Hallowed Ground (5 page)

Hell, even back then I’d known she was too good for me, but I was going to spend my life proving I was exactly what she needed now. And the timing…well, it sucked, but this could protect her if something happened to me. “Want to gamble on that always?”

Her eyes flew open, locking onto mine, and her hips froze. “What?”

Fuck, the box was still upstairs, and she deserved better than this, but I couldn’t keep it in any longer, and the alcohol wasn’t helping. “We could make it forever. You and me.”

Eyes wide, she leaned back, her hand slipping out of my pants. “What are you saying?”

Shit, just spit it out.
“I’m leaving in ten days. I want you to be taken care of, to have the security of my last name, to know you have access to everything while I’m gone.”

“Josh?” Her eyes narrowed and not in a good way.

You are fucking this all up—get to the point!

“We could get married!” It flew out of my mouth. Gone was the pretty speech I’d been practicing for the last month, waiting for the perfect, not-too-over-the-top moment. I’d somehow developed verbal stomach flu. “You know, elope, like Jagger and Paisley. Just you and me. Forever.”

“Because you’re deploying in ten days.”

“The timing is shit, I know that. God, I wish it was different and we had all the time in the world. But this would protect you, give you access to my benefits.”

“Unbelievable.” She pushed off my lap and tugged her skirt down her thighs. “Un-fucking-believable!”

Mayday. Mayday, you’re going down, buddy.
I leaned forward, reaching for her, but she sidestepped. “December…” I shook my head, wishing I’d had about three fewer beers. “I thought you’d be happy.” This was not how I pictured this moment going.

“This…this is a proposal?” If it were anger I saw in her eyes, I could have held my shit together. I could have fired back. But the hurt? Fuck, I was defenseless.

My mouth opened and shut a few times. I couldn’t figure out what the hell to say that wasn’t going to dig me a deeper hole than the one I was already in.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Because I didn’t hear a question, Josh. I heard a business proposal.” A single tear slipped down her cheek, crushing my heart in a way her words never could have.

“December…” I stood, but she backed farther away.

“No. My answer is no.”

Fuck, I was wrong. One word decimated me.

Chapter Five

Ember

I swatted the tear away angrily. How did this even qualify as a proposal? I’d fantasized about this exact moment since I was a freshman in high school drawing doodles with his name.

This was more like a nightmare.

“You don’t want to marry me?” he whispered.

“What? All I have ever wanted is to marry you, to be your always, to wake up knowing that I’m yours and you’re mine.” How could he even think that?

He tucked his thumbs in his pockets and rolled his shoulders. “That’s what I thought this was about. You and me, forever.”

“Really? Because you just proposed like I’m some tag-chaser you picked up in a random bar, and you’re offering me free health care so you can make more money on a deployment, and we’d better hurry up and sign those papers before you ship out.”

His head snapped back like I’d slapped him. “I guess I didn’t think you wanted some over-the-top proposal. Isn’t that what you always alluded to? I have the ring upstairs, I can get it—”

“I don’t want a fucking ring!” My voice broke. “I just want your heart.”

“God, baby. You have it. I love you more than my own life.” His eyes squeezed shut. “I probably should have led with that.”

“The whole love thing might have helped,” I bit out. “Or even something as trite as ‘will you marry me?’ may have sufficed.”

“Then let me start over,” he begged, meeting my eyes. “There is nothing more important to me than you, December.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Not now. Not ten days before you deploy, and not
because
you’re deploying.”

“I just want to—”

“Protect me?” I finished for him when he couldn’t.

“Yeah.”

“Josh, if something happens to you, a wedding ring isn’t going to save my sanity or salvage my heart. The army has dictated everything about my life since I was born. Where I lived, when I moved, when I lost my friends…when I lost my father. I’ll be damned if I give it a say in when I become your wife. Only we get that say.” I pulled the blanket around my shoulders, trying to ward off the chill I knew had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the loss of Josh’s warmth.

“I don’t want to wait another year. I want you to be my wife, and I thought…” He laced his fingers and rested them on the top of his head. “I don’t care how I marry you, December. In a huge, crowded church, on a deserted beach, in the fucking janitor closet of city hall. I don’t care as long as it makes you my wife, and I guess I thought you felt the same way.”

