I furrow my brow but don’t have time to ask him why.
Knock! Knock!
Boone shouts, “Come in!”
The front door bursts open, and a parade of people come streaming through. There’s Siggy, who gives us a big wave, followed by Holt and Blaire, Coy and Bellamy, a younger couple that are so attractive it takes my breath away, and Oliver.
Rosie springs to her feet. “Hi, Iggy!”
“Hi, sweetheart.” She scoops Rosie up and kisses her cheek. “How are you?”
“Good. Where’s Wade?”
Boone growls, making everyone laugh.
I get to my feet. “Hi, everyone. What’s going on?” I ask with a laugh of bewilderment.
“We’re here to celebrate your engagement,” Blaire says. “I hope you’re ready to eat.”
“I’d love to be eating at our wedding,” Holt says dryly. “Has that thought ever crossed your mind?”
Blaire sticks an elbow in his side. “Stop it. I’ll pick a day soon.”
“When?” Siggy asks. “I mean, do you have a season in mind because I’d like to start thinking about venues and things—in case you need my help, of course.”
Bellamy puts her hand on her belly. “Can you wait until he’s born?” Her eyes go wide. “Oh, crap.”
“It’s a boy?” Siggy asks. “I thought you didn’t know?”
Coy grins. “We were going to keep it a secret. Looks like that went well.”
“Sorry,” Bellamy says sheepishly. “I’m just so hungry that I can’t think.”
“To the kitchen,” Siggy says, herding everyone into the other room.
I start to follow them, but Boone pulls me back. He wraps his arms around me and kisses the tip of my nose.
“I was worried we weren’t going to be okay,” I admit. “Thank you for having the courage to come after me. But I shouldn’t have made you chase me.”
“I would rather you hadn’t.” He winks. “But I’ve learned a few things lately.”
“Oh, have you?”
“Yeah. One of them is that I really like fucking you.”
I laugh.
“And another one is that I hope to have our own babies really soon.”
“Really?”
He grins. “If you want to, of course.”
The idea of carrying Boone’s child inside me makes it really, really hard not to take him to the bedroom immediately. He must sense the heat in my body because he smirks.
“And third,” he says, locking his hands at the small of my back, “I want to love you with reckless abandon.”
“What do you mean?”
He stares over my head and thinks. “I want to love you without caring about what other people think. I want to love you so hard that you can barely handle it. I want to love you so wildly that you never wonder, even for a second, if my heart is yours.”
I bite my lip and bask in the warmth of his words.
I have never known this sort of love before, and although it’s hard to believe that I deserve it, I have a feeling Boone will make sure I know it. And Rosie too.
She’ll never know the doubt Nettie and I had growing up.
“I don’t know if I would’ve understood the need for that if you hadn’t run away from me,” he says.
“I’m still sorry I did it.”
“I’m not. Everything happens for a reason, Jaxi. From you picking the wrong house to being in Savannah when Rosie needed you. Doesn’t it feel like the universe was watching out for you even when things didn’t feel that way at the time?”
He has a point. Of course, he does.
When I look back at my life and trace how I got here—to a spot more amazing than anything I could’ve dreamed of—I had to go through a lot of crap. There were so many times when I thought the world forgot about me. That I didn’t belong. That I didn’t have a purpose.
The truth is, the world didn’t forget about me. It was just preparing me for the place I did belong. And that I have the most incredible purpose—the best gift—in the world.
Being Rosie’s mom and loving her with all of my heart. And now? Loving and being loved by Boone too.
For the rest of my life.
Epilogue
Boone
One month later
“Where’s Rosie?” Jaxi asks.
“How the heck do I know?”
We look around the backyard. Pink, yellow, and green balloons are attached to nearly every stable surface imaginable. A sign that says Happy Birthday hangs along the house. Streamers stretch from one end of the porch to the other and even a sling to the side of the slide going into the pool.
Holt and Blaire stand with Oliver near the pool. Coy and Bellamy sit under an umbrella with Hollis and Larissa and Libby. Mom and Dad sit with Bellamy’s dad and Hollis’s grandma Judy near the snack table while Wade hides in the garage on a top secret mission.
“There she is,” I say, spying her and Bree crawling under the gift table. “Hey, Rosie. Come here.”
She scurries out from under the table and makes a beeline for me. The rose gold watch I got her for her birthday sits proudly on her wrist.