Page 18 of Fall Into Love

She has no idea, and it would all go a hell of a lot smoother if she’d take her mouth off my cock for thirty seconds so I could think of what I rehearsed to tell her about where we’re going for dinner tonight.

“Emma,” I groan, my head dropping back against the headboard.

She hums around me, peering up the length of my body with those hazel eyes like she knows exactly what she’s doing to me. She does. Three months, and she’s learned every button I’ve got and delights in pressing all of them at once.

“You’re jumpy this morning,” she says, her hand still working me slick and steady. “All wound up. Something on your mind, Mr. Mayor?”

Only the ring in my sock drawer and spending the rest of my life with you.

“Thinking about you, baby. Always,” I manage.

She smiles sweetly and takes me deep again.

I decide the rest of my life can wait fifteen minutes…

I let her wreck me right up to the edge, and once I’ve had enough of being the one taken apart, I hook my hands under her arms and haul her up my body. She yelps and laughs as I drag her into my lap, straddling me, her sleep shirt up around her waist.

“I wasn’t done,” she breathes, but she’s already rolling her hips against me.

I drag her mouth down to mine and line myself up. She sinks onto me with a gasp that turns into my name, and fuck, three months, and it still knocks the wind out of me every single time. She rides me slow and deep, her hands braced on my chest, her hair a mess and her cheeks flushed. I hold her hips and meet every roll of them. I tell her how good she is, how perfect, how she’s the best thing that ever walked into my life.

She comes apart first, clenching around me with my name on her lips, and I follow her right over, holding her against my chest while we both come down, her heartbeat steady against mine.

“Okay,” she mumbles into my neck. “What has gotten into you today?”

Everything. You. Forever. “Just happy,” I say, and it’s not even a lie. I kiss her temple. “Get dressed, gorgeous. I want to show you something.”

I close her eyes for the last ten feet across the garage.

“Caleb, if this is another ‘really big’ spider, I swear—”

“It’s not a spider.” I chuckle, positioning her in front of the workbench, my hands over her eyes, my heart going like a two-stroke. Three years I’ve been out here. Three years of early morning starts and blood on my knuckles, manufacturing parts that either don’t exist anymore or are impossible to find. Working out here alone in the quiet. Somewhere in the last three months, it stopped being an escape and started being a thing I was finishing. For a reason. “Okay. Open.”

I drop my hands. Emma goes completely still.

Because sitting there under the work lights, where a rusted-out shell used to sit on jack stands, is a fully restored 1969 Chevrolet Camaro. Gleaming. Reborn. Every panel straight, every inch of chrome mirror-bright—and the paint I agonized over for a week, a deep, warm gold that catches the light like the sign over her shop.

Emma walks toward it slowly. “Caleb, she’s beautiful.”

“She’s yours.” It comes out before I’d planned it. I clear my throat. “Ours. And I didn’t build her to sit in a garage.” I grab the keys off the hook and toss them. She catches them against her chest, stunned. “Come on. It’s date night, darlin’.”

We take the coastal side roads with the heater blasting and the winter sun dropping toward the water. Emma’s got her feet up on the dash, laughing at nothing, and I have to keep reminding myself to watch the road instead of her.

The ring’s in my jacket pocket. I’ve checked it four times. It’s still there every time, which you’d think would be reassuring, but it only sets my pulse on fire for what’s to come.

I pull off at the overlook above The Tides, where the peninsula falls away into the ocean, and the whole sky’s gone pink and gold over the water. A few other folks are scattered along the railing—a couple with a thermos, a guy walking his dog, some resort guests bundled up for the sunset.

“It’s freezing,” Emma says happily, tucking herself under my arm as we walk to the railing.

“Emma.”

She turns, and I watch her take in my face. Her breath catches before I’ve even moved.

“You know I’m not the best with words when it comes to you,” I say. “I’ve ruined a few perfect moments trying to find the right ones, so I’m just going to say it plain, and you can decide what to do with me after.” My hands shake, and not from the cold. “Three months ago, I was the loneliest man in Hemlock Point, and then you looked at me, and you kept looking, even when I gave you every reason not to. I built that car alone in the dark for three years because it was easier than going to bed alone.”

I drop down on one knee, and I hear somebody down the railing gasp as Emma’s hand flies to her mouth. I pull out the little velvet box and open it.

“I promised you I was going to keep showing up. Every day. For the rest of my life, I want to keep that promise to you. If you’ll have me, Emma Rayne Jones, will you marry me?”

She’s crying and nodding before I finish, dropping down onto her knees with me and taking my face in her cold hands. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, you ridiculous man, obviously yes.”

I get the ring on her finger with shaking hands, and then she’s kissing me. The little crowd along the railing breaks into applause and whistles, but I don’t care about a single bit of it except her.

“I love you,” she says against my mouth. “So much.”

I haul her to her feet and kiss her again, the sun going down over the water. “I love you, too, darlin’, with everything I have.”

My fiancée smiles as I open the passenger door of the car for her. My whole future climbs in and keeps her hand in mine the whole way as I drive us back toward town. The last of the light goes down over Hemlock Point as the girl of my dreams rides shotgun in the best thing I ever built.

Second best, now.

The End.