“How I feel? I want you to
want
to marry me. I want you to marry me because I’m the only possible future for you, because I’m the one you can’t live without, and not because you think you
have
to. Not because Jagger and Paisley did it.”

“Look how happy they are!”

“Happy? For fuck’s sake! Did you even ask when their baby is due?”

He blinked. “No.”

“October ninth.”

He paused midshrug, finally clicking with what I was trying to tell him. “Yeah. You guys will most likely still be gone. She will go through this entire pregnancy, and probably the birth, on her own. Jagger is about to miss out on almost all of their first year of marriage and watching over Paisley’s pregnancy. Do you think that makes him happy? Is that what you want? For our first year of marriage to happen over Skype calls, wondering if we’ll ever make it to a first anniversary? Because that’s why you’re doing this, right? To protect me if you don’t come back?”

The muscles in his jaw flexed. “That’s not fair.”

“No. None of this is.” We stood in silence, staring at each other across this giant sinkhole in our relationship.

“I think you’re a pompous asshole who wouldn’t know love if it was delivered naked to you on a fucking platter!” Morgan’s voice carried from the field behind us.

Guess we’re not the only ones awake and arguing.

“One, I’m well aware of what love is, and two, what the hell do you expect from me, Morgan? I’m leaving!” Will shouted as Morgan arrived at the nearly dead fire.

“Oh look, a functioning military couple,” Morgan said, waving to Josh and me.

“Don’t bet on it,” I answered.

Josh tilted his head and shot me a look that said he didn’t appreciate the comment.

Too fucking bad.
He’d just treated one of the most important moments of our life like it was another item to be checked off his pre-deployment checklist.

“Weigh in for me,” Morgan drawled, crossing her arms as Will caught up to her.

“Morgan,” he warned.

“Oh, come on, Will. My feelings for you are the worst-kept secret since Paisley’s for Jagger. I think we can all be honest here.”

Josh edged away. “Not sure this is our place.”

“Oh, no you don’t, Walker.” Morgan stared him down. “Tell me, if you had feelings for someone, wouldn’t you want to be with them? Even if they only had a couple months before they deployed?”

“Actually—” Josh started.

“Damn it, Morgan! I’ll be gone nine months. You want to start a relationship like that?” Apparently Will’s drawl was a bit more pronounced when he got mad.

Fascinating.

“It’s not like this is World War Two, Will! We can Skype, and write letters, and talk on the phone. Do you think I won’t wait for you? Is that it?” Morgan fired back.

Holy shit.
Josh couldn’t have thought that…or could he?

“Is that the real reason?” I asked Josh, not caring that we’d just turned this into a melee. “Are you scared I won’t wait for you? That I don’t love you enough, so a ring will keep me around?”

Josh rubbed his hands over his face. “We are not doing this right now.”

“Wouldn’t you want whatever time you could get?” Morgan yelled at Will.

Enough.

“You know what?” I said, turning toward Morgan and away from Josh. “I’m with Will. If you have feelings for him, then talk during the deployment, be there for him, show him the woman you’ve grown to be. Don’t jump into a relationship because you think you’re on some stupid timeline.”

Her eyebrows shot to the sky.

“Yeah, I think I’m going to head home for the night,” Will drawled.

“You should take Josh with you,” I called over my shoulder as I stomped into our house, shutting the door with enough force to declare me a tantrum-throwing toddler. My clothes hit the hamper while I muttered to myself about the idiocy of men.

The bed was cold as I crawled under the covers.
Get used to it. He’ll be gone in ten days.

It hit me. Ten days. We had milk that expired later than that, and it was all I had guaranteed with him. Anything could happen after that. Ten days, and I’d just thrown his proposal in his face and declared it not good enough.

“You’re such a bitch,” I cried to myself as the tears started to flow. Why couldn’t anything be simple? Why couldn’t we get engaged and then marry in a year after bickering over wedding details? Why couldn’t we have just a tiny piece of normal?

Did it really matter if I said, “I do,” in front of a hundred other people? Did it matter if it was now or in a year from now? I wasn’t going to somehow stop loving him. He was woven into my soul so deeply that if someone were to pull a single thread of him away, I would unravel.

