Vera closes the front door and locks it. Leaning against the front of my truck, I can’t help but stare at her. Can’t help but watch the way the sun bounces off her long black hair and the way the perfectly sculpted apples of her cheeks shift when she glances over her shoulder, giving me a small smile. If I try hard enough, I can still taste her on my tongue. I ate her after breakfast. She’s my favorite snack. My cock agrees, hardening in my jeans as I remember the soft sounds of delight that escaped her perfect pink lips while she laid spread open on the kitchen counter not even twenty minutes ago. I silently tell him to stand down because we’ve got more important things to do. Fear tries to slither into my gut, and I do my best to extinguish that shit.
Thinking about what I’m about to do has me feeling like even more of a dipshit for all the crap that happened with Dahlia. Now that I know what it is to have someone become the only person you want to spend the rest of your life with.
No one can make me see the world differently quite like this woman can. Yeah, she’s hurt me, she damn well almost destroyed me, and I’ll always regret what I did as a result. But I’d let her hurt me over and over again now that I know her reasons for doing it in the first place. She loves me. Me. A lowly, smartass mechanic from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks.
I sometimes still have trouble believing it, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to let her slip through my grease-stained fingers.
I would’ve proposed sooner, and I did, in an ass-backward kind of way. I’ve told her many times at random that she’s going to marry me. She just has a way of making me speak every thought she elicits in my brain. Which is almost all of them. And every time I told her, she gave me that beautiful laugh of hers before saying she’d think about it when I actually got around to asking her properly.
It’s taken six months, but I finally saved up enough to buy her a decent ring. It might not be full of diamonds or any kind of gold, but it’s enough. At least, I hope it is. And I hope like hell she doesn’t need to think about it for too long. This shit is scary enough. She can’t leave a man in limbo like that.
“Wait up.” I straighten from the truck and grab her hand. She spins around, raising a dark questioning brow at me.
Dropping to my knee beside the passenger door, I start my speech right away, for fear of choking if I pause long enough. “Vera Marie Bramston, I know you love your books, but you already know this isn’t some fairy tale. I’m not some knight in shining armor. I’m going to fuck up, and I’m going to piss you off more times than I care to admit. But I will love you with every breath I’m lucky enough to take and make sure you know it every damn day. Because we don’t need perfect when what we have is real. And I’ll pick real over anything if it means I get you.” I take a deep, much-needed breath. “Be my wife. Maybe not tomorrow or next month, but please tell me that you’ll agree to be my wife someday in the not too distant future and make me the happiest son of a bitch in the whole damn world.”
She just stares at me, her mouth slightly parted. Shit. Maybe I should’ve taken her to dinner instead of asking her on my driveway like the scumbag I am. But I picked up the ring yesterday and couldn’t wait.
Fuck. I don’t think my heart is even beating. I’d thump my chest, try to restart it, but I can’t seem to move. Then she sniffs, wiping under her nose as tears start to stream from those beautiful, ice blue eyes. “That wasn’t really a question, but I’m going to say yes anyway.”
Shock and elation tear through me, and I almost drop the ring. “Y-yes?”
She laughs. “Yes. Hurry up and put that ring on my finger before I change my mind.”
That snaps me back into action. I stand and grab her soft hand, sliding it on her finger. Lifting it to my lips, I kiss it. Then she jumps on me and starts kissing my face. I’d have probably dropped her if I wasn’t so used to her sneak attacks by now. I grab the side of her face to bring her lips to mine, needing to see those eyes when I say, “I love you, Frost.”
She exhales a shaky breath, and my heart starts beating double time. “I love you, Hero.”
I kiss her hard then put her in the truck, and not gonna lie, I feel like skipping as I round it to the driver’s side. She said yes. Fuck me. Just wait until old Graham hears about this. He still lives at the bookstore, but Vera’s running it now, so she’s there almost every day with him. I was shocked as fuck to learn he’s her grandad, but looking at him after I found out, I don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner. The eyes. Not many sets of eyes in this world share that same light blue color.
The smile stays on my face until we’re half an hour into our drive. I glance over at her, finding her amused eyes watching me. “Does this mean I can knock you up soon?” There my mouth goes again. Always betraying me.
She guffaws, choking and coughing. I frown, stubbing out my cigarette and reaching over to whack her on the back. “I’m fine,” she breathes out in a wheeze.
“Really?” Wait a minute. “You don’t want kids?”
She shakes her head. “Why would I? They cry, they stink, and they steal sleep from you.” She then grumbles quietly, “I like my sleep.”
I’m so outraged, I almost pull the truck over to the side of the old highway we’re driving down. “No.” It’s all I can come up with.
“Yes.”
“But …” I blink rapidly. “You never said you didn’t like kids. Everyone likes kids.”
“Not everyone and you never asked.” She pauses, her voice tinged with fear. “Do you want your ring back? Maybe …”
“Shit, whoa. Stop right there. That ring is yours, and you are mine. Besides …” I reach for my cigarettes because I need another after this bombshell. She takes them from me and lights one, taking a drag before handing it over. “I’ll change your mind.”
She just laughs, which is fine. Because her reluctance to fight back on the subject tells me all I need to know.
She’ll give me one.
Maybe two if I play my cards right.
