“Good? It looks like a fairy tale.”
Backyard weddings, especially in the backyard of the bride and groom, weren’t for the faint of heart. There was no escaping something to be done, something to be set up, last minute details to be taken care of. But between my friends, my sister-in-law, and my mother, who’d taken up wedding planning with the precision of a five-star general, there was very little for me to worry about.
Tristan’s hand coasted around my waist in a slow track, and my skin began to hum in response. Maybe I should’ve been sleeping, maybe he should’ve been too, but it was impossible for him to touch me without this happening. Without the slow, inevitable build, the buzz in my blood that made me want to purr happily.
But his hand stopped over my stomach and stayed there. Fingers spread wide over my skin, only slightly rounded. I laid mine over the top of his and tangled our fingers together.
“Feel anything yet?” he asked in a hushed whisper, like he was afraid to wake eleven-week-old baby Whitfield.
I smiled. He asked me this at least three times a day, from the moment we saw the positive pregnancy test.
“Not yet.”
“I still think it’s a boy.”
My smile grew and I shifted to face him. This was the other thing he said at least three times a day. “That’s because having a girl terrifies you.”
He pressed his palm even further into my skin, like he could pick up sound waves from the baby, feel it’s tiny heartbeat, learn something new that all our books, all the websites we’d read couldn’t tell him. “Of course, it terrifies me,” he said grumpily. “She’ll look like you, and then I’ll have another Anna in the world to yank my heart out of my chest. How could I ever let her out of my sight?”
I laughed, only stopping when he kissed me again. I wound my arms around his neck and hitched my thigh up around his waist to deepen it. Tomorrow, he’d be my husband.
My husband.
Into his thick, long hair, which was unbound, I dug my fingers and held onto the curve of his head. Ever since we found out I was pregnant, Tristan had treated me so gently, so carefully, and tonight, that wasn’t what I wanted. I knew tomorrow night, when we crawled back in bed as Mr. and Mrs. Whitfield, I’d be exhausted to my core from dancing and laughing and being with all the people who loved us so much, who were so happy for us, but tonight, we had everything laid out before us like the sun was just starting to rise.
Tristan’s breathing picked up as he rocked his hips into mine, and a groan came from deep within his broad chest when I sucked his tongue into my mouth.
“I don’t want you to hold back tonight,” I whispered against his lips. “Make love to me, Tristan, and tomorrow when I walk down that aisle to you, you’ll know that I can still feel where you were on my body.”
“God, Anna,” he said gruffly, rolling us so he was fully stretched out on top of me. He propped his full weight on his forearms, which caged around my head. So large that he blotted out the light of the moon, Tristan stared down at me like he couldn’t believe that I was there. Like he couldn’t believe that I was his, or that he was mine.
I wiggled my hips under him and he grinned widely when he got the hint.
Clothes. Off. Now.
He kneeled between my split legs and used his big hands to ease my sleep shorts down my legs, followed by the sensible cotton underwear. Tomorrow night would be for lace and silk, tonight was still the reality before the rest of our lives began.
Careful of my sensitive breasts, already fuller than they’d ever been, he dipped his head and licked a wide circle around my flesh.
“You taste so good,” he whispered.
I was already aching, shaking, trembling with need, and he’d barely touched me. Barely done anything.
Pregnancy was the best thing ever.
Tristan’s hand wound through my hair and tangled through the strands. “Will this be down for me tomorrow?” he asked gruffly. “I love seeing it down your back. Love seeing it and knowing that I get to be the one to mess it up later.”
“Yes,” I moaned, biting the side of his neck where I could feel the thrum of his pulse.
Tristan pushed off his boxer briefs and slid back in place on top of me, and my hands ran greedily over the ribbons of muscle under his hot skin as he moved. “Will you be my wife tomorrow?”
“Yes. Yes.”
He lined up and paused there, staring into my eyes as I shifted restlessly. “Forever. This is forever, Anna.”
Then he thrust, hard.
I cried out and held on.
It felt so good. He was so deep. He was everywhere. How I’d ever lived without him in my life felt impossible to conceive, unreasonable now that I knew what it was like.
To be loved so fully.
To be cherished beyond reason.
To be respected for every tiny thing that made up who I was.
“Tristan,” I moaned as he moved faster, held my tighter, hands dug into my skin.
“You are everything,” he rasped. “Everything.”
Sweat gathered at my temples, and along his spine under my fingers as he pressed his forehead tight to mine.
“I love you,” I said against his lips, and he captured the words with his mouth on mine, moving with a ferocity that took my breath away. The kiss was sloppy and endless, until I cried out his name, and he yelled mine into the darkness of our room.
I wrapped my arms tight around him as he tried to catch his breath, his head buried against my neck.
“You don’t have to leave tonight,” I told him in between pants.
Tristan lifted his head. “It’s tradition. I can’t see the bride the day of the wedding.” He glanced at the clock. “Which means I need to be out of here in about fifteen minutes.”
I pouted, which made him laugh under his breath.
“But,” I pleaded, nuzzling my nose against his, “we can break a little tradition like this one. No one will know.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud, because I knew it bugged him when I did, but this wasn’t my first wedding. I’d done the big ball gown with the perfect bouquet of roses, walked down the aisle to a man I knew I shouldn’t have married. Following an arbitrary tradition seemed … well … arbitrary at this point.
To him, and to me, the fact that this was my second marriage, and my second wedding, wasn’t a point we dwelled on at all during the planning. A casual, backyard wedding would have suited us just fine even if it was my first. Getting married under the tree where he asked me to marry him was exactly what I would have chosen, no matter how many times I’d done this, no matter if I’d never done it before.
Tristan exhaled heavily and rolled to his side so he could see my face. His hand swept away the mess of hair covering my face. There was such tenderness in the gesture that I felt a lump grow larger and larger in my throat.
“I’ll know,” he said after a while. His voice was so low and steady, and I knew there was no budging him. It was one of the things I loved most about Tristan. It was why he loved me for so long, even though there’d been very little hope. Because he just knew. He knew that I was it for him, even if it took six years for me to see the same thing. Be able to do anything about it. Be free to be with him. “And when you walk down that aisle toward me, my Anna, I’ll see you in that beautiful dress that I’ve never seen and feel so damn lucky that I’m the man you’re walking toward. There have been a thousand moments that I’ve waited for with you, and we’ve had almost all of them by now. But this one,” his hand slid over the tiny, undetectable bump under my skin, “and watching you hold our child for the first time, are the next on my list that I’m most looking forward to. I want to give that moment the respect it deserves.”
Well, damn it.
I sniffled, and he wiped away the single tear that fell in an awkward trail down the edge of my nose.
“Okay,” I said in a watery voice.
“Okay.”
“Are you leaving now?”