Chapter Thirty
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Foop, ping. Foop, ping. Foop, ping.
The pitching machine on the Maddox beach shot balls at Dane’s bat, and he hit each one with progressively stronger force. A brew of irritation and hurt fueled the strength in his arm. He’d hit so many now, refilling the machine twice over the last hour, that his triceps ached and his grip on the bat’s handle had started to go.
If he hit one hard enough and far enough, maybe it would take all this emotion at Brooke’s apparent rejection of him sailing away with it.
Foop, ping. Foop, ping.
Ball after ball he whacked toward the reedy area down the beach. That foop-ping pattern’s third syllable could have easily been why? He still didn’t know what had happened today, or what Brooke was thinking. She hadn’t come to find him.
This morning he’d been so sure. Where had all that assurance gone?
“Dane?” A voice called to him across the dune, breaking his rhythm and making him miss his first ball in a while. He looked up and saw the top of someone’s head rising above the dunes.
Could it be Brooke? Finally? If so, what will she say to me? If this was Brooke, their conversation could go basically one of two ways—either building or demolishing all the castles he’d built in the air.
Foop, ping. He let his eyes dart toward the dune, and sure enough—Brooke! She rose into view, prettier than ever, a smile breaking across her face, but one he didn’t know the meaning of yet, and which could send him to heaven or to hell. Probably the latter, though, the way she’d gone off with Crosby after the trial, ditching Dane. He had to turn away as irritation rose in him—mostly caused by the uncertainty of everything between the two of them. Besides, a ball was coming again, foop.
Ping! It sailed past the stand of trees, and he waited for the next ball, suppressing all kinds of instinctive urges—to shout for joy, to throw his arms around her, to ask her what in tarnation she was thinking, going off with Crosby after the trial.
“I thought I might find you here.” Brooke wobbled up toward him, and Dane watched her in his peripheral vision. She still wore her heels and skirt from the day in court, her shoes gouging into the sand with each step. Finally, she took them off and held them in her hand. “Hey, you’re hitting well.”
After Dane glanced at her he’d kept hitting. Frankly, he was in no mood to be told about her reconciliation with Crosby. If she wanted that doctor, it was her choice. Dane couldn’t stop her. He’d fought for her with his last breath, and it appeared that she’d chosen that jackwagon instead.
“Rock?” Brooke was as close as she ought to get to a man practicing batting on a beach. “You all right? I thought you’d be as happy about your victory as I am.”
Oh, so now it was his victory, too? Foop. He missed the pitch, swinging but catching nothing but air.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
“Your machine sounds empty.”
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
“It’s sunset.” He walked over and shut it off, and then came back to home plate where she stood waiting for him, shifting her weight and looking like a reason to eat his own heart out. “I should be getting home anyway,” he said. Wherever home was. The boat? Back at his apartment in Naughton? He didn’t know. The only place he ever felt at home these days was wherever Brooke Chadwick was. And despite that, it looked to Dane like she’d chosen Ames Crosby. He couldn’t look her in the eye, not when she’d see into his, too, and note the emotions surely swirling there.
Brooke picked up the ball he’d missed. She tossed it in the air and caught it a few times.
“I’ll pitch to you,” she said. He watched as she headed out to where they’d always designated the pitcher’s mound for their little league practices, still wearing her form-fitting skirt, but barefoot now, her shoes deposited beside him at their makeshift home plate. With every step the sway of her hips drew his eyes, until he tore them away.
“You’d pitch? To a Rockwell?” It came out more bitter than he intended, but she didn’t miss a beat.
“Haven’t we gone over this?” Her arm dropped to her side, and she cocked her head. “Rock. Come on. You’re more than your name.”
Her tone came so tenderly that he at last made himself zero in on her face. There was a different look in her countenance than he’d expect if she was going to kick him to the curb and tell him she was running off with Crosby. So she wasn’t here just to dump him, eh? The look in her eyes said hello, not goodbye. It wasn’t pity there— it was longing.
She came back to him. She didn’t stay with Ames. She was here on the dunes with Dane, and looking like she wanted to be with him, not anyone else.
And he was an idiot, a complete jackwagon for thinking otherwise, for getting mad and taking off. Looking at her now, at the lovelight in her eyes, the tides of his emotions switched directions inside him. Now, the waters coming in brought something he hadn’t felt an iota of in the last hour: confidence—a lot of it. Dane intended to make the most of this moment.
“I tell you what, Miss Chesapeake,” he said, squaring his shoulders and winding up his bat to hit. “You go ahead and pitch. Give me your best fast ball. If it’s in the strike zone, I’m hitting it. In fact, I’m hitting a home run, right over center field.” He took his bat and pointed it to a stand of scrub cedars growing about two-hundred yards off. Definitely home run territory.
