“The smell of that crap was enough to turn my stomach, baby.” I sat beside her and pulled her legs across my lap before picking up my own plate. “I don’t know how you ate so much of it.”
“I was determined to get to come home and not have to spend the night in the hospital. I wanted to sleep snuggled against you.”
“I would have made it happen if they had kept you overnight,” I promised.
She took another bite of her sandwich before looking at me through her lashes. “What you asked me before…about moving in with you…”
“I’ll go get your stuff right now if you want,” I told her, happiness causing little zings of pleasure to detonate throughout my body.
Her laugh filled the room. “That doesn’t have to happen right this second, but yeah, we can move my things over. If you’re still interested in me living with you.”
“Having you sleep in my arms every night for the rest of our lives would be a dream come true for me, Doe.” I cupped the side of her face, stroking my thumb over her bottom lip. “You are my entire world, baby. I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I couldn’t come home to you every day, I would wither and die.”
She leaned into my touch. “Same.”
The commercials on the TV ended, and the news anchor’s face filled the screen. “Breaking news out of Nashville, Tennessee. Senator Jonas Wilcox is under fire tonight after it was alleged that his daughter, Courtney Wilcox, has been prostituting herself to get her father’s campaign funded…”
The anchorman continued to go into more detail about the allegations, and several pictures of Courtney in compromising positions with major contributors to her father’s campaign popped up on one side of the screen. Beside me, Doe watched with wide eyes, her mouth hanging slightly open.
“Whoa, isn’t that the girl you were talking to in the grocery store a while back?” I asked, feigning surprise.
Doe didn’t seem to be able to look away from the dumpster fire on the flat-screen. “Yeah, that’s her,” she mumbled, taking another bite of her sandwich and chewing with gusto.
We watched in silence for a while until she’d finished her sandwich and started munching on half of my second one. She didn’t look away from the pictures on the TV until the anchor went to commercial.
“Huh,” she said with a grunt. “That sucks so bad for her. She always had aspirations to go into politics like her dad. I bet her dad will have to resign and back out of the November election now.”
I stared at her in wonder. After everything Aspen had said about what Courtney did to Doe over the years, I would have expected her to be full of glee and rooting for Wilcox and his daughter to crash and burn. Yet she was sincerely sad for the girl who had taken pleasure in bullying her for so long.
Doe had already shown me that she was precious, but it wasn’t until right then that I realized how one of a kind she truly was. There was no ill will in her, no maliciousness of any sort. She was good all the way to her core.
In that moment, I knew just how undeserving of her I really was, but I’d be damned if I ever let anyone take her away from me. I needed to lock her down, put my ring on her finger before someone more worthy came along and tried to steal this real-life angel.
Cupping the back of her head, I pulled her in for a long, tender kiss. With a dreamy sigh, she pulled back and looked up at me with glazed eyes. “What was that for?”
“Just reminding myself that you are mine.”
“I’ll always be yours,” she murmured, licking her kiss-swollen lips.
“Not long enough.”
Epilogue
Doe
I grabbed my purse off the passenger seat and made a run for the medical plaza entrance. It was pouring with rain outside, and even with my jacket on and the hood up over my head, I was soaked all the way through by the time I got to the door.
Tossing back the hood, I started to wring out my hair before walking into the building, not wanting to cause a puddle that someone might slip in and fall on the tiled floor. The blast of the AC as I hurried toward Dr. Contreras’s office made me shiver, but I ignored it as I practically sprinted down the corridor.
I was late, and this was definitely one visit I didn’t want to miss.
It had been eighteen months to the day since I’d donated bone marrow to Pixie, and she was in remission. But it wasn’t the worry of her illness returning that made me not want to miss the doctor’s visit. Dr. Contreras had had a long conversation with Jenner the week before, so I was well aware of what was going to happen today, and I wanted to be front and center when he popped the question.
Tomas. I had to remember to start calling him Tomas now. The man couldn’t be the equivalent of my brother-in-law and I still called him Dr. Contreras.
Jenner and I always accompanied Pixie to every doctor’s appointment, but I’d woken up feeling off that morning. I hadn’t told Jenner about it, but I had made a quick excuse about Mom needing my help with something. I’d promised I would meet them at the appointment.
After he’d left to pick up Pixie, I’d made a quick stop at the pharmacy and then spent the next hour staring at the two pink lines on the pregnancy test in wonder. Jenner and I had been married for six months, but we’d only decided to start trying to get pregnant the month before. I knew how hard it was for some people to get pregnant, taking years for them to conceive. Having a positive pregnancy test so soon didn’t seem like it should be possible. I was scared that it was false, so I’d taken another, and then another after that once it had been positive as well.
All three tests had said the same thing, but my fear that it was all a dream still lingered.
But my anxiety over being pregnant or not had to be pushed to the back of my mind as I opened the door to the hematologist’s office. The receptionist behind the desk saw me as soon as I walked in and quickly waved me back. I shot her a grin and opened the door that led to the exam rooms. A nurse stood outside a door, and she urged me over. With a wink, she opened the door for me.
Slightly out of breath, I stepped inside. Thankfully, it was just Pixie and Jenner so far. Pixie, with her baby-fine blond hair cut in a chic bob, gave me a wide-eyed greeting. Jenner jumped to his feet and pulled my jacket off before shrugging out of his own and wrapping it around me. His huge hands rubbed over my chilled arms. “Baby, you’re freezing.”
“I’m okay,” I murmured, leaning in for a kiss. My trembling wasn’t completely from the cold, but I didn’t want to spoil this for Pixie with my own news.
I barely had time to sit and pull out my phone, pretending to send a text. Opening the camera, I hit record and waited…
The knock on the door was loud, but the door didn’t open. Pixie huffed. “We’re all decent in here, Doc!” she yelled.
Another knock came, but still, it didn’t open. Muttering expletives under her breath that made Jenner snicker, she got off the exam table and stomped to the door. She pulled it open with ten times more strength than she would have had eighteen months before, a snarky retort on her lips, only to stop in her tracks when she came face-to-face with the man on his knees before her.
“Doc?” she whispered with a catch in her voice.