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She blinked back a fresh rush of tears and turned her cheek to speak directly into his ear. “I’m in love with you, too.”
His smile lit up his whole face, softening the lines of worry and age, his gray-blue eyes sparkling. When he stepped back, lifting the microphone to his lips again, he kept one hand closed firmly around hers. Beckett turned his attention out to the audience. “I need your help with this next part,” he said, his voice booming through the sound system.
All across the arena, audience members reached under their seats and came back holding up bundles of flowers. Daffodils and marigolds as far as the eye could see, cream and crimson, apricot and the brightest sun-kissed yellow, soft pinks and brilliant oranges, peach and ivory and fiery red. A sea of blooms waving back at them.
She turned, stunned, to Beckett, just as the sky opened up and flower petals rained down over the crowd, swirling, dancing, delicate petals shooting from the confetti blowers at the edge of the stage and falling from the rigging, coating everything in color.
“I didn’t want to wait for our garden to grow,” Beckett said, holding her gaze captive.
He only winced a little as he got to one knee, the screams of the audience reaching a new level of intensity. “Your knee,” she said through her tears, and though he couldn’t possibly have heard her, he arched an eyebrow at her, his lips twitching in amusement, as if to tease her for interjecting her concern into this moment.
“Katerina Luna, I loved you in that little yellow dress sitting at my poker table. I loved you when you left, when you came back, and every day in between. But I have never loved you more than I do now.” He ran his thumb over the ring on her finger, the beautiful diamond and gold band he’d put there weeks ago. “It was never pretend. Not to me. Please say you’ll marry me.”
She hadn’t even realized she was nodding until he got back to his feet, cradling her face in his hands.
“Yes?” he asked, the hope in his eyes squeezing her heart until she thought she might burst with the joy of it.
“Yes. Of course, I’ll marry you,” she said.
As his lips pressed to hers, the crowd faded away, their excited screams and cheering morphing into white noise, their repeated confessions of love murmured against each other’s lips the only sound that mattered. A sound etched onto her heart, into every nerve ending and cell.
When at last they broke apart, her lips tingling with the intensity of his kisses, she rose up on her tiptoes to say in his ear, “What happens now?”
“Now?” He cradled her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing away the tears and mascara beneath her eyes as a slow smile spread across his face. “Now we live happily ever after.”
Epilogue
Four Months Later
“Is it supposed to look like that?” Nico asked, peering around Beckett into the open oven in Beckett’s Aster Bay kitchen.
Beckett scowled and slammed the oven closed, turning off the frustrating appliance in the process. “I don’t get it. I did everything the recipe says.” He pointed accusatorily at the recipe on the poured concrete countertop.
“Is this one of Eva’s?” Nico asked, picking up the print out. Beckett grunted an acknowledgment. “Why don’t you just call her? I’m sure she’d walk you through it.”
“I’m not calling Zach’s sister.”
“Stepsister,” Nico corrected.
“Same thing.”
“Very much not the same thing,” Nico said. “I would be an asshole for saying Zach’s sister is hot. I’m only mildly inconsiderate for saying his stepsister is.”
Beckett rolled his eyes and reached for his cell phone, muttering, “Just wanted to cook my fiancée a nice meal. Fucking ordering takeout again.”
“Ooh, are you ordering from Lemon and Thyme? Get me some of their beet gnocchi.”
“Get your own damn beet gnocchi. You’re not staying,” Beckett said as he entered his order into the website of the best restaurant in Aster Bay.
“You’re kicking me out?” Nico asked with mock offense.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be? Like at your own house?”
Nico sighed. “It’s all the way across the street.”
Beckett shot him a look. Not that he didn’t enjoy spending time with his bandmate, but some days he questioned the wisdom that had led them all to build houses around the same cul-de-sac in the small Rhode Island town—like when he wanted to spend a romantic evening with his fiancée, for example.
“Logan and I do have that meeting with the Love Resort people in a little while.”
