My eyebrows take up residence somewhere behind my hairline. Mrs. Stone?
“We’re not married,” I correct her politely. “Much to Mr. Stone’s chagrin.”
He gives me a look that says I’ll regret that later.
“Oh, I’m ever so sorry.” She places a hand on her chest. “That’s what one gets for assuming.”
“It’s okay.” I smile. “I doubt you’ll be the last to.”
She returns my smile. “Can I help you in any way?”
“Hmm…” My eyes find the tiny strings I saw Aaron eying contemplatively earlier. I pick up the white one beneath a matching basque and show her it. “Do you have this in any other colors?”
Aaron clears his throat and shifts when I look at him.
“We do. They’re just over here.” She waves me over and shows me a section of the wall with the exact pair of panties in an array of colors.
“Well,” I say, glancing back at Aaron and grabbing a couple of them, “would you look at that?”
***
“I warned you.”
“Do I look like I’m remotely bothered about the amount of money that just cost me? I love spoiling you.”
“Aaron, you and I both know that lingerie isn’t exactly spoiling me. You get far more pleasure from it than I do.”
He pulls my feet onto his lap and massages them. “But in the end, we both get the pleasure, so does it really matter?”
I lean my head against the seat and smile. “I suppose not.”
I really did warn him. After one long hour of wandering back and forth through the shop and trying on a few items I wasn’t so sure of, he handed over his card and a few hundred pounds. Despite my cringe at the time, I’ve accepted that it wasn’t my fault.
He made me do it with talk of pulling me out of and f**king me in it all.
And after sitting in a restaurant with him for two and a half hours, I’m more than ready to see if he’ll make good on his promises. But first…
“Can I ask you something?”
“It sounds serious.”
“It is… Kind of. Did you mean what you said earlier?”
“About f**king you in that devil-sent red outfit? Absolutely.”
I climb from the car after him and follow him into the house. “No,” I say slowly, kicking my shoes off at the door. “The other thing.”
“I said a lot of things to you earlier, Bambi. You’re going to have to elaborate a little more than ‘the other thing.’” He raises his eyebrows in amusement, and the movement tugs his lips up with it.
I sit on the edge of the kitchen table and watch as he maneuvers his way around it. He’s certain in everything he does, even if it’s only throwing a teabag in a mug and pouring water over it. If I’ve noticed anything, it’s that he never falters in his movements. There’s never a tremble of his hand or a slip of his fingers.
That’s something reflected in the rest of his life. He never does something unless he wholeheartedly means it, and the same goes for his words. He never says something he doesn’t mean.
“When you said that one day everything you have will be mine.” I swallow, and he freezes. “Did you mean that?”
“Does that scare you?” he asks without looking at me.
“Will that make a difference to your answer?”
“No. I’m just curious.”
I put my hands in my lap and look down, uncertainty swirling in me. Right now, we’re polar opposites. “Yes. It does—a little.”
A mug hits the countertop, and he appears in front of me. One of his hands creeps up my thigh, opening my legs, and he slips between them.
“Why does it scare you?”
I shrug one shoulder. “It just does. It’s a big step.”
“Now tell me the real reason.” He hooks two fingers under my chin and lifts my face until our eyes meet. “Dayton.”
“It’s something I can’t control,” I say softly. “I can’t control whether or not you want to ask me, and I definitely can’t control whether or not you do. And I wouldn’t ask you to wait until I definitively said I was ready because I might never be ready.”
“I would wait until you said so if that’s what freaks you out.”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t ready to go with you to Vegas. I wasn’t ready to say yes when you begged for another chance. I wasn’t ready to come here. It’s when the best things happen. Sometimes you want the exact thing you think you’re not ready for because you actually are.”
“Look at me.”
I keep my eyes down.
“Dayton, look at me, sweetheart.” He brushes a thumb across my cheek. “I’m not answering your question until you do.”
Reluctantly, I meet his gaze—his raw, emotion-filled, honest gaze that tugs at a part of me buried deep down.
“Did I mean what I said? Absolutely. I meant it with everything I am. One day, you will have everything I have. One day, you’ll walk into a store, they’ll call you Mrs. Stone, and you won’t have to correct them. You’ll smile and nod instead.” He swallows audibly and cups my face. “But only when you’re ready. If I have to wait ten years until you’re ready to say yes, then I will. You’re mine anyway. I know in my heart you belong to me. I don’t need the validation of a piece of paper to tell me you’re mine for the rest of my life. But it will happen, Dayton. There’s nothing I want more than to see you walking down an aisle toward me knowing you’re giving me everything.”
“But you’ve done it before.” My words are a mere whisper.
He touches his lips to my forehead and lets them linger for a long moment. “My body might have, but my heart hasn’t. My heart has always been married to you.”
I wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his neck. His go around me just as tightly, and I take a deep breath. I just need him to hold me.
This conversation wasn’t supposed to happen for a long, long time. It’s just one more wrench in the works of my life right now.
Except that this is the kind of wrench that sets my heart beating frantically with both excitement and fear.
“You still have to convince me to move in with you first,” I mumble against his skin.
Silence.
“Aaron.”
Silence.
“Aaron!”
I pull back and study his smirking face. It’s the same look he had earlier when I mentioned it. It’s the look that says he knows something I don’t, and it sets my body on red alert.