“Oh, yeah? So you’re calling your shot, are you? And if you do hit a home run there, then what?” Brooke’s mouth quirked into a flirty grin, and the final vestiges of his anger vanished. “Because I am totally going to get a strike off you, with my perfectly aimed fastball.”
He choked up on the bat and took two practice swings, and then he sprang it on her: his condition for this bet. “If my home run goes where I’m calling my shot, then you have to kiss me—and I mean well.”
“Well?” She cocked her head and raised a come-hither eyebrow. “Deal.”
Deal! He could almost taste the cinnamon of her lips right now. He wound up his bat again, ready to pummel that baseball right over center field and to kingdom come.
However, Brooke held up a pausing finger and put forth a condition of her own. “But if I pitch a strike, or if your ball doesn’t fly straight over center field, George Herman Ruth, then I…get to ask a favor.”
Oooh. This got even better. “I can do favors.” He could do all manner of favors. This was turning into a win-win. “Bring it, Brookie Baby.”
She half-laughed. “You haven’t called me Brookie Baby in forever, and you don’t even know what the favor is.”
“You called me Rock a minute ago. It’s only fair.”
With a nod, she got serious. What could be hotter than watching a woman with a body like that wearing a tight dress pitch a ball? Not much, in Dane Rockwell’s book. In fact, he’d bought her a ring an hour after the last time he saw her pitching in a dress.
Yeah, he was whipped. Over the best girl who ever played catch on the beach at Maddox.
And he was going to slam this ball clean over center field and claim what was his. He wound up and leaned in, right knee bent, eyes narrowed, ready for her pitch, but even more ready for her kiss’s petal-soft pressure, warmth, and delicious taste.
Brooke’s eyes narrowed. She meant business. She palmed the ball. Their eyes met.
With both form and speed, she hurled her fastball overhand, just like Matthew Chadwick had taught her, exactly in the style of Thunder Chadwick. It hurtled toward him at least sixty miles an hour.
Dane swung. The bat connected— ping. He dropped his arm, the bat landing at his foot while he watched his hit sail, sail, sail off. The last rays of sun gleamed, and he had to put a hand up to shield his eyes to see the ball.
Floosh. It landed in the trees, far in the distance.
“Home run!” he hollered to the world in his most barbaric yawp, both his arms shooting straight in the air for the victory, and jumping twice on home plate before he went charging toward the pitcher’s mound to claim his prize.
Brooke held up a hand to slow him. “That’s left field, not center field, my friend.”
“A technicality.” He slowed, but he didn’t stop. Instead he skidded up beside her and pulled her waist up against his torso, her body’s pliant muscles flexing in his grasp and making his fingers tremble with anticipation. “Irrelevant.” He gazed down into her eyes, hunger for her gnawing a hole in him.
“Charlie Root wouldn’t say so.”
“Let’s leave Charlie Root out of our kiss.” Because there would be one, guaranteed. And it would put all other kisses in history to shame as it made Brooke Chadwick beg to be his woman forever.
“It’s not the deal, and you know it.”
“Come on, Brookie Baby.” Dane’s lips were going to spontaneously combust if he didn’t kiss her soon. He’d earned it— all the livelong day he’d earned it. “Fine. What’s your favor?”
Brooke’s eyes twinkled. She was playing him like a bass on a line. “Mr. Appleton. You remember him?”
“Uh, the jeweler? In Maddox?” Sure, Dane remembered him, but he was not part of this moment’s equation. The last thing Dane wanted to think about was a crusty old man when he had this curvaceous girl in a skirt pressed up against him.
“That’s the one.” She ran a soft finger down the side of his neck, raising a shiver in his belly for her. “He said you bought something for me last year. That’s the favor I’m asking as the victor in this bet— I want to see what you bought.”
The ring? She wanted to see the ring? Okay.
From deep in his shirt pocket where he’d kept it daily for over a year, he extracted the platinum setting with the three-carat diamond, the one he’d had to use his first three paychecks at Tweed Law to pay off while he ate nothing but ramen for weeks.
He hooked it on his index finger and dangled it in front of her eyes. It glinted in a final ray of sunlight, and Brooke gasped.
“That–that’s for me? And you actually had it with you today?” She craned her head, wriggling in his arms, and making him aware of every muscle in her torso, while looking at the ring from several angles. He lifted it near to his lips, bringing it into good view, and bringing Brooke into excellent proximity. “It’s a unique cut, like the one Appleton kept in his store window for years.” She looked away from the diamond and back at him now.
She lifted a tentative hand to reach for it and then drew back. “Er, or was for me, I mean.”
“I bought it the night before I kissed you that day at church in front of Pastor Walden and Pansy Proust and God and everyone. In fact, I was planning on proposing to you that day.”
“Really?”
“You were always my Plan A, Brooke.”
Brooke’s eyebrows pushed together, almost in disbelief. “Really?” she said again.
“Really.”
Her voice took on a high whisper. “You were always my Plan A, too.”
