“But now…now when they look at you…”—I emitted another soft growl—“Now when they look, and they see…They don’t just wonder, they know. They know you’re mine. And I love looking at them and having them know you’re carrying my child. They know you’re mine—both of you. I love that they know exactly what I’ve done to you to put that child in there. I love that there is no doubt—no doubt at all. They know they don’t have a chance.”
I held her closer to me.
“You’re mine.” I growled low in her ear. “The way you look now—that just proves it. I’ve never seen you more beautiful than the way you are, and every guy who looks at you knows where I’ve been.”
Tria was silent for a moment, breathing a little more heavily and holding herself perfectly still until she finally spoke.
“You…um…I think you might have gotten an extra dose of testosterone when God was handing that shit out,” she said and then giggled slightly.
“You may be right,” I admitted. I sat back against the couch cushions and kept myself from making any potentially lethal remarks about raging hormones. “I can’t help it. I love that other guys know I’ve fucked you—that I did this to you.”
I ran both hands over her stomach.
“You aren’t right in the head,” she informed me. “You are very sweet though in your own way.”
I gave her a crooked smile and then remembered that I really wasn’t all that sweet. In fact, I had been a total fail at least once.
Well, all right—more than once. There was one time when I wasn’t so sweet. I needed to correct that right now.
“I have something for you,” I announced.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s not much,” I replied as I stood up and went over to my jacket. I pulled a little cloth pouch out of the pocket and walked back over to sit on the couch. “You know I suck at this shit, so I’m just going to give it to you, since I never gave you one before.”
I opened the pouch and shook out a small ring of white gold into Tria’s hand. There was a round center filled with diamond and sapphire chips in a random, squiggly pattern in a white gold lattice.
“It should fit,” I said with a shrug.
Tria’s eyes darted from the ring to my face and back again.
“Did…did…did you…?”
“I made it,” I confirmed. “I paid for the stones I broke my first couple of weeks there until I had enough for the setting. I’ve been working on it in the evening when you were doing school stuff.”
She slipped the ring over her finger and then twisted her wrist back and forth to make the chipped stones catch the light. My heart started to beat faster, and I realized that this was just the sort of thing to let everyone know she was mine even after the baby was born.
“Is this a…a…a wedding ring?”
“Um…yeah, actually.” I chuckled. “Will you marry me?”
Tria stared at her hand with her mouth open, but no sound came out of it.
“It’s not much,” I said. “I mean, the stones really weren’t worth much before I broke—”
She suddenly smothered me with her mouth, and for a moment, I could hardly breathe as she climbed over the top of me and pinned me to the arm of the couch. I held her by her widening hips—God, I loved how they looked now—and kept her from crushing the rounded bundle between us.
“It’s beautiful!” she cried as she wrapped her arms around my neck and nearly cut off the circulation to my head. “It’s the most beautiful ring in the whole world, I swear!”
I had to laugh.
“I kind of doubt that,” I said. I managed to get her to sit back down beside me and then wrapped an arm across her shoulders and watched her watch the ring sparkle until tears formed in her eyes again.
“I’m sorry,” Tria said quietly.
“What for?”
“I’ve been a bitch all morning.”