Page 99 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Rafe."

"I'm not letting it go again. Not you, not them, not any version of this. I want to marry you, Jenna. I want to be the name on the paperwork and the guy standing at the door for every single pickup and the reason these two have someone else in their corner besides you for the rest of their lives. I want all of it, out in the open, with witnesses who apparently take their jobs very seriously." He reaches into his jacket pocket, and Josie practically launches the little paper-towel bundle at him before he can even ask, and he catches it, laughing despite himself, unwrapping it with hands that aren't quite steady.

"Yes."

"You haven't even seen the ring yet."

"Doesn't matter what it looks like. My answer's still yes."

"Jenna."

"Yes, Rafe. The answer's yes." I'm laughing and it's coming out tangled up with something closer to tears, and the twins are shrieking, actually shrieking, Josie jumping in place and Eli pumping one fist like his team just won something, and Rafe's still kneeling there in the grass looking up at me like he can't quite believe the mission succeeded.

"I had a whole speech left."

"Save it for the wedding."

He laughs, low and disbelieving, and finally slides the ring onto my finger with hands that have gone properly unsteady now, no calm left in them at all, and it catches the last of the light exactly the way the whole ridge is catching it, gold and warm and entirely too perfect to be real. He stands, and I go straight into his arms, and the twins crash into both of us at once, the four of us knotted together in the grass in front of a sign that stayed hidden for a full week thanks entirely to one very serious eight-year-old's sense of duty.

"Does this mean you're really our dad now?" Josie asks, muffled against my side, and something in Rafe's whole body goes still.

"If you'll have me."

"We already voted," Eli says. "You were unanimous."

"When exactly did this vote happen?"

"Last week. During perimeter duty." Eli says it like the timeline should have been obvious, like important elections simply happen whenever the mission requires them. "Josie wanted it official in writing, but we didn't have paper that wasn't already covered in paint."

"I'm putting it in writing now," Josie announces. "Somebody find me a crayon."

Rafe laughs, and it breaks a little in the middle, and he pulls all three of us in tighter, gold light pouring long and low across a ridge that used to hold only grief and now, finally, holds this too, all four of us and a hand-painted sign and a valley that's about to become the place we tell this story from for the rest of our lives.

50

RAFE

Isign the last form at the kitchen table an hour before I'm supposed to be getting dressed, Priya's assistant hovering just long enough to notarize it and then leaving me alone with a stack of paper that somehow outweighs anything else I've signed in my life.

"That's the whole thing?" Jenna asks, watching from the doorway in her robe, hair still in curlers, looking more nervous about this than she has about anything wedding related so far.

"That's the whole thing." I set the pen down and look at the last page one more time, my name printed next to two others in a font that doesn't know what it just did. I'm a legal guardian now, a stepfather, official and notarized, filed with the county before I've even put on a tie. "Eli and Josie Montgomery-Walsh, if the school paperwork ever catches up to this."

"You're allowed to be emotional about it."

"I'm not being emotional. I'm being efficient. Big day, lot to get through." The words catch halfway out, thick with something I can't quite hide in time, and Jenna crosses the kitchen and puts both hands on my shoulders, and I give up pretending on the next breath, the one I can't quite finish.

"There he is," she says, gentle, no teasing left in it at all.

"I've been signing paperwork with a legal pad in my back pocket for more years than I like to admit, reasons to leave, columns of risk, all of it. This is the first stack of forms I've ever signed that made me want to stay put instead of run."

"Good thing you've got a wedding to get to, then."

"I've got about an hour before Dot has my head for being late to my own ceremony."

"Dot would forgive you anything. She's been planning this wedding longer than we have." Jenna kisses the top of my head, quick, easy, and heads back toward the bedroom to finish getting ready, and I sit there another minute with the paperwork squared into a neat stack, running my thumb along the edge of it the way I used to run my thumb over a set of dog tags on a night I don't visit alone anymore. It's a different kind of weight entirely, the kind a man actually wants to carry.

I find Eli in the hallway a few minutes later, already half dressed, wrestling stubbornly with a bow tie he refuses to let anyone help him with on principle.