Pleasing Her SEAL

She sniffed.

He hadn’t fixed anything, hadn’t fixed them. “Don’t cry. I’ll make this right.”

White knighting was dangerous. He sucked at being a hero. He was also, apparently, a sucker for her curves. When she looked at him, her beautiful brown eyes gleaming with mischief, he felt it right down to the toes of his dress shoes.

“I’m happy,” she whispered, and then she launched herself at him again. “I love you, too.” When they finally came up for air, however, she’d thought of another question. “How did you get here?”

For a moment, his tongue got stuck and he felt more than a little light-headed. That happened when he was around Maddie. Nothing he could ever do would be enough to earn her love and the privilege of standing by her side. She was giving it to him, though, giving herself to him, and he planned to spend every minute of the next eighty years proving to her that she’d made the right call. She was his everything. It was that fucking simple, so he ought to be able to answer her question.

“Motorcycle.” He jerked a thumb toward the entrance of the fancy pavilion thingie. A guy in a uniform had offered to “Valet this for you, sir?” But he’d declined, because he liked to keep his lines of retreat open.

She glowed up at him as he steered her through the tent, where the reception he’d crashed was being held. Coming in uniform had its advantages, because the valets and the lady with the headset running the op hadn’t questioned him. He’d do whatever it took to keep that look of happiness on Maddie’s face. As they moved through the crowd of guests, he focused on the exit. He wanted to get her out of here. Partly because he wanted to find out what she had on under that dress, but more because he was ready to get on with them.

She elbowed him. “Are we leaving?”

“You want to go for a ride?” Say yes. He’d wait out the reception if that was what she wished, but they were definitely eloping when it was their turn. He wasn’t starring in any dinner-dance spectacle.

“Can I drive?” She looked up at him hopefully.

“The keys are in my pocket.” She looked good in his jacket. Maybe he could convince her to wear just the jacket later on. She fished in the pocket for the keys—and came up with both the keys and a little black box.

“That’s for you,” he said. That damn magazine article had better have been right, or he’d go hunt down the writer personally.

She opened the box. He’d spotted the ring in the jeweler’s window. It was bold and blingy, with enough carats to blind someone from across the room. The ring had pizzazz and it made him smile. Maybe he should have let her pick out her own ring. Waiting until she’d said yes might have been smart, too.

“I read on a blog that proposals should be memorable,” he said when she didn’t say anything. Her fingers patted the velvet sides, stroked over the stones. He didn’t hear a no. In fact, he didn’t hear anything at all.

She lifted her head and looked at him, a mixture of emotions on her face. Amusement, pleasure—and something he really hoped looked a whole lot like love.

“Then, go ahead and make it,” she said. She didn’t let go of the box, though. Or throw it at him. So he went for broke and dropped to one knee on the grass, taking the hand that wasn’t holding the ring box.

“Madeline Holmes, will you marry me? Not saying yes when you proposed to me was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I shouldn’t have let you go.”

He was pretty sure that they had an audience watching them from the big purple tent—an audience with cell phones. They’d be starring front and center on YouTube, and that was okay by him. He wasn’t sure, however, how long he was supposed to spend on bended knee. The magazine article had been annoyingly vague on that part. He settled for tugging her down onto his thigh. She leaned into him and grinned.

“I was moving kind of fast.”

He smiled. Maddie only seemed to have two speeds: gung-ho and full steam ahead. She didn’t hold back, either, in bed or in matters of the heart. There was a lot he could learn from her. He’d made a mistake when he’d been eighteen, and he’d been scared of repeating it. Instead, he’d made a different mistake, letting go when he should have held on.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes?” He was pretty certain his heart was on his sleeve for everyone to see, and he needed to get this right.

“Yes, you can slide that pretty ring of yours on my finger.” She pressed a kiss against his mouth. “Does that mean I don’t have to buy you a ring?”