Page 329 of All For You Duet
His voice drops so low. “Eat it.” It’s almost funny.
I drop mine, too. “No.”
“Quit being stubborn.”
“No.” I bury my face in the pillow. “You’re not the boss of me.”
The bed shifts. He crawls over me. “Magnolia Cade Bryant, if you don’t eat this damn banana, I’m gonna cream your corn.”
I crack my eyelids open to his naked silhouette over me. “Promise?” I tease. The lamp by my bed glows, making his tan skin glisten above me. He’s half grinning and half worried, and I don’t know why I’m being so obstinate.
Maybe it’s because he cares so much. Maybe it’s because he can read my heart and know exactly what I need. Maybe it’s because he’s that boy at eighteen who sacrificed everything for me, and he hasn’t stopped. He’s right here. Letting me whine. Letting me be a pain in the ass while he smiles like he loves everything about me.
Or maybe it’s because we can fight and still love each other…
This is my answer. I feel it.
“Split it with me,” I tell him, trying not to be distracted by his nude beauty straddling me. “You were sweating your balls off today, too.”
He puts a quarter piece in my mouth and then pops a piece in his, chewing while he talks, “My balls are doing just dandy, thank you.”
The last half, he splits, putting another piece in my mouth while he chews the rest, and these questions hurt while I swallow down the banana. They have since the night of our pretend fight that felt very real.
“Do you love him more than me?” I ask, almost afraid of the answer. “Would you rather be with him?” Not that if I lost Redix’s love to Silas, I’d be angry. I could almost barely survive it.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he says. “He made you very happy. And y’all never fought.”
“Neither did you two.”
“He gave me hell about stuff, but no, we didn’t fight like you and me.”
My heart is thudding. It needs to know. “So what’s your answer?” I dare to confess, “Because you’re my answer. You always have been.”
He leans forward, bracing one arm by my head while his other hand, his fingertips tickle down my cheek to my lips.
“My answer, Detective, is the same as yours.” His gaze shelters mine. For twenty years, it’s been my heaven. “My answer is that I love my best friend, the one who saved me too, the one who gave me her candy, and I’m never leaving her again.” His lips near mine. My heart thuds, tears welling in my eyes. “My answer,” he almost whispers, “is that I love the one I share this dream with.”
“What’s the dream?” My lips tickle against his.
“That you marry me, please, Cade Bryant.”
I can’t stop them. Tears fall. But these aren’t sad. These are sudden. And pure. And finally, this is the way. “Yes.”
He smiles, so true and from his soul, while he confesses, “I promised Mama G I’d ask, but I was gonna wait a few months, but I can’t wait anymore.”
“She’d want it like this.” My fingers thread through his strands. “She wouldn’t want us to wait. She’d want us to live on. Together.”
He nuzzles his nose to mine. “Our dream starts today, Cade. Promise me.”
“Our dream started the day we met.”
The touch of his lips. They’ve never felt this soft, this real and safe, and they’re never leaving. They’ll always be a pillow away, or at the end of my day, or kissing me by the kitchen sink.
And then his kiss becomes his deepest promise for our dream, months before we’ll swear it over rings. It moves into me, along with his body urging against mine.
We know this dance, this position, while my thighs, my heart, my entire soul open to him one last time because this is it. There’s no going back, and we know it. We feel it as his hand finds mine on his scruffy jaw, and he moves it. Wedging our bodies, lining up his hard tip at my wetting entrance, he rests my palm on his left buttock.
His glute muscles flex under my grasp, the welts of his scar rising against my hand, and my every next day is certain. They’ll be spent loving him.