Page 59 of Always Been His

“All the time,” she answers evenly, looking out into the fading sun. “But rushes aren’t always good things. Sometimes I forget how to relax.”

I dismount, take Porter’s reins and hold my hand out for Juniper’s. Sienna hands them down and swings out of the saddle herself before I can help her, landing clean on both feet in the field grass.

“I get that,” I whisper. “I don’t want you to ever have to rush with me, baby.”

“Nice and slow?” She smirks, leaning in.

“And deep.” I wink, pulling away.

She chuckles to herself, as I tie both horses to the fence post at the edge of the trail and turn south.

“Come here,” I say.

She follows me through the tree break, ten feet of pine, and then the trees open up.

The field runs about two acres from the tree line to a low stone wall at the far edge of the property. In August it goes completely blue and purple. Wild lupine mostly, with some lavender and something else I never bothered to learn the name of, waist-high in places covering the whole thing in a vibrant blue that reminds me of Sienna. I found it two months after Boston, on a run I pushed too far south because I was distracted, thinking about her. I’ve come back here maybe a dozen times since.

Sienna stops at the edge of the field. She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at it, both hands loose at her sides, her braids moving in the breeze.

“Gray,” she says finally, quiet.

“Yeah?”

“This is…”

“I found it two months after Boston,” I say. “Accidentally. It made me think of you.”

She turns to look at me.

“I kept coming back,” I say. “A lot. It was the only place I could let myself think about you. Out here with nobody around. I would stand here and lose track of time, then go back to the house and be fine for another week or so.”

“I wrote about you,” she says. “The whole album. Every song on it. It was the only time I didn’t feel guilty thinking about you.” Her eyes are steady as they search mine, her voice small and honest. “I couldn’t let go of what happened in Boston. I tried. I wrote about it, had therapy, toured forty-five cities, and none of it worked. You were everywhere. You were in every song before I even put you there.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ve heard you on every radio station from here to Portland, and I told myself it was nothing every single time.” I pause. “And I was wrong every single time.”

She lets out a short breath that is almost a laugh and looks back at the field.

I reach into my pants pocket.

This ring has been collecting dust in the back of my sock drawer since the night I drove home from Boston, the one piece of that trip I didn’t throw in a dumpster because I couldn’t make myself do it.

“Sienna,” I say, drawing her attention back to me.

I hold it out in my palm. A pearl set in a thin gold band, blue accents on either side, small and specific. Sapphires. Her favorite stones.

She goes completely still. “Are you about to get on one knee? Because, Grayson, I’m not…”

“Not yet, Songbird,” I smile. “I had this ring made two years ago. I came to Boston to ask you to be mine.”

“This is so old-fashioned of you,” she whispers, her eyes stuck on the ring in my palm.

“Sienna, I want you so bad it hurts. I’ve been miserable every moment you’re not mine.” I keep my voice as even as I can, but I feel the rasp in it climbing, the emotion underneath the words that I’ve never been good at keeping down when she looks at me this way. Like I’m all she has ever wanted. “I want to marry you, but I know how much you love romance, and I want us to have the love story you always wanted. I want to court you the old-fashioned way. Romance you. And then I want to get down on one knee and do it all over again.”

She sucks in a sharp breath. Her eyes gloss over.

“Sienna Reneé Rhodes,” I say. “Will you be my girl?”

The half second between the question leaving my mouth and whatever comes back makes my stomach drop, because there is a version of this where she says no.