My chest was rising and falling rapidly as my heart slammed into my ribcage.
Ryder stroked his thumbs over my cheeks, and with his alluring eyes he looked right through me and found my soul. “I. Love. You. Branna.”
I forced down the lump of emotion that sat in my throat and whispered, “I love you, too, Ryder. So much it hurts.”
He wasted no time in claiming my mouth with his, kissing me with a hunger I hadn’t known from him in a long time, and unlike before, I didn’t stop him. I kissed him back, and when he pulled away, I was delighted to find I didn’t want him to.
“You’re the light of my life,” Ryder said, breathing heavily against my lips. “Without you everything was dark, and unappealing. I didn’t want to live without you.”
His honesty made me cry.
“Look at me,” he demanded.
I opened my eyes and stared into his.
“I. Love. You.” He said clearly. “I never want to be without you. Never.”
I clung to him
“Marry me,” Ryder said with his next breath. “I know we’re going to take this slow, but say you will marry me. I will still move at a speed you are comfortable with, but I need you to agree to marry me.”
I sniffled.
“We’re already engaged,” I said, confused.
“We were on the verge of ending things for good, I need to hear you say you still want to be with me for the rest of our lives. Please, darling, I need to hear you say it. I need to.”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “Yes, I still want to marry you. I want nothin’ more. We’re in this for the long haul.”
Ryder lifted his hand and lifted his pinkie finger to me.
“Forever?” he said.
I hooked my finger tightly around his, and with my heart pumping with nothing but pure love I said, “Forever.”
Three months later…
“Why are your eyebrows so nicely shaped?” Keela asked Dominic as we sat in the sitting room of her and Alec’s house. All of us were together so when the lads laughed, Dominic’s face turned red with embarrassment.
He avoided looking at his brothers as he said, “Bronagh cried because I wouldn’t let her pluck them, and the only way to make her stop crying was to let her do them so I sucked it up. She’s extremely pregnant and is touchy about everything so I let her do what she wants without argument if it means no tears.”
Smart lad.
Bronagh, Alannah and Aideen were in the kitchen making food so they were out of earshot for this very interesting turn in our conversation.
“Hold the fucking phone,” Alec laughed as he got up and walked over to Dominic and bent forward. He grabbed hold of his brother’s head, and forced him to look at him. “Aw, how cute! You’re a pretty little princess!”
Dominic shoved Alec’s teasing self away and glared at Damien and Kane who were covering their mouths trying, and failing, to muffle their chuckles.
“I think you look great,” I offered. “It’s nice to see a man that grooms his eyebrows. They’re such an important facial feature.”
Alec, Damien and Kane looked at me like a vagina suddenly grew on the middle of my forehead.
Dominic blinked. “They are?”
“Of course,” Keela answered for me. “Yours aren’t perfectly shaped, but they’re very nicely done, I’d say you’re just even more attractive now. I never noticed that they were a little bushy before, but Bee did good. You look sexy.”
Dominic smugly grinned at his brothers who were now eyeing him, and his eyebrows. Alec, on the other hand, was glaring at Keela who had done well to avoid catching his stare.
I snorted. “Leave her alone, it’s not like she’s lying, Dominic is sexy.”
Dominic’s grin deepened, and smugness radiated from him in waves as he clasped his hands together behind his head and he looked around the room. I laughed and shook my head at him.
I jumped when a finger sticking into my side startled me. I quickly looked at the poker and grinned, “I know, I know, I’m goin’ to pay for talkin’ up your little brother, and let me just say that I can’t wait.”
My Ryder’s lip curved upward. “You’re a hellcat.”
“I know,” I teased.
It had been three months since I made up with Ryder, and four months and one week since all hell broke loose. We were still taking things slow, and by that I mean really slow. We hadn’t done much more than kiss one another, and it was the best decision we had ever made.
The first night we met, sex between us was almost instant. There was thick sexual tension from the moment we locked eyes on one another, but this time, we were trying a different approach. One where we listened to our minds, and hearts, instead of our libidos.
We knew that if the FBI hadn’t uprooted our lives then we would have been perfectly fine continuing the way we were in our relationship, but since we were starting over fresh, we wanted to try taking a different path this time around. We switched up our tactics, and instead of doing everything arse backwards, we took things in baby steps.