Chapter 19
Ashley would have thought she couldn’t sleep after the fiasco with Colin, but the twins always overruled her. Instead, she had quickly drifted into a restless sleep full of nightmares. When she awoke, it was still daylight outside. It didn’t really tell her that much as it got dark so late at night here. Glancing at her clock, she saw that it was only six. She had been asleep for two hours
She lay staring at the ceiling for a minute and then placed her hands on her stomach, running them across the taut round surface that was now where she used to have a waistline. She smiled down at it. When she had come here, she had been running away from something, trying to make her life more bearable. In doing so, she had found everything that was the answer to her unhappiness and it wasn’t just the money. She had also been enamored of Colin from the first moment they met and no matter how hard she had tried to fight that, he had gotten through to her, so why was she still here in her room instead of in his arms?
Was she more like her parents than she thought? Incapable of finding happiness with another person? Perhaps she was just doomed to repeat their mistakes, to float around from relationship to relationship until she finally accepted she wasn’t built for it and turned to whatever substance might numb the pain of being doomed to solitude. Could it be that she was never going to find true happiness?
There was the most perfect man in the world in love with her. He was asking her to marry him and instead of being as ecstatic as she should have been, she had freaked out and ran off to her room? What was wrong with her? She thought about this for a few moments and realized that she had just gotten so used to getting everything wrong, that she didn’t know how to accept finally getting something right.
Bolting upright, she picked up the ring from her side table, clutching it tightly in her hand as she went out to look for him. There was no sign of him in the house, so she went out and found Mike having a quick smoke in the back garden.
“Do you know where Colin has gone?” she asked.
He nodded his head toward the castle ruins and she headed that way as fast as she could wobble in her current condition. She arrived red-faced and out of breath.
“Jesus Christ, Ashley. What are you doing? You shouldn’t be coming out here by yourself at this stage of your pregnancy,” Colin said as she entered the open door of the tower, panting like a dog.
“I love you,” she said urgently, holding out her hand with the ring lying in the palm.
“I love you too, but you are giving me back the ring?” he said, sounding even more distraught than he had earlier.
“No. I’m telling you that I’m an idiot and that you never put it on my finger. You have to do that, or we can’t be engaged,” she said, desperation lacing every word.
Colin studied her face, his eyes squinting as if trying to read her thoughts. For a moment, it was like a standoff with him looking at her and her looking back, the ring still lying in her extended palm as if in some sort of love limbo. Finally, his lips curved upward into a smile as he reached out and took the ring from her hand, slipping it onto her finger. Looking down at her, he repeated his question from earlier with quiet deliberation.
“Ashley, will you marry me?”
“Yes! Yes, I will!” she said, this time not hesitating to say what she should have earlier.
“What changed your mind?” he said.
“Nothing changed my mind. I already wanted to marry you. I just didn’t know it.”
“I’m not really sure what to make of that,” he said, his brows twisted together in contemplation, but a bemused look still on his face.
“I just panicked for stupid reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with how I feel about you.”
“You’re going to make me crazy for the rest of my life, aren’t you?” he said in a playful tone.
“You bet your hot Scottish ass I am,” she told him.
Colin put his tools away and opened the hatch beneath where the base of the sculpture he had only recently finished had been standing. Ashley looked down to see nothing but the dirt he had filled into where the fire pit and beyond had been, just as he had said. Still, the idea that it had once held a family’s fortune was intriguing.
“No one knows this is here. You could put a body down there, throw a good coat of cement over the floor and no one would ever think to look for it,” he told her idly.
“Are you threatening me?” she said, laughing.
“I’m just making an observation,” he said, smiling.
“I’ll make a note of that . . . and put it somewhere safe in case I disappear.”
“Good thing you’re about to have two dragons to protect you from one larger one,” he said with a wink.
“Funny. I doubt they’d be able to take you anyway, not for a while.”
“Oh, they’ll be able to take me before you know it. I told you, dragons born of a human and a shifter are stronger than those born of two shifters. I’ll never stand a chance against them. Unless one of them turns out to be a puny girl like you,” he said.
“I’ll show you puny!” she protested, but he was already scooping her up and kissing her.
“You’ve made me very happy today, crazy lady.”
“I’ll make sure that never changes,” she replied.
