“What are you doing here?”
It was not quite the reception I had expected. So I decided to take Lemon’s advice and just tell him how I felt. “Someone tore my heart out and carried it across the ocean.”
I saw him swallow several times. I took a step forward. He stepped back.
“But it’s okay. I don’t want it back. You can keep it. It was always yours, anyways.”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to say those things to me. You’re not obligated to. You don’t have to say them because you feel guilty or you think you owe me. You don’t.”
“Is that what you think?” That was so far from how I felt that it stunned me. “That’s not why I’m here. I came here to tell you no.”
“No?” he repeated.
“You were always encouraging me to say no. So, no, I won’t accept you leaving me. No, I won’t be apart from you. No, you can’t go on without knowing how I feel about you.”
I put my hand out and let it fall when he didn’t make a move to take it.
“Aunt Sylvia told me what you told her. About the things I said in the ambulance. I don’t remember saying them. I never would have said any of that stuff to you if I’d been in my right mind. Because it was the opposite of how I feel. If I could slingshot a starship around the sun, go back in time, and undo it, I would.”
“You know that’s theoretically impossible.” Finally, a glimmer of hope.
“I know. And I wish you’d given me a chance to explain instead of leaving. Because that made me discover I kind of have serious abandonment issues.”
“I thought you wanted me to go. That you couldn’t or didn’t love me. And I loved you enough to respect your wishes, even though it killed me. And I was ashamed. Ashamed that I couldn’t keep you safe.” His voice had a jagged edge to it, the pain evident, twisting my insides.
When I stepped forward again, this time he didn’t move back. “Nothing that happened was your fault. I’m so sorry that you felt like you had to go. It was the very last thing I wanted. Because . . .” This was it. No hesitation this time. I wanted to say it. “I love you. You make me crazy sometimes, but I love you. I love your smile, I love your mind, I love that you get all my jokes, I love how you take care of me, I love your good heart, I love—”
He didn’t let me finish. He crushed me against him, pulling me into the warmest, strongest, most loving kiss imaginable. It was better than I had remembered.
“. . . you,” I said breathily when he let me up for air. “I love you.”
Closing his eyes, he put his forehead against mine. “Ti adoro. Ti amo, Genesis. I love you so much. I never thought I’d hear you say those words to me.”
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life saying them to you.” Being like this, here in his arms, it was all I ever wanted. It made me feel complete. Whole.
I was where I belonged.
“I will never leave you again,” he promised in a low voice that made shivers dance over my bare skin. “And I know you don’t like surprises, so I’m telling you up front. I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
Delirious, happy zings shot around inside me. That sounded like a good plan to me.
Until he got down on one knee and my stomach plummeted into my ankles. “You mean now?”
“Yes, now. I did warn you first.” He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a ring box.
“Have you just been walking around with a ring box?” I asked as I pressed my hands against my flushed face, realizing that wasn’t possible. “Did Lemon and Kat tell you I was coming?”
“This is the ring I picked out for you on the show. I carried it in my pocket when I missed you, which was all the time.” I thought of all the time we’d spent together. He’d had this with him the whole time? “And don’t be upset, but when you were taken, Marco put a watch on your passport just in case that monster tried to take you out of the country. So he got an alert when you got on a plane to Milan, and he told me. I didn’t know what you would say or why you were coming, but for the first time in a long time, I had hope.”
This was how my life would be. It would be more public than I’d prefer. Sometimes I would be watched. Sometimes I might feel trapped. But the trade-off was that I got Rafe, and he was worth anything else I had to go through. “I’m not mad,” I told him. “But I will have to go back to Iowa on Monday. I have class.”
“We can spend part of the year here, part in Iowa. We can create a room for your aunt and her husband in the palace, if you’d like. Whatever you want.”