“I’m messing with you. I knew you’d come.” She leaned up to press a kiss to his mouth. It had only been a couple of weeks, but it felt like forever since she’d touched him, held him, made love to him. “Stop beating yourself up about something that happened years ago. It’s over, and I’m over it. It’s time for us to move on.
He started to say something else, but she stopped him with a finger on his lips. “And to answer your question from before. If you hadn’t shown up, I would have locked myself in my room and eaten so much chocolate that I threw up. And then I would have gotten in my daddy’s truck and driven to Fort Worth and dragged your ass to the closest justice of the peace.”
He nipped at her finger, then grinned when she yanked it away with a yelp. “You would not have come to Fort Worth.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that, buddy. You asked me to marry you, and I’m holding you to it. There’s nowhere on this earth—or off of it—that you can escape now. You’re mine … forever. Whether you like it or not.”
His eyes turned to molten chocolate at her words. “And you’re mine.”
“Always.” Everything she had—everything she was—belonged to him.
“Say it.” He rested a hand on her lower back and then pressed her body against his. “Say that you’re mine.”
“I’m yours. I’ve always been yours.” She was wearing a wedding dress, a bunch of crinolines, and a pair of Spanx at her mother’s insistence, and still she could feel him get hard at her words.
“Thank God.” This time he was the one to kiss her. But it was no chaste kiss. It was wicked and wild and so wanton that her knees trembled beneath her skirts.
Her hands came up to the lapels of his suit, and her grip on them was the only thing that kept her from falling as he thrust his tongue inside her mouth and the kiss took on a life of its own.
Minutes—or maybe hours, or maybe days—later, he pulled away. She grumbled a protest as he did, but eventually she let him go. They did have people waiting for them.
“Let’s get married.” Heath escorted her to the front yard, where the altar and arbor he’d insisted on were set up.
“Let’s.” She looked up to find her father was waiting for her at the end of the aisle. “And for the record, this is the best idea you’ve ever had.”
“No.” Heath gave her one more kiss for good luck. “Loving you is the best idea I ever had. But this is a close second. Though it is tied with my decision to throw that seventy-five-yard touchdown pass in the last Super Bowl. Now that was a really great idea.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Heath was always going to be Heath, and she was always going to be the lucky woman who loved him. What else could a nerdy astrophysicist ask for?
* * *