Colin sat her back down and they made their way out of the tower, locking the door behind them. When they returned to the house, he moved her sculpture from the living room table where they had left it, carrying it to the dresser that held her things in his room before going down to dinner. Afterwards, Colin gathered the staff that was present together and announced their engagement and that was it. No huge fanfare, no big party, just the two of them with the people that spent the most time with them and Ashley found that it was more than enough for her. It wasn’t about other people, it was about them.
When his parents arrived the following week, there was no need for lies other than a bit of omission. While there was no mention of how they had met other than it being on a trip to New York, they did not misrepresent themselves as being married. Instead, Colin told them what was mostly the truth. He knew they would accept that they were getting married soon even though they had gotten pregnant first.
“We met, and it was love at first sight. We got our cart a little in front of our horse, so we’ll be having not one but two babies in a few months and we want to be married before they are born. I thought we would have the ceremony up on the backside of the property in the tower with just us, the babies and our staff.”
“That’s not very much of a wedding day for Ashley, son,” his mother clucked at him in a disappointed tone.
“It’s just a formality for friends and family, Mom. Once the twins are born and get a little bigger so that they are capable of spending a couple weeks with their grandparents, we’re going to do it all again, but more formally, in Italy, before heading off for a long honeymoon.”
“Well, be careful or you’ll only come back with more twins,” his father quipped.
“Oh, you two would love that,” Colin laughed, pulling everyone into a hug.
“Welcome to the family, Ashley. You’re going to wonder sometimes what you did to deserve getting mixed up with the likes of us, but I promise you will never feel bored,” his mom said thoughtfully.
“I can’t imagine that I ever would,” Ashley laughed.
The rest of their visit was pleasant. She couldn’t help but notice that his parents were very different, but they seemed to balance one another out. His mother was very formal, proper, and his father was much more laid back and open. Neither were unpleasant to her, but she got a much deeper sense of some disapproval from his mother than his father. Perhaps it was just that she had such traditional values or maybe this was just how it was with mothers-in-law all over the world.
She wondered if there was ever a woman marrying a man that met his mother and just embraced her immediately. Probably not, she thought, as she caught the woman looking her up and down with pursed lips as she spoke with Colin out of hearing range. Still, she wasn’t rude and that was at least something.
“I take it that your mother didn’t care much for me,” Ashley confided to Colin later that night after their visitors had gone.
“My mother doesn’t like anyone,” he replied.
“So, you aren’t denying it then.”
“Don’t take it personally, Ashley. She doesn’t dislike you and that’s about as good as it gets. My mother is very old fashioned. She was born in a different century, a different place. Her marriage to my father was arranged and he said she was appalled by the idea of having to marry him. He was reckless, foolish, and full of mayhem is what she had said in her protests with her parents, right in front of him.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
“I’ve not always been a good, wholesome boy. I’ve been through my share of women and she knows it. In her mind, I’ve gotten some girl pregnant and, in an act of desperation, decided to marry her to fulfill my family obligations to her and my father. She doesn’t understand that I’m capable of more than flitting from one woman to the next because it is all she’s ever seen me do.”
“Well, that is comforting. I can see that she and I are going to get along fabulously with that sort of thinking.”
“Like I said, don’t take it personally. She didn’t love my father when they married. Hell, she didn’t even like him according to what they’ve both told me, but over time, she has grown to love him. My grandparents matched them simply because they were both shifters and one of my father’s cousins had successfully mated with one of her cousins, so there was a good chance they would be compatible. They lacked the luxury of blood tests like you and I had available to us. It’s just hard for her to accept that the two of us could have been lucky enough to not only be compatible, but to be in love.”
“And she doesn’t know about the blood tests.”
“No. She does not. So, she’s just a skeptic. She questions everything. It’s one thing the two of you have in common. Trust me, once she sees how happy we are, that it’s not just some act we’re putting on for their benefit, she will come around and she will love you just as much as I do.”
“I hope so. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life at odds with your mother.”
“You won’t.”
Ashley kissed him and curled up against him in the bed. She could only lay on her side with him behind her now as her belly got in the way of getting too close if she was facing him. He snuggled up against her with his nose buried in her hair, snoring gently, lulling her to sleep.