I grab her hand and place it on my thigh. She squeezes it, and I try to ignore the blood shooting straight to my dick. This damn woman. I wonder if there’ll ever come a day when I’m not sporting a semi whenever she’s around. I tuck my cigarette between my teeth and adjust my dick in my jeans. She squeezes my thigh again, telling me without words that she’s well aware of my suffering.
To stop my dick from hardening any more, I ask, “You gonna tell your dad?”
She laughs. “What do you think?”
“You’re just gonna let him find out in his own time, then?” I grin.
“Probably.” She shrugs, clearly not giving a damn.
Can’t blame her. The guy’s a straight up asswipe with severe anger issues.
I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting him once, five months ago at dinner. Where he grilled me about my job, tattoos, and lack of college degrees for thirty minutes before Vera said she’d had enough and that we were leaving. He apparently apologized. Not to me, but to her. And that’s what matters. I don’t need the guy to like me; that’s not what’s important. But seeing her happy is.
Stiff dick officially gone.
We pull into the parking lot of Penstville penitentiary just under an hour later. My stomach turns as I think about Felix stuck behind the electrical barbed-wire cage that surrounds the huge brick fortress. Three weeks. Just three weeks and he’ll be out.
Vera has yet to meet him. Whenever I’ve asked, she’s said she’d rather not walk into a den full of criminals that haven’t been laid in God knows how long.
She’s funny when she’s scared.
But even though I know she’s nervous—having never visited a jail before—she’s here with me today. Which means more than I could ever possibly wrap my brain around.
I round the truck, grabbing her hand and helping her down. “You sure you want to come in?” It’s really not that bad, but I need to remember that my version of not that bad is probably very different from hers.
She nods. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”
Pride fills my chest while I stare down at my raven-haired beauty. Christ, I’ll never forget the day I first saw her, walking down the side of that highway as if she owned the damn thing. All dressed up and completely unaware of the effect she’d have on the unsuspecting drivers speeding by. I still have no idea what made me pull over, other than the fact I didn’t want some woman’s death on my conscience. That, and a bit of curiosity. I have moments when I just stare at her, feeling so damn glad that I did. I know that my paranoia and lack of trust in people almost fucked up the best damn thing I’ve ever had in my life, but I won’t make that mistake again.
I lean forward, placing a gentle kiss on her full lips. She smiles, and my fucking heart inflates. “Let’s, beauty.”
We head inside through metal detectors and all sorts of invasive shit. After signing in, a meaty guard with a moustache that could rival Tom Selleck’s takes us through to the visiting room.
Vera looks around at the few inmates sitting with their families or friends, her shoulders dropping slightly. I wind my arm around her waist, tucking her into my side, and feel her relax even more.
Shouting starts somewhere nearby, and she tenses. My grip on her hip tightens, and she turns her face to mine. “Where is he?”
“He’ll be out in a minute; they’ve gotta get him.” I move us over to a table in the corner, and we take a seat. Vera still melded to my side.
The guard returns, bringing with him my best friend and my partner in crime. My brother.
People used to say we could pass as twins. But although I work out when I can, I’m nowhere near as big as Felix has gotten since he went to jail. He works out a lot. Told me that and reading is all he really has to do in this shithole. Plus, working out keeps his anxiety at bay. And he’s got a fuck load of it, given his girl left him and he’s never even met his own kid.
He’s also got brown eyes instead of green. But I must say, my hair is much better than his. It would be, considering his is all shaved off into a crew cut.
Poor guy.
I go to get up, but hesitate when I look at Vera. She gives me a weak smile, telling me she’s okay. So I stand and walk over to my brother, slapping him on the back and sighing with relief. He may have messed up and let me down in a huge way, but he’s still my brother. The only family I have left besides the woman sitting behind me.
“Missed you, kid.” He scruffs my hair, and I punch him in the arm. He’s always called me kid, despite only being fourteen months older than I am.
“How’s it hanging? Still keeping an eye out for creeps in the shower room?”
He laughs; the sound is gruff like he doesn’t do it much, and I’ve shocked it out of him. “How’s the shop?”
I nod. “Good.” I gesture toward Vera. “Here she is.”
Felix peers around me to look at a blank-faced Vera. “Well, shit. She came along this time.”
We take a seat, and Felix holds out a hand to shake Vera’s. She just stares at it then finally gives in and shakes his hand with a loose grip.
“Pleasure to finally meet you, Vera.” He grins at me briefly when his eyes land on her ring.
She removes her hand and opens her bag. “Likewise. Bet you can’t wait to get out of this hellhole.” She squirts some hand sanitizer onto her hands and rubs, not giving two shits if she’s offended my brother.
“Damn right, I can’t.” He tilts his head, watching her, and then glances at me again. I shrug, grinning like a man who won the moon and all the stars and got to keep them for himself.
Felix shakes his head, laughing behind his hand rubbing at the scruff on his jaw. He knows all about how awesome she is, so he knows what to expect. Sort of.
Vera puts her sanitizer away. “Are you going to tell him?”
Yeah, I swallowed my pride about a month ago and took her up on her offer to pay for a better PI. Kind of had to if I wanted to buy her that ring. Plus, time is running out. But it seems it was worth every penny. Dahlia ended up sending me the number of the guy her husband knows who then found her within a week of us contacting him.
Nodding, I fold my hand around Vera’s on the plastic table. “We found them.”
The End.