I don’t know what to say. I stare at the silver platinum ring inside the white velvet, and then I glance up at her.
“Is this an April Fool’s joke?” I ask, my voice shaking. “Are you punking me?”
“You’re kind of ruining this,” she says, her expression falling at my question. My own face shifts, and I scowl her.
“You stole my thunder.”
“What?” Her forehead furrows.
“You…” I sit up quickly, snap the box shut, and take her mouth with mine. The kiss is quick before I lean over for the nightstand and tug the bottom drawer open. I hold out my own gift for her.
“Patience, Mum said, but I’ve been waiting a long time to give this to you. I didn’t know if you were ready, but I had it just in case. Just in case I could make a fuss and demand you marry me.”
“Demand?” she snaps without irritation. A smile turns her face from confused to sunshine.
“Yes, I’m here for you. End of story. I’m yours. Be mine.” I want her to belong to me like I belong to her.
“Yes, Ethan. I’ll marry you. Now answer my question.”
“What question is that?” I tease, leaning forward with a smile on my lips.
“Will you marry me?”
“There’d never be anyone else. I’d love to marry you, princess. I love you.” My mouth meets hers once again before I pull back and slip the ring on her finger. She does the same to mine, and we clasp our left hands together. The metal of each band clinks above our palms, but they look good together. I bring her hand to my mouth and kiss over the ring, lingering there before I look up at my soon-to-be wife because who am I kidding, I’m tired of patience. She’s the love of my life, and the future never looked so good.
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Thank you for reading.
Up next in the Heart Collection: Fight From The Heart
If you’d like more of the Scott Family:
View With Your Heart
Want to stay up to date on all things L.B. Dunbar: Love Notes
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More by L.B. Dunbar
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Silver Player
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Rom-com for the over 40
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The Heart Collection
Small town, sweet and sexy stories of family and love.
Speak from the Heart
Read with your Heart
Look with your Heart
Fight from the Heart
View with your Heart
The Legendary Rock Star Series
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The island knows what you’ve done.
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Turn the page for an excerpt of Fight From The Heart.
Excerpt:
Fight From The Heart – Book 4 in the Heart collection
Chapter 1
Must be the flu
[Pam]
I hate that I’m in love with my boss.
I actually have two jobs so it’s not my day-job boss. It’s my other boss—an annoyingly needy grown-ass forty-year old man who I’ve worked for over two years and still wonder most days why I do it.
Because you think he’s hot and he pays you well for your time.
Yes, but should it be about money and looks? I’m literally arguing with myself in my head which is pounding. It’s mid-February. As a single woman, I’ve survived the dreaded Valentine’s holiday, but I’m not feeling great. Stuffy nose. Sore throat. Cough. Aches. Chills. It’s your classic flu and all I want to do is curl up in bed—my bed—in my apartment.
Not here. Not at selfish Jacob Vincent’s house waiting to let the housecleaner in.
You live alone. It’s not even dirty in here, I internally scold him.
Jacob’s home on the shore of Lake Michigan sits just outside our small town of Elk Lake City. It’s a huge house with floor to ceiling windows along the back of the home and strangely reminds me of what Edward Cullen’s house was depicted as in Twilight, the books, not the movies.
The movies never get it right, Jacob likes to argue with me. It’s all about the written word. Books do it best.
He isn’t wrong. As a fiction author, his writing first attracted me to him. To his books, not him personally.
In person, Jacob Vincent is nothing short of edgy and rugged in a boxer kind of way. He’s lean but muscular. Feisty and jumpy with deep dark eyes like midnight and a head of short hair to match. He doesn’t have a scruffy beard so much as a jaw covered with artful stubble, unless he’s in writer mode. Then he might go days without shaving giving him the lumberjack effect. Either way, he’s a good-looking man in the way a man can be when he’s had his nose broken a few times, cuts on his forehead and cheek that marred his perfection, and several tattoos on his body. From physical appearances, you’d never image words are how he likes to fight best.
And right now, I’d like to throat punch him myself for requesting I be here to let the housecleaner enter.
Just give her a key, I argued with him before he left on a ten-day holiday with his girlfriend.
That’s right. The man I’m in love with also has a picture-perfect girlfriend, tall and lean herself with big boobs and a tight ass. Not like me, who is curvy in all the right places but not the right places for a man like Jacob Vincent. She’s Malibu Barbie and I’m just the shape of Michigan.
Jacob refused to give a key to anyone other than me and his stepsister Ella who lived here for a while. As she’s in New York, I’m the one who feels like I’m on my deathbed waiting for a cleaning lady to clean a house that isn’t even dirty.