“I was just thinking about how I spend less time working these days,” I say.
She slows our pace. “Is that bad? Do you need to work more?”
“Probably.” I chuckle. “No, it’s fine. Everything gets done, and Bobby brought on his nephew to help pick up the slack. He needs the money, so it’s a win all around.” I take a breath and decide to go for it. “I was imagining what life will be like a few years down the road.”
We walk through the parking lot, hand in hand, and I notice Mira nibbling her bottom lip, which in this case, doesn’t always bode well.
“What are you saying?” she asks.
“Nothing, really. Just thinking that it would be nice someday to have a son or daughter who wanted to love the ranch as much as I do.”
She pulls a cart from the corral. A blast of chilly air hits us as we enter Miller’s Market and head to the produce first.
“Hey, Hartley. Mira,” Grange Sheffler says. He graduated a year before us and wound up taking over his dad’s mechanic shop in town. “I don’t care how many times I see you two together, it makes me laugh. How many years did the two of you waste?”
“Too fucking many,” I say, smiling at him.
He chuckles. “Good seeing you both.”
“You, too, Grange,” Mira says as we move on.
She chooses a bin of strawberries from the strawberry farm outside of town and places it in the cart. She nibbles her lip again, her mind elsewhere. I grab a package of dates and toss them beside the strawberries.
“Yeah,” she says, answering a question that I didn’t ask.
“Yeah, what?”
“Not now. Maybe not even this year.” A grin teases the corner of her lips. “But I think maybe I’d like to have a baby.”
I stop in my tracks, my heart short-circuiting.
She, however, doesn’t miss a step. “Maybe two, because I really loved having a sister. Especially when things weren’t so great, you know?”
My mind’s so frazzled. The only thing working is my dick.
“Three is too many, I think,” she says as if we’re discussing the weather. She adds a bag of almonds to the cart. “And I feel like with three that you have a middle child, and you’d have to play zone defense with them. Like what if one of them wanted to ride horses, and the others did ballet and piano? We can’t be three places at once.”
I reach out and grab her elbow, pulling her to a stop. She turns to me with the most beautiful expression in her eyes. They’re clear, a little hesitant, maybe, but the shield she used to carry when things became personal, or intimate in any way but sexually, is gone.
Thank you, God.
She searches my face. And the longer she looks, the softer her shoulders become. She finally relents and gives me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen from her—one that I’ll file away as a core memory.
This is my girl,my wife, relaxed. Happy.
“I didn’t say that to pressure you into anything,” I say quietly. “I was just being honest about what I was thinking.”
“And that’s all I want from you. Honesty.” She drops her gaze to my bulging cock. “Well, and that.”
I pull her into me and kiss her forehead, wishing we were home so I could pull her onto my lap. I’ve always loved this woman, but the feelings that I have for her now almost feel too big to be encapsulated into one four-letter word.
She’s my world. My life. My future.
And if I’m reading her right, hopefully the mother of my children someday.
And for the first time in our lives, I don’t worry that she’ll take off and leave me behind. We’re truly together, in every way.
She loves me.
