Gabby reached for one as soon as she was seated and snapped it in two.
She’d worn another dress tonight, this one more slinky, more revealing. Straps so thin they looked like they could snap at any moment and the black fabric held a shimmer to it every time she moved. The front draped loosely over her breasts, revealing cleavage that made my mouth water. The lights above us reflected off her, making her appear like an angel—a dirty, filthy angel who loved all the things I did to her in bed—but an angel all the same.
“You’re giving me the sex look,” she muttered, biting into her breadstick.
“My sex look?”
“Yeah.” She spun the breadstick in a circle pointed at me. “Yeah, that dimple on your cheek pops out when you’re thinking of sex.”
I cleared my throat. “Of course I’m thinking of sex. You’re in front of me, and all I can think of is dragging my tongue down that cleavage on display, sucking on your nipples until you’re begging for more.”
Her lips parted, cheeks flushed, and she huffed. “You can’t say things like that to me in public.”
“Why not?”
“Because now I want sex, too.”
I laughed as her cheeks turned crimson. “You make that sound like a bad thing.”
She rolled her eyes and hissed at me in a way that was much too playful to be serious. “Well I don’t want to leave a wet spot on their chairs, so stop it.”
I waggled my brows playfully, fighting against the urge to make her do just that. “Have I turned you on already? Just thinking about how much I like sucking on you—”
“Stop.” She tossed the remainder of her breadstick across the table at me.
I caught it easily and popped it into my mouth.
“You’re horrible,” she grumbled.
“That’s not what you said this morning.”
Our server appeared at the table, smirking at me in a way that proved he’d heard me. Gabby choked on her water.
We ordered, scallops and shrimp pasta for Gabby, a ribeye and lobster tail for me, and as soon as he left, I returned to the conversation.
Seeing Gabby’s cheeks turn hot pink had become my favorite thing. “If I remember correctly, which I’m sure I vividly do, you called me amazing. Incredible. You said I was awesome.”
As predicted, cheeks warmed, eyes rolled. She tipped her glass in my direction. “That’s not what I said.”
“No?”
“No. I said it was incredible. Amazing and awesome. You were not mentioned at all.”
“Semantics. You wouldn’t have had it if it hadn’t been for me. Which makes them interchangeable.”
Another eye roll but she said nothing.
I took that as a win.
It was after dinner was done. After we’d both had a couple of drinks. After we both groaned absolutely not when it came to our server’s offer of seeing a dessert menu. The only dessert I needed was sitting across from me, a woman who I’d fallen in love with much quicker than I realized.
It was then, with the twinkling lights around us, the soft laughter of others at tables nearby, the breeze in the air and the sound of the lake in the distance I took my shot.
I’d meant to wait until we were back in our RV, bundled beneath blankets and curled up skin-to-skin, but Gabby looked so relaxed, so happy.
I wanted to help her stay that way forever.
Leaning forward, I set my drink off to the side.
“I’m going to say something, and I’m hoping you’re ready to hear it, because I can’t keep it to myself any longer.”
She blinked, surprised, wiping away the relaxed gleam in her eye. “What is it?”
I reached across the table, took her hand in mine. She was soft, a slight chill to her skin and as I rubbed my thumb over her palm, she shivered.
“I love you, Gabby. I’m pretty sure I fell in love with you the night we were married, only I didn’t know it truly until we came on this trip.”
As I spoke, her lips parted, that shiver turned to a full body tremble. Her hand tightened in mine and she opened her mouth but no words came out.
I pushed on.
“I know when we woke up that morning, and since then, I’ve said there had to be a reason for why we got married, and I wanted to figure it out, that we owed it to each other to do that, but now I know why.”
“Joey—” Her voice was a rasp, barely audible, as if finding words were difficult, but mine were easy.
They fell from my lips like rain fell from the clouds.
“You love life. You love finding the enjoyment and the beauty in the smallest things. You enrapture every single person you come in contact with. Your laugh is infectious, and your smile can light up a starless sky. Everything I learn about you makes me fall deeper under your spell, so we might be married already, but I’m asking you when this trip is done to move to Vegas with me. Permanently. Let me buy you your salon so you can chase your dreams. Stay married to me, Gabby, and I swear it, I will bust my ass to make sure you have everything you can possibly desire and more.”
My heart raced and my grip on her hand didn’t loosen. One breath passed.
Then two.
Another.
Tears swam in her eyes and she swallowed, opened her mouth, and I swore the words yes were going to fall from them as easily as her smiles came.
But then she said, “I… I can’t.”
No. She said no. It was possible my heart stopped, shriveled. A pain so severe ripped through me I was terrified of collapsing right there. My world imploded just as I’d hoped it was beginning.
“Why?” I could barely choke out the word.
“I think… no.” She flipped her hand beneath mine and held on to me as I tried to pull away from her. “I love you too. I want you to know that and I would love nothing better to let you do all those things for me. But part of the reason why I always wanted to make this trip and see these things isn’t just to see the country, but to figure out myself. I can’t do that if I go from letting Garrett take care of me to having you do it. It’s not right.”
“I’m your husband. It’s my job.”
“It’s mine to figure out how to take care of myself first, though. I need to know I can do that. My mom’s right—”
“The hell she is.”
Is that what this was about? Her mom?
“Please. She is, in a sense. I need to know I can be independent. I need to know I can live life on my own two feet. I need to know what kind of woman that makes me before I stand back and let someone else make my dreams come true for me.”
She was killing me. Absolutely killing me. I wanted to plead with her, to get her to see that even if she had family who helped her, she’d already done so much for herself. She’d proven she could take care of herself. She held down a job, a career she loved, she lived on her own. She had the strength to leave a relationship after investing so much time in a man who treated her like shit—something not all women did. But there was something in her eyes, all light from our earlier adventure now gone, that told me she wasn’t in the place to listen.
She wouldn’t hear all the ways she took care of herself and had already proven her own strength.
This was something she needed to figure out for herself.