The air seeps out of me as Jemma pokes me in the arm with her elbow.

“Who is that?” she asks. “Because we definitely didn’t order him up to deliver flowers for your birthday. I mean, I wish I’d thought of it, but… Are you even listening, Jules?”

I still don’t know what to say as I stare at Owen.

My teenaged sister hops out of the car. She has to come around to my side to open my door. When she starts pulling me out, I don’t move.

I just sit there as Owen watches me while still holding the flowers. Funny, even the flowers can be a shield for him—but then he lowers them as I see something deep and profound in his eyes, even from here.

“Jules!” Jemma whispers. “You’re freaking me out.”

Freaking out… Yes, that’s definitely what I’m doing as Owen starts to walk toward the car.

Panicked, I reach over to start the engine again, but that doesn’t make sense. Nothing about what I’m feeling right now makes sense as emotion surges in me like an off-balance chemical rush—sadness, uncertainty, anger taking me over.

Then I remember the last time we saw each other: Owen saying that he never wanted to see me again right before he left me and never came back…

I break down into the tears that have been threatening me ever since he left. I cry into my hands, covering my face so that no one can see what a true mess I am now.

Why is he here? Does he think flowers are going to solve something?

“Jules?” I hear Jemma saying.

Then I hear Owen’s voice, slightly out of breath as if he ran the rest of the way over here. “Juliet?”

I feel his big hand slide onto my arm as if he wants to hold me, comfort me, but in a flash of confused, blurred, teary rage, I burst out of the car. Suddenly I’m beating on Owen’s chest, and it feels like rock beneath my fists.

“I hate you!” I yell. “I hate all your stupid compulsive rules and habits and everything you stand for!”

I pummel him again and again, but he merely stands there and takes it. Through my tears I see that Jason has run up behind Owen to take the flowers from him before I beat those to a pulp, too, and the thought that my own brother is helping the man who broke my heart pisses me off even more.

“Juliet, I was a coward.”

I pull my hand back from giving Owen another punch as his words echo around me. A latent sob shudders through me as I look up at him and blink back tears.

“What did you say?” I ask in a shaky voice.

“I said I was a coward. I ran away from you and your messy, chaotic reality and everything it represented.”

He’s not stiff or tense. There’s something very open about him now, and I keep my fist raised. But I’m listening, even as the blood jams in my veins, urging me to run away because I’m afraid he’s going to hurt me again, that there’ll be more emotional pain in my near future.

Yet, dammit, I want to stay and listen.

No, I think. I just want to stay with him…

He must see that he’s got my attention, and he continues. “My whole life I’ve tried to put everything into order. I’ve tried to keep the demons of my childhood at bay. But, now, for the first time, I’ve realized that it isn’t worth it to be neat and tidy and ordered anymore.” He tilts his head like a tamed beast. “All I want now is you, Juliet. At any cost.”

The words are still swirling around me, waiting for me to grab onto them. Meanwhile, he looks at my brothers and sisters who are hanging onto his every word, just as gape-mouthed as I was when I first showed up at his mansion’s doorstep.

Then he looks back at me. “Most importantly, I want all of the crazy messiness that comes with you, too.”

He can’t mean that he would also accept the kids, because they’re a part of me. I’ll never go anywhere without them again.

I doubt everything he’s saying, because he’s spent so much time pushing me away—and everything that surrounds me.

As I try to catch my breath, finding some sense in all this, I hear little Jazzie whisper to the other kids.

“Jules has a boyfriend!”

“Shut up,” Jake says.

Now, with them so personally involved, I do come to my senses. “Kids, please go in the house.”

Jemma shakes her head. “Not on your life.”

But the young man of the house, Jason, forcefully begins to herd them away while muttering something about adults needing their privacy. Jemma rolls her eyes as Jason gives the flowers back to me.

Owen keeps watching me, and I clutch the bouquet in front of me like it’s my shield.

After the kids get to the house, the screen door shuts behind them, but I know they’re still behind it, listening.

When I look back at Owen, there’s tenderness in his gaze. It’s the same emotion I’ve caught in him a few times when we were together, but it was always gone before I could identify it.

He’s not hiding it now.

“I still don’t know what spurred this visit,” I whisper, “and I’m positive that you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’d better believe I do.” Now a fiercer emotion fills his dark eyes, but it’s not anger. I think it’s…

Love?

