“Are you planning on driving me out to the middle of nowhere and dumping my body?” I asked as he took a sharp right turn onto a dirt road that I hadn’t seen until the last minute.
“Not today. Maybe in sixty years,” he said with a smile I barely caught the edge of thanks to the light from his dash.
My heart thumped like a little kid who just got told she was going to Disney—not that I knew from experience, but I could imagine. “Oh? Sixty years?”
His smile got even wider as he navigated us down the pitch-black street. “You play your cards right and maybe it’ll be seventy.”
I was too busy taking in the magnitude of his words to respond.
He glanced at me. “Too much?”
Too much? I squeezed my hands into fists and put them under my thighs for the second time in two days, but this time, it was because… I didn’t know what to do with them, not because I wanted to smack him. “No. It’s just… I’m not used to it. It doesn’t feel real, I guess.”
“What doesn’t feel real?”
“You. This. Everything.” I laughed, feeling nervous all of a sudden. “I mean, I’m fine. I’m not complaining, but it’s just… a lot to take in.”
Zac reached across the console, and I took his hand, sliding my palm across his warm one.
“Just yesterday I thought I was going to need to go far away for a while to get over you, because there was no way I could keep going with you a few feet away and now—”
“And now we’re pulling up to what I wanted to show you,” he cut me off with a squeeze of his hand as he turned the car into a fenced-in property with a gate with horses on it.
I squinted through the side window, but it was too dark to see anything other than a white fence along the sides of the car. “Where are we?”
Up ahead, the headlights caught onto a two-story home circled by a handful of big trees.
I eyed Zac and caught him looking at me with a small smile on his face.
“Why do you look nervous?” I questioned.
“I’m not nervous.”
“That’s your nervous face, Snack Pack.”
“It’s not my nervous face,” he tried to claim.
But it was his nervous face. What the hell did he have to be nervous about?
He slowly pulled the car to a stop along the gravel driveway and put it into park.
“Whose place is this?”
He snickered as he turned the car off. “So many questions. Come on. Come with me.”
I shot him another look but opened the door and got out. He was already circling around the front and, again, putting his hand out toward me. I grinned at him, feeling nervous myself, and took it. “If we get arrested for trespassing, I’m blaming you, okay?”
He tugged me closer and pressed his mouth against my temple before leading me forward. Unable to see much as we headed toward the front door, I tripped on something and just barely kept from busting my ass when Zac pulled my arm up with a laugh too.
“You got those heels on again?”
“No! Maybe….” I laughed as I got my feet under me.
He pulled his phone out and flashed the screen toward the ground. Then he slowly looked back up at me. If I had any hopes he wouldn’t recognize my shoes, they would’ve gone to hell with the look he sent me.
They were the same boots I’d worn the day we’d gone to the haunted house.
His mouth twitched.
I just blinked at him.
He blinked back.
“Are we going in or…?”
He shook his head, and he didn’t need to say anything as we kept going to the front door and stopped there. Using his phone, he illuminated the doorknob, and I saw that there was a keypad above the knob. He pressed in a couple buttons, and it unlocked.
Zac shot me another glance as he opened the door and reached just inside, flicking the lights on. “Come on,” he said.
So I went on. Zac led me through a doorway off the white-walled foyer and into an open area with a spacious living room on the left with a wall full of windows, and on the right was a big, big kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the double fridge, then the double ovens, an island with a beautiful white countertop, and a six-range oven with red knobs. And then there were the two-tone cabinets; the ones against the wall were white and the bottoms ones were navy.
“Oh wow,” I said. “This place is awesome.”
The fingers holding mine twitched. “You think?”
“Yeah. I mean, Trev’s place is amazing, don’t get me wrong, but this one….” I looked up at him with a smile. “Is this a vacation rental? I feel like we’re not that far from Paw-Paw’s house, but I would know if they remodeled their place.”
“No, this isn’t Paw-Paw’s,” he confirmed. Zac leaned his hip against the island, crossed his arms over his chest, and fucking said it. “I don’t want you to move to Killeen.”
I blinked. “Okay….”
Then he nodded. “You move, I’m goin’ with you.”
Andddd I froze. The weight of his words kicked me in the stomach. “What the hell are you talking about, Zac?”
“If you move to Killeen, to Morocco, to Orlando… I’m comin’ with you.”
My stomach cramped suddenly.
“I know you said this is all new and it doesn’t feel real and it’s too fast, but… Bibi, I’ve always known what I wanted. Maybe sometimes I don’t think straight and I might fart around, but once I get my head on and decide on somethin’, I’m gonna do it. And if I’ve learned anything the last couple weeks, it’s that I don’t wanna be without you. I’m so damn in love with you, kiddo, and I wanna be where you are.”
He stood up straight suddenly and blazed those light blue eyes at me, his hands going to my wrists, where he swallowed them up, making them feel small. He took a deep breath, and his shoulders fell. “I know you’ve got your own life, and I know you’ve got these dreams and plans that you don’t need me for, but I’ll buy you the nicest kitchen I can afford if you don’t leave.” One hand let go of my wrist, but all he did was stretch my fingers out, and then he rubbed them. “If you stick with me. If you gimme a chance.”
My heart was going to hammer out of my chest at this rate. In about three seconds. Maybe two.
“Zac—” I started to say.
“I don’t know where the hell I’m gonna end up a month from now, or two weeks from now, and I’m sorry—”
“Zac,” I tried to cut him off again.
He wouldn’t let me. “But I bought this place. I closed on it two days ago. There’s twenty-seven acres, plenty of room for us to build you a studio or somethin’ like you said you wanted. I can’t promise I won’t have to move around in the near future, but I wanna have some place to come home to. Some place that won’t go anywhere.” He bit his bottom lip. “If you don’t like somethin’—”
“Zachary James Travis,” I whispered.
He stopped talking and raised his eyebrows. “Bianca Maria Brannen.”
“You told me you loved me yesterday, and today you’re telling me you bought a house? You bought me a house?”