit replied as they shook hands, as though they’d just struck a deal...about our marriage...without any input from me.
Okay. Forget the tears. Now I was irritated with both of them.
“Ahem.” I waited until they both looked at me to continue. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Don’t torture the poor man,” my dad muttered. “Of course, you want to marry Whit. You’re head over heels in love with him.”
I narrowed my eyes at my dad. “Don’t you think that’s something I should’ve been the one to tell him?”
My dad heaved a deep sigh and shook his head. “It’s not my fault you’ve been slacking.”
“Are you sure you want to spend the rest of your life with me?” I jerked my thumb toward my dad. “Because he’s never going to stop sticking his nose in our business.”
“Seems like a fair trade to me.” Whit chuckled softly and pulled me close. “My mom will never stop trying to teach you how to cook all my favorite dishes, and she’ll pester us for grandbabies until we give her one. And that’ll probably only buy us a few months until she starts asking when we’re going to have another.”
My hand dropped to my stomach, and I mumbled, “She might not have long to wait.”
I hadn’t spoken softly enough because my dad heard what I said and growled, “Don’t make me get one of my shotguns.”
Whit held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I’m more than willing to marry her, pregnant or not.”
“The gun wouldn’t be for you.” My dad pointed at me. “It’d be for her since she hasn’t accepted your proposal yet.”
“How could I accept?” I huffed, stomping my foot on the ground. “He hasn’t even asked me yet.”
“Good point, baby.” Whit took my hands in his and dropped down on one knee.
“Hold up a second.” After all his finagling, I couldn’t believe my dad interrupted right when Whit was going to ask me to marry him. “It isn’t a true proposal unless you’ve got a ring.”
“I’ve already looked online.” I gasped, thrilled to learn that he’d already been thinking about marriage before my dad brought it up. “But I didn’t want to buy one off the internet. It seemed too impersonal for something she’s going to wear for the rest of our lives.”
My dad reached into his pocket and pulled out a diamond solitaire. “I was hoping you’d use this. It was her mother’s.”
“Oh, my gosh,” I whispered, tears streaming down my cheeks. I hadn’t seen my mom’s engagement ring in fifteenyears. When we’d buried her, she’d only had her wedding band on her finger. My dad must have been holding on to it all this time, waiting for me to find the man I was meant to be with, like he had with my mom.
“Thank you, sir.” Whit’s gaze stayed glued on my face as he reached out to take the ring from my dad. He didn’t break eye contact with me until he slipped the diamond solitaire onto the tip of my finger, his lips curving into a satisfied smile as he got a look at the three-carat stone.
“My dad didn’t mess around when he bought that.” My hand trembled in his grasp. “My mom said he picked the biggest one he could afford so that nobody would miss that she belonged to him.”
“I like how your dad thinks.”
I laughed softly. “Yeah, I figured you would.”
His broad chest expanded as he took a deep breath, and I knew our perfect moment had finally arrived. “Victoria Ashe. I love you so damn much, I can’t picture a future without you in it. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
“Yes,” I cried with a frantic nod. “I love you so much, too. And I can’t wait to marry you.”
It wasn’t until a week later that I discovered my fiancé had taken what I’d said literally...when he surprised me with my own wedding in the front yard of the cabin where we fell in love.
EPILOGUE
WHIT
Iknew my wife was tougher than she looked, but she blew me away with how she handled her labor and delivery with our first child. Twenty-three hours of pain and three hours of pushing, and not once did she curse at me or threaten to cut my balls off. “You’re one hell of a woman, Mrs. Victoria Baker.”
There were dark smudges under her eyes, but she had never looked more beautiful than when she tore her gaze from our baby girl to smile at me. “I did okay, huh?”
“You did fucking amazing.” I brushed a kiss against her lips and bent my head lower to do the same against Nora’s cheek.
