“Too late! I made it. Pay up, Gorgeous.”
Vi rolled over slowly. In the dim pre-dawn of her brother’s farm house, where they’d gone to celebrate New Year’s Eve, Chase’s big body was propped over hers, his hand shaking her shoulder. He looked as pushy and unstoppable and eager as a kid at Christmas. Which she should know, having been dragged out of bed at this hour only a week before by his nieces and nephews when they spent Christmas in Texas.
Even though she was in that swimmy, queasy space between a night full of dancing and good wine and the hangover that was going to set in soon, she still had to smile.
Chase had fun at New Year’s. He danced all night. He carried the kids on his shoulders while he danced and let them put funny hats on him and crouched in a corner coaxing smiles out of a tearful three-year-old who, overstimulated but determined to make it until midnight, was having a harder and harder time handling it when her older cousins ran faster than she did.
He had fun at Christmas, too. He washed dishes and decorated trees and helped cut out cookies—although he mostly ate the dough—and split wood, making sure Vi came to watch him flex while he did it, and kept a fire going. Christmas morning, he got down and built train tracks and robots and even, calmly and with a secret glint of humor in his eyes, played with dolls in princess outfits when his littlest niece begged him, although he tended to have the princesses get in catastrophic situations and then explode into action with flips and derring-do as they surmounted it. His niece loved it.
From what he said, missing Christmas with his family was one of his hardest times downrange, and he was thrilled when, like this year, his tour ended in time for him to enjoy it.
“Pay up what?” she demanded, just to see what he said.
“Your entire life, of course,” he said grandly. “Now mine. As promised.” He held out a small box. “Plus, Grandma says can we quit messing around and pick a date. She’s decided she wants to complete a triathlon, and she’s worried we’ll mess up her training schedule.”
Vi had to pause at that. “Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Won’t get on a plane but is considering swimming four kilometers in open ocean? At the age of eighty-six?”
“You met her, right?”
“Yeah, and I think you were exaggerating about the ailing part. If she and my grandmother ever meet, they are going to hit it off so well.”
“Maybe they can get married.” Chase paused as he heard what he’d said, and a grin crossed his face. “Love to see the look on my parents’ faces if that happened. Vi!” He nudged the ring box against her hand.
Scarred but healed, that hand.
Resilient. Like them.
“Damn, I love you,” she sighed.
A huge smile split his face. He opened the ring box.
And she was a little afraid. Because he hadn’t consulted her about the ring choice—she hadn’t even known he had bought one already—and when a man chose the engagement ring on his own, it seemed as if he made a statement. Of who he thought the woman he was marrying was, and of who he wanted her to be.
One of those moments when the difference between who a man wanted to have hot sex with and who he wanted to have in his life as his partner and mother of his children really shone through.
What if the ring was fragile and sweet and fancy? What if it had a huge, protruding diamond, to show him off—what a good, generous guy he was who could take care of his little woman—rather than a ring that suited her work and how much she must use her hands?
Chase had such a hopeful look on his face, excited, pushy…exactly like his nieces and nephews on Christmas morning.
Nieces and nephews who had given Chase quite a few handmade presents he didn’t quite know what to do with, but which he had exclaimed over enthusiastically anyway, as if they were the greatest treasures he had ever received. He had a bracelet made out of pink yarn and bits of crayon-colored paper stashed carefully in a small treasure box right now, a bracelet he’d worn every day of the rest of the visit and right onto the plane back to France so his niece could see it on his wrist.
She looked down at the ring.
A gorgeous Damascus steel, with the classic ripple pattern, and a tension set diamond held in the wide band like a star caught in strength. Exquisitely simple, the diamond winking in that smooth band.
Her breath caught, and she looked up at him quickly, her eyes stinging.
“I wanted it to be something that showed off your hand,” he said cautiously, checking her face, just like his niece had his about that yarn bracelet, to make sure she liked it. “Rather than the other way around.”
Her scarred, tough hand. The stinging grew worse.
“I know you’ll still have to take it off a lot when you’re working, because of hygiene and all that, but I wanted it to be at least possible to work in it. Like it…honored what you do, wasn’t the opposite of it.”