Her face burned and she clenched her eyes shut, wishing the ground would swallow her whole. They’d barely decided to stay together and she was already talking about kids? She cringed inside, wishing he’d say something…or, just be quiet. Yeah, that would be better. Maybe they could forget she’d said anything.
His voice was low and happy when he broke the silence between them. “I’d want our children to know where their mother grew up…to know their aunts and uncles, their grandfather and cousins. The swing on the porch, that baby Holstein. I’d want them to know all of it.” As Preston spoke, he stepped behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, and her whole body relaxed against him. His voice was soft in her ear, barely an audible rumble, but thick with emotion. “I wasn’t even sure if you wanted kids.”
“Of course I do.” She turned around in his arms, leaning her back against the fence, looking up at his face. “I want yours.”
His lips tilted up and his eyes—which looked back at her with such intense and deep love—softened as they searched hers. “You do?”
“Yes.” She shrugged, smiling back at him, wondering why he was so surprised.
“But…” His smile faded, though his grip around her waist tightened. “How will that work? Would we raise our kids in L.A.? With you off on movie shoots? Far from your family and mine? Spending holidays without my brothers or your sisters? That’s just not how I imagined having a family, Elise.”
She stiffened. “I never said that’s how I envisioned it, either.”
“Well then…how?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t… I mean, we’d have to talk about it. Figure it out.”
“When exactly?” he asked, dropping his arms and taking a step back from her. “When will we figure it out?”
She had a fleeting feeling of panic, but when she examined it, she realized it wasn’t because she felt pressured by Preston, but because she feared hurting him or losing him. She stepped toward him, leaning into their discussion, and said, “When we get home.”
“Home? And where exactly is that? Philly? New York? L.A.? Hell, we don’t even know where we’re going to live…or if we’re even going to live together.”
Refusing to let herself be drawn into an argument when they hadn’t even had a chance to discuss things logically, she placed her hand on his arm, curling her fingers gently around his sun-warmed skin. “When we get back to Philly, we’ll discuss it. All of it.”
He searched her face, then sighed loudly, a huffing noise of frustration and angst, and it flipped her heart to know that she was causing him any more pain.
“Preston...”
“What?” he snapped, his troubled green eyes vulnerable as they held hers.
“I am committed to this. To you. I promise you that we’ll figure it out.”
“How?” he asked again, his eyes increasingly bleak despite her reassurances.
And suddenly she had an idea. A good idea. An idea that was aborted long ago and saved for today.
“We’ll have a Marriage Summit,” she said, grinning up at him.
Her words surprised him; she could tell because he couldn’t keep his lips from twitching, and his free hand reached up to cover her fingers resting on his arm.
“A Marriage Summit?”
“Mm-hm,” she said. “When we get back to Philly, we’ll sit down for hours and talk about all of it: kids, where we want to live, our careers, our families, what’s important, what we can bend on, what we can’t. We’ll stay up all night until the morning…until we know how we want this marriage to look. And then we’ll make it happen.”
“We will?”
“Mm-hm,” she said, pressing against him, relaxing as his arms circled around her. “We’re goal-oriented people. We’re good at making plans and doing whatever we need to do to make our dreams come true. You’re my dream.”
“And you’re mine,” he murmured, his voice full of warmth and wonder. “You’re very certain we’ll make it work.”
“There’s love here,” she reminded him, tilting her head back as he lowered his lips to hers.
Chapter 20
Make Room