“Already?” she asked as she smiled at me.
“Not quite,” I told her, looking up into her eyes. “But I will be soon.” I flicked my tongue against her clit and watched as her head fell on to the pillow. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to let you sleep before you’ve at least come twice.”
I made good on my promise. Once with my tongue and once as we made slow, passionate love before falling asleep in each other’s arms.
* * *
The sunlight shining into the room had woken me, and when I rolled over to look at the angelic woman sleeping peacefully next to me I didn’t mind one bit. Judging by the sun, it had to be before six. The sun was just starting to rise and it was still a little hazy out.
As much as I wanted to watch her sleep, I had something that I had to show her. The sunrise would only make it that much more memorable for her. All I wanted to do was fill her head with amazing memories and I had a feeling this one was going to be huge. Or at least I hoped it was going to be.
It was something I’d been thinking about for a while… something I should have done a long time ago. I started kissing the side of her neck until she began to stir.
“Mmmm...” She turned on her side to face me. “Good morning,” she purred.
“Good morning, gorgeous.” I kissed the tip of her nose and quickly jumped out of bed.
“Where are you going?” She sighed. “It’s barely light out.”
“I know.” I tossed her one of my t-shirts and a pair of sweats that I knew she would have to roll to keep on her waist. “Get dressed. I have something to show you.” I pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and, begrudgingly, she followed me.
“We better be going to get breakfast,” she told me as I took her hand and led her downstairs and out the back door of the cabin.
“We can,” I pulled her hand to my lips, “but first I need you to come somewhere with me.”
“Fine,” she said dramatically, flashing a grin that said she was game for my little expedition. We walked down the back edge of the property, passed the track and to the top of one of the few hills. Her hand in mine and a thousand questions rolling off her tongue. The mystery was eating her from the inside out, which only made me smile that much more as I kept quiet. From the top, we could see out over the pond and if you squinted, we could see the construction of my parents’ house in the distance.
“All right,” I said, moving to stand in front of her. “Close your eyes.”
“Just tell me what we’re doing, Reid.”
“Just do it.” I laughed at her early morning crankiness. “I promise it will be worth it.”
Skeptically, I closed one eye waiting for him to just get on with it. What could he possibly have to show me that required an early morning hike?
“Both of them,” he insisted, placing his hands on my shoulders. When I did, I felt his full lips against mine. If he was looking to take our love making outside, there was a pretty good chance I’d comply if he kept kissing me the way he was. When he stopped, I knew the new fantasy in my head would have to wait. “Okay,” he said, tugging my shoulders a little so I would follow his direction. “A little more. Two more steps. Okay, stop.” I heard him sigh and I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or excited or a little bit of both.
“What are you doing?” I said, when I didn’t hear him say anything for what seemed like forever.
“I’m thinking, woman,” he said with a chuckle. “Give a guy a second to get his thoughts right.”
I was confused and excited, and a tiny part of me wondered if I was going to open my eyes and find him on one knee. If he’d planned on proposing first thing in the morning and I hadn’t even put on makeup I was going to seriously question his sanity. Not that I would even consider saying no. If he was crazy, I was crazy.
“Nora,” he said, his tone a bit more serious. I started to open my eyes. “Not yet. Just little bit longer.” He cleared his throat and the nervous anticipation I felt building in my chest had traveled to my throat. I tried to swallow it down as he continued. I trusted him and whatever harebrained scheme he was trying to pull off. “Nora. You know I love you?”
“Yes.”
“You know that I don’t ever want to be away from you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and I wanted to run something by you.”
“Okay...”
“I wanted to know what you would think about the two of us building a life together.”
“You know I want that.”
“I do, but what I mean is seriously taking a step that would make Halstead our home.”
“I think I understand.” I felt my head tilt as I tried to figure out what he meant. “But...”
“Open your eyes,” he said, as he walked around behind me. His arms circled my waist and he rested his head on my shoulder. “I mean, I literally want to build a home with you. Right here.”
Having my eyes closed so long, it took a second for them to adjust. As soon as they did, I was able to take in the scenery. The wide, grassy hillside overlooking the back half of the one hundred acres he’d purchased for his parents.
“Right where we are standing we could build a house,” he told me. He’d obviously thought a lot about this, and I could see exactly why he’d picked this location. His arms slipped from around me and he walked a few feet to my right. “Our kitchen. Where you cook fantastic meals, and I probably just make a mess.” He smiled, moving to the left. “A living room, where our friends and family come to hang out and where you force me to watch those terrible movies.” He paused, before grabbing my hand with his. “And, maybe one day it will be where we play with our kids and they force us to watch terrible cartoon dinosaurs and singing princesses.”
My anxiety quickly turned to admiration and hope and every other feeling that you get when you actually start to envision the future with the person you love. Tiny versions of Reid and me running around the very property where we’d grown up was something that I used to think about, especially when I was pregnant, but after the miscarriage and when he left I thought the possibility was gone. But now, seeing him here and hearing all of the big plans he had for us, my heart melted. Reid was the reason I could never see a future with anyone else. He was my future.
“And over here,” he said, pulling me to the left. “Our bedroom. Where we go to sleep and wake up with each other as much as possible, and where a whole lot of other fun stuff happens,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, which earned a chuckle from me. He tugged me closer to him and kissed me softly. “I know my job is less than ideal for building a life together, but if we actually have a home somewhere to call ours between the traveling and training, maybe it won’t be so bad.”
“I love it,” I said, practically jumping up to kiss him again. He locked his arms around me and held my body to his as I covered his lips and the rest of his face with peppered kisses. “I love you.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes! I want to build a life with you, and the fact that you want to have at least part of it here means the world to me.”
“I’d never want to take you away from your family,” he confessed. “Besides, my parents are going to be here too, and we might need some help with all the kids, you know?”
“We might,” I laughed. Yesterday, he’d hypothetically proposed a marriage, today, we were having a brood of hypothetical children. It was terrifyingly fantastic and I loved that he wanted to do it all with me.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you went through back then,” he told me, his eyes dropping to my stomach for a brief moment. “I think you’re right about the timing not being right and how everything worked out the way it did for a reason. But now, it’s different. We can handle it. We can make this work and we can be parents if we want to be. We could... we can have whatever we want out of life.” His admission had left me speechless. I know I might have had concerns that he was a guy with Peter Pan Syndrome, a big kid who just liked to ride his motorcycle, but I could tell he was ready to grow up. He was ready for a life with me. I was ready for a life with him.