Page 56 of Match Made In Growl

She turned from the chamber wall and looked at him, leaning against the oak tree at the basin's edge with his arms crossed and the afternoon light turning his amber eyes to honey. He looked like himself again but different. The cocky grin was there but it sat on a face that had earned it, backed by something steadier than charm.

"Are you asking me to move in with you?" she said.

"I'm suggesting that a woman who's going to spend a year excavating a site a quarter mile from my cabin might find the commute convenient."

"Convenient."

"Practical, even."

She walked across the basin to where he stood. His heartbeat was steady in her blood, her presence warm in his. She stopped close enough that the toes of her boots touched his and looked up at him with the directness that had been hers long before any bond had sharpened it.

"Ask me properly, Holt."

His grin softened into something real. "Stay with me, Steph."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I said okay. Don't make it weird."

He kissed her in the basin with the chamber open behind them and the blue light humming in the stone and the afternoon sun warm on their shoulders. She could feel his joy, uncomplicated and enormous, and her own rose to meet it.

The dig wasn't finished. The translations would take months. The political fallout would take longer. The pride would need time to reconcile what Rydan had done with what they'd believed, and the restored families would need advocates and allies and a community willing to do the slow, uncomfortable work of accountability.

But the site was protected, the truth was in the light. And the woman who'd come to Hollow Oak to dig up the past had found something she hadn't been looking for.

Her work was just beginning.

32

CRISS

Five days of living with Stephanie Ward taught Criss the following: she used all the hot water every morning without apology, she organized her field notes on the kitchen table in a system that looked like chaos and was apparently alphabetical by geological period, she sang off-key in the shower when she thought he couldn't hear, and she slept with one leg thrown over his hip like she was claiming territory.

He'd never been happier in his life, and it made him want to do something stupid.

He found Kieran behind the main house splitting wood on a Tuesday morning while Steph was at the site. Freya had taken Sage to the apothecary, so they were alone, which was good because Criss didn't trust himself to have this conversation with an audience.

He picked up the second axe and started splitting alongside his cousin without saying anything. They worked in tandem for a while, the crack of wood and the thud of split logs filling the silence. It was Kieran's kind of communication: physical, parallel, no eye contact required.

"I'm going to ask Steph to marry me," Criss said, and drove the axe through a log that didn't deserve the force he put behind it. Both halves flew off the stump and into the grass.

Kieran's axe paused mid-swing. He lowered it slowly, rested the head on the ground, and looked at Criss with an expression that took a moment to decode because Kieran's face wasn't built for what it was doing.

He was smiling.

Not the wry, you're-an-idiot smile that Criss usually earned. Something warmer than that, and brief, there and gone before it could be examined. He picked his axe back up.

"When?" Kieran asked.

"Tonight. Maybe. I haven't figured out the details."

"You don't need details. You need a ring and the guts to ask."

"I have guts."

"You're splitting my firewood at seven in the morning because you're too nervous to sit still. That's not guts. That's anxiety." Kieran swung, split, stacked. "What are you worried about?"