Bali had turned out to be even more perfect than I could have imagined. Not only was the tropical island lush and vibrant, with perfect sandy beaches and endless blue skies. But Jack was with me. Everyday.

I woke up, and he was laying in bed next to me—snoring, usually. I teased him about his snoring, but I actually kind of liked it. After almost a year of sleeping next to one another, I didn’t know if I’d be able to sleep without the raspy sound. Then, I’d go to work, and Jack was there. A benefit of starting your own business is that you get to choose your co-workers.

Our first few months on the island were aimless. Matt had set us up with new identities and enough money to buy a place and get settled, but we quickly ran out of cash and had to pick up odd jobs. I worked at a bar on the weekends and Jack picked up work on a construction crew. And then, I’d stumbled upon an idea.

“What are we good at?” I asked him one night as we were laying in bed.

“Sex,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at me and running his finger between my breasts.

I swatted his hand away. “Aside from that.”

“Killing people,” he said with no hint of irony. “And hiding from the mafia. It seems we are very good at that.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Which would make us the perfect bail bondsmen. Or, bail bondsman and a bondswoman. Or Bail bondswoman and the bounty hunter.”

“You want me to be a bounty hunter?” he asked, unconvinced.

“Think about it,” I said. “We pay for some junkies bail, and then track him down when he fails to show up for court. We get paid, and we get to use our very specific set of skills.”

“You’re crazy,” Jack said, crawling over me and pressing my thighs apart.

I lost my train of thought for the next thirty minutes, but as soon as we were both finished and lying next to one another again, I repeated the idea. I repeated it often enough that Jack eventually gave in. And three months later, we paid out our first bail. Six months after that, we had more business than we knew what to do with.

Jack’s phone vibrated in the center of the table and he reached out and silenced it.

“That could be important,” I said.

He sighed. “I’m tired of work interrupting our dinners together. It can wait for twenty minutes.”

“That’s sweet,” I said, smiling at him and then taking an aggressively large bite of chicken, making sure to get a bit of the sauce on my chin.

He rolled his eyes and laughed. “Very nice.”

“Sexy, isn’t it?” I asked, suggestively licking my lips. “I bet you didn’t know you were going to be building your new life with such a feminine, demure woman.”

This time he barked out a laugh, hardly able to keep it in. “One conversation with you told me you weren’t a feminine, demure woman. I knew sitting at the hotel bar in New Orleans that you were different.”

I wiped the sauce off my chin with my napkin and then waved him away. “Yeah, right.”

“Yeah. Right,” he said, the smile on his face gone. “I knew there was something special about you, and it scared the hell out of me.”

The tone of the dinner had changed, and I didn’t understand why. “You never told me that before.”

He shrugged. “I was debating whether I wanted to ask you up to my room when you suggested it yourself. Early on, I tried to distance myself from you, convince myself that you were just a pretty face and a good body, but you kept popping back up. You kept drawing me in.”

“Why are you saying this?” I asked, setting my fork down. “Is everything okay?”

“You were fearless and determined. You challenged me and made me work for every smile, every touch. You just blew me away, and you still do.”

Even after a year, Jack wasn’t the kind of man to openly talk about his emotions. He showed me he loved me every day, but we didn’t talk about it. We had never even defined our relationship. People usually assumed we were married or dating, and we let them think what they wanted. Labels didn’t matter to me. Being with Jack mattered to me.

But now, listening to him talk about when we met and how he felt about me, my first thought was that he was dying. Had he been to the doctor recently? Was it cancer? Were these his dying words? Jack looked as healthy as ever, so I pushed the thought from my mind.

“You are being weird,” I said. “What’s going on?”

His phone rang again, and Jack answered it and then hung up.

“God damn phone,” he muttered, standing up and shoving the phone into his back pocket.

Then, I noticed the lump in his front pocket. He followed my eyes to the bulge in his jeans, and then slid his hand in and pulled out a small black box.

“You asked me to start a new life with you, and I hesitated. I was terrified and cowardly. I had to think about it. But I don’t have to think about this,” he said, dropping to one knee in front of me.

My eyes were so wide I thought they would fall out and roll away. I covered my mouth with one hand and stared at him, trying to decide if I’d eaten some bad chicken and was in the midst of a dream.

“Mia, will you marry me?” Jack opened the small box and revealed a tiny silver band with a humble diamond in the middle. I reached for it, and he pulled the box away. “You have to answer first.”

I laughed and realized tears were streaming down my cheeks. “Yes. Absolutely. Yes, I will marry you.”

He pulled the ring out of the box and slipped it on my finger. It fit perfectly. He wrapped his arms around me, and I buried my face in his neck, crying with happiness and hope and too much love to describe.

And then his phone rang again.

“God damn it,” he said, yanking the phone from his pocket and barking a greeting into it.

His eyes widened. “We’ll be right there.”

“Did he come out of hiding?” I asked, a smile creeping onto my face.

Jack nodded. “That stupid son of a bitch skipped court and then went to his momma’s house for a Sunday night dinner.”

“There’s a reason he was caught by the police and in need of bail in the first place,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s an idiot,” Jack said, grabbing my hand and pulling me towards the front door.

“Nowhere near as good as we are,” I agreed.

Jack spun me around, so we were chest-to-chest and kissed me, tipping me backwards to deepen it before standing me back up. “No one is as good as we are, baby.”

I smiled and wrapped my arms around his chest. “You got that right.”