Dane couldn’t help letting disbelief surface from inside him, after everything that had passed in the last year—and even a touch of what had happened today after the trial still bit at him. It must have shown in his face.
“No, honest,” Brooke said, sincerity lighting her eyes. “Ask Quirt. Well, don’t. He’ll make fun of me and trot out my junior high notebooks to prove it. Brooke Rockwell. Brooke loves Dane. Brooke ’n’ Rock.” She almost looked sheepish. “So many curlicues and little hearts around our combined names, it’s no wonder I failed eighth grade American History.” Her laugh enveloped him like the scent of baking bread, and he couldn’t help but laugh a little, too, at the image of a teenage Brooke with stars in her eyes— over him. He’d never seen it then, but now, looking back, there might have been something brewing between them all that time.
“You failed American History, huh?” The confession made him laugh a little, and he pressed the ring into his fist as he pulled Brooke up to him again.
“Don’t tell Aunt Ruth.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout.” Her gaze danced up at him, and he was thinking how he could sink into those eyes and live in their light forever. Brooke swatted his chest, and then slid her arms back around him, so close he could feel her heartbeat. “I’m sorry if I ever made you think otherwise. But, dang it, Dane. You were just so molasses-slow in showing me you liked me, I started thinking I’d have to settle for some other person whose letter was much farther down the alphabet.”
“So…Dane and Brooke. Plan A, huh?” Everything inside him clicked together, like the final piece of a puzzle, and it shifted his confidence into overdrive where it belonged. She wants me.
“Dane and Brooke together with hearts and curlicues,” she whispered, her lips nuzzling his neck and her breath tickling his earlobe, shooting shivers of hearts and curlicues up and down his spine.
When her lower lip then grazed his jaw line with soft, tantalizing pressure, he almost succumbed, but Dane still had one question to be asked, even though coherent thought was quickly fleeing because their nearness buzzed with electricity charged enough to light a whole city. “Are you saying if I’d proposed a year ago with this ring, you would have said yes?”
“Right after sending Crosby the dumping text.”
“You wouldn’t have.” Dane let out a soft chuckle, knowing Brooke would never be that cruel.
“If you’d asked, I would have come running, even in my dress—even in my heels.”
That was saying something—because she hated heels. And then Dane couldn’t help remembering the fact that she could come running, after all that life had dealt her, which made that statement and the woman all the more precious to him now. Dane’s soul thrummed with longing and the impossibility of his hopes finally being realized: that despite his Rockwell heritage, and despite everything seemingly in the whole universe that lined up against the two of them, their love might triumph yet.
“You wanted me, huh?”
“I wanted you. Only you.” Her lips grazed his earlobe and she said, “You were always there for me, and I never once thought about counting on anyone else. You’re my go-to. You’re my man.” Truth and sincerity pooled in the fathomless depths of her eyes. She loved him— had loved him, maybe even longer than he’d been in love with her.
I’m her man.
The ring burned in his palm as he let her soft breaths caress the side of his neck and his hands press into the curve of her lower back. She was so beautiful, and he’d wanted this moment for so long.
“This ring was going to be for you, but—” He had her full attention, and he hung on the word, torturing her on purpose, and she wriggled closer to him.
“But?”
“But I’d need a kiss to seal its meaning.” The kiss— he’d earned it, by all accounts. It danced between them, elusive and taunting.
“And what exactly is its meaning?” Her voice came low and breathy, and she bit her lower lip on just the one side, making Dane’s desire for her surge like a wave.
“That you,” he spoke slowly and so she couldn’t misunderstand, “Brooke Chadwick,” he caressed her name, “love me, Dane Rockwell, enough to wear my ring, and to someday be my wife.” He slid it onto her finger as she nodded a fast yes, her eyes welling with tears.
At last Dane cupped her face in his hands and pressed his kiss to her lips. He bent her head back across his arm and kissed her, softly at first, and then with gradually increasing pressure.
She clung to him, her arms tightening on his back, as if she didn’t want even a molecule of air to pass between them to separate them ever again. His mouth coaxed more response from hers, and soon, she was returning his insistence with passion that felt to him like pent-up resistance had all broken loose.
“You’re making me dizzy,” she huffed, pulling away, and then coming back to his mouth for more, giving him a supple reward for his persistent efforts.
“I want to make you dizzy. I will make you dizzy.” Dane hoisted her up, her legs around his waist and spun her in a slow circle on the pitcher’s mound, taking her mouth one taste at a time— cinnamon here, honey here, vanilla there. “You’ve had this coming for years.”
“Uh-huh,” she breathed between efforts. “Oh, Dane. I love you.”
This kiss was worth all the patience he’d exercised. It enticed him from head to toe, and promised of even better things to come once she was, in very deed, his own Mrs. Rockwell.
“So, that’s a yes?”
“Yes, all day long. Every day. Forever.”
He slid the diamond onto her finger at last.