As my head spins he goes on.

“You don’t know how many times I’ve started to walk out my door, ready to come to you. But there were still so many of those demons nattering at me, telling me that I wouldn’t ever be able to get as close as I wanted to be to you, that I didn’t deserve it, and you would only…”

“What? Contaminate you?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking, Juliet. For a long time, I believed that there was no one on earth who would ever understand my situation. Then you showed up, only for me to drive you away. Or should I say that I drove away from you?”

At the mention of the day he left me, I grip the flowers tighter.

His smile is back, but it’s melancholy. “Then, one day, when I turned on the sound system in the music room, a song came blaring on. Music that you evidently would listen to and dance around to when I wasn’t home. At least that’s what Nat told me.” He fists a hand and puts it over his heart. His voice goes jagged. “That’s when I really felt how hollow my life was without you around. It was as if a piece of me was missing, and I had to have you back where you belong.”

“I belong here, with the kids—”

“And they’re no doubt as wild and chaotic as you can be. But I want that, Juliet. I want all of it.”

The sweet scent of the flowers is beginning to lull me. So is the warmth of Owen’s gaze as he lavishes it over my face, taking me in as if he really did miss me.

I’m beginning to believe, second by second, that he did.

My god, he did.

He lowers his voice so just the two of us can hear. “When you came into my life, for the first time I was able to forget about all of my tension and hang-ups and need for order. With you, I wanted to be dirty. Goddammit, so dirty. You brought out a side of me that was always pent up. You could say you unleashed something I’d been struggling to keep inside.”

I think of the beast he always became when it was only the two of us in a room, and my skin flushes.

He reaches out his hand to me, then drops it as if he still doesn’t know what’s going through my mind. “That first night, when I didn’t use a condom… I just didn’t do things like that. Ever. You saw how I acted—the dread, the claustrophobia. It was all so messy, literally and figuratively. So raw. My need for you took me off guard because you didn’t fit in to my well-planned routine like you were supposed to.”

He’s breaking me down. But was there ever much to break? I’ve always been his, even after he hurt me so badly.

He must see this in my teary gaze, because he finally reaches out to brush his fingertips over my cheek. He wipes away those tears.

“The morning after we were first together and you left, I couldn’t let you go even then, Juliet. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. I couldn’t stop wanting to be with you, and that’s why I showed up on the jet. That’s why I wanted an extended arrangement.”

“And are you down here to offer me another extension? Is that what this is?”

“No.”

He tucks my hair behind my ear, looking into my eyes as if he’s finally allowed himself to get lost in them, just as I’ve gotten lost in his so many times.

I’m not sure why he’s here if it’s not for another arrangement. I’m afraid to ask, so I say, “What if you run away again when things get tough?”

Now there’s something in his gaze I really haven’t seen before. Peace.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says firmly. “And when I say it, I mean it.”

He gets down to one knee, and as I grip the flowers, he reaches into his jacket and produces a velvet box. He opens it to reveal a shining diamond ring. The thing is enormous.

More tears gather in my eyes, but they’re not even remotely sad or angry. They’re tears of rapture.

I faintly hear the screen door of the house opening as he lifts the box with the ring in it to me.

“Juliet Hope, I love you with all my heart and soul. Marry me. Be with me. Love me as much as I love you.”

All of my fear has flown, and I know what I want. I always did.

I nod mutely, then burst out with my response. “I love you, Owen,” I gasp. “Of course I’ll marry you.”

As I fall down into his arms, he catches me, then sweeps me into a delirious kiss that has my mind filled with cheers.

Heat roars through me in every way—love, adoration, fulfillment. Today is the first of many days with Owen....

Then, gradually, I realize that the cheers aren’t in my head—my brothers and sisters are the ones yelling with glee, running to us like a wild bunch. When I break from the kiss, Owen softly dries the rest of my face with his knuckles, and I look up at my family.

“Told you she has a boyfriend!” Jazzie says.

Then my crazy siblings mob Owen, asking a million questions. They’re hugging me at the same time, shaking me and demanding to know what’s going on, even as they’re laughing because I’m so damned happy.

But Owen keeps holding me tight, keeping me upright, just as he’s always done.

And just as I’m going to continue to do for him.