How did he get so lucky to find Mena not once but twice? He was the luckiest guy in the world that she wanted to be with him. But luck was for pants, not love and he wasn’t going to chicken out and risk losing her again.
“You look beautiful.” She always did, no matter what she wore.
“You tell me all the time and what’s even better, you show me.” She rested her palms on his chest. “I love you. You’re the sauce on my spaghetti.” He laughed, but she saw through it. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
He took a fortifying breath. “If I was to ask you if you wanted to marry me, would your first thought be stars on fire, I love him but not that much and I really don’t want to change anything because what we’re doing now is great and why spoil a good thing and besides I’m super busy at—”
She put a hand over his mouth. “Stop talking.”
He blinked at her. She stared back with very wet eyes. He didn’t know how to interpret the wet eyes. Could be Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” good. Could be emotionally nobble him forever bad. His organs got ahead of the game and interpreted it as under attack and flooded his system with nausea-making poisons.
“My first thought would be yes,” Mena, said, taking her hand away.
He could’ve gone to his knees in relief. “What would your second thought be?”
“Grip, would you marry me?”
He took a step back in shock as if a monster had leapt out at him from a wardrobe.
Mena said, “I just want your first thought because I know all your other thoughts will be about how we make it work because that’s who you are.”
He slapped each of his cheeks, one, two, making them sting, unsure he heard correctly. “Did you just ask me to marry you?”
“Yes, I did.”
He reversed that distance between them. The only thing chasing him was his own heartbeat. “Just like that?”
She smiled and it made the wet eyes easier to interpret, that, and his were wet too. “Just like that,” she said.
“Fuck. Is that allowed? I mean, I guess it’s allowed and it’s fucking fantastic. I was going to,” he gestured at the ground, and said, “knee,” and then, “ring,” gave up trying to make sense and just answered the question, “yes,” and reached for her.
It didn’t matter if he wasn’t the one to do the asking and there were way more fun things they could do from their knees. He didn’t feel sick with nerves anymore.
“You don’t want to do it today, do you?”
It was Mena’s turn to startle. She jumped as if a spider had crawled up her leg. “No, much as I do love you, I don’t want to do it today.”
Of course not. She’d want her mum and Caroline here. She’d want Vera to make her a dress, and his folks would tear him a new one if he got married and didn’t invite them.
“Just checking. I love you. We can get married whenever you want. I want to kiss you but if I start, I won’t want to stop, and I need t
o get a wedding back on the rails.”
She gave him the kind of smile that promised the lingerie she wore under her sexy little dress was spectacular and he’d get to watch her strip it off before they played with each other’s piercings. And so he kissed her anyway, because what was a man supposed to do when he was proposed to, but demonstrate his extreme appreciation, even if it meant he could not take two handfuls of her gorgeous arse because there were fifty other people on this deck and he wasn’t sharing that. He contented himself with palming her hip where his tattoo was because she was extraordinary.
“If we like this wedding, we can have one just like it,” he said when they both needed air, and then he left her because they were really way off schedule now and he had a job to do.
He cruised by Haydn and Teela, and gave them the okay, sent Teela scrambling to change, found the celebrant and clued her in and then went to tell Evie and Jay they were off the hook. There’d be a wedding as promised but whatever form of being together they chose, hitched with the paperwork or without, wasn’t anyone’s business.
At the door, he knocked and waited until he heard Jay’s voice. Last surprise he needed was to see them at it. What he got was three dogs on the bed and Evie in the dress, stepping into shoes before Jay zipped her up.
“Isn’t that bad luck?” he said.
“We like to live dangerously,” Jay said. “And it’ll probably rot the lining of my stomach but who cares?”
“No, we didn’t have sex in here, the dogs put us off,” Evie said.
“I wasn’t going to ask.” They both laughed at him. Yeah all right, he was going to ask. But they had form. Once did it in a backstage supply cupboard. “What does it mean that you’re in the dress?” It could just mean the clothes she’d had on were covered in dog hair and slobber and she didn’t want to go outside like that.