The door opened softly, light throwing my shadow onto the far wall. Josh was nearly silent as he stripped down for bed, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. How could I have done that to him? Sure, his logic was flawed, but wanting to marry me? That wasn’t only timing forcing the issue. It couldn’t have been.

The bed sank under his weight as he took his spot, the one closest to the door. We laid there in silence, the argument between us so raw that even the softest touch in the wrong way could set us both to bleeding.

But I had to make this right. I turned over and burrowed into his chest, startling him for the barest of seconds before his strong arms closed around me. I pressed a kiss to the fire and ice tattoo above his heart. “I’m so sorry,” I said softly into his skin. “Josh, I’m just so sorry.”

“Shh,” he whispered, kissing the top of my head. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. I fucked up something that was supposed to be un-fuck-up-able.”

I tilted my head until I caught the moonlight reflected in his eyes. “I was stupid, Josh. It doesn’t matter what the timing is. You and I are a foregone conclusion. You’re it for me, and I don’t need a ring on my finger to remind me of that. But I do want to marry you, I promise. There’s nothing I want more in this world than to be your wife.” I took a stuttering breath. “Ask me again.”

He raised his hand and stroked my cheek with his thumb, an eternity of love pouring from his eyes. “No.”

I tried—and failed—not to let that hurt. “Okay.”

He pressed his lips to mine in a sweet kiss and traced my bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. “December Howard. You deserve everything I can give you. My body, my heart, my name. They’re already yours, we’re just missing some paperwork. But you’re right. I don’t want this deployment to change anything about us, and if I weren’t leaving in ten days, we wouldn’t even be considering eloping. We’d probably have some huge mountaintop wedding, right?”

I couldn’t contain the smile that spread across my face. “We could ride the chairlifts up. And imagine the pictures!”

He laughed, pressing another kiss to my lips but pulling back before I could lean in for more. “I won’t let this deployment steal that away from us, too, so I’m not asking you now.”

I pushed away the thought that I’d ruined any chance of him asking again, and trusted in him. “But you will ask again.”

“On our terms, and no one else’s.”

I nodded. “You and me against the world,” I whispered.

“Always,” he finished with a kiss.

“You sure you don’t mind snagging notes for me?” I asked Luke before sipping my latte.

“You sure you don’t have an Ephesus application to hand me? There is a deadline, even for a shoo-in like you.”

“I’m not a shoo-in, and I still haven’t decided if I’m going.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sure you have. You can’t turn this down. You won’t. You’re not deciding, you’re rationalizing it between your head and your heart. But think of it this way—if you go on the dig, you’d actually be physically closer to Flyboy than you are here in Nashville.”

“I guess I’d never thought of it that way.”

“And as for the notes, what else am I good for as a TA in Senior Seminar?” He shoulder-bumped me as we carried our takeout coffees back to the classroom.

“I know I’ll miss class the day he leaves, but I’m not going to mope for longer than twenty-four hours,” I said, mostly to promise myself. “Then I’ll be back here to kick ass.”

“So one more weekend, huh?” He shot me the look…the one that dripped with so much sympathy that it triggered my stop-pitying-me reflex.

“Yep. And I’m going to make it perfect for him.”

“Why don’t you guys get away? I bet my dad wouldn’t mind covering a suite for you guys near the beach somewhere. Atlantic City, maybe?”

“That’s so nice of you to offer, Luke, but even all your dad’s money can’t get the army to cooperate. He has to be able to report within four hours, so that’s too far.”

“Hmmm.” He opened the door for me and we walked inside, taking the stairs toward the room. “Wait. Flyboy was hockey boy first, right?”

“Most definitely,” I answered, my stomach immediately fluttering at the thought of watching him play again. God, the way he moved on the ice never failed to turn me on to the point I was ready to rip off that sweaty uniform right there on the ice. And the way he handled that stick with his hands…

“Earth to Ember,” Luke sang.

“Oh, sorry.” I shook my head.

“Okay, well, if you’re done mentally fucking your boyfriend, I think I might have an idea. Remember that little expansion team my dad owns?”

I paused mid step, making Luke back up to fetch me. “I’d hardly call the Louisville Bobcats little. They’re an NHL team.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he got bored with hotels. Anyway, how about we get you guys phenomenal seats to the Sunday game, and then follow up with a suite at 21C? A little sports for him, a little pampering for you, some hotel sexy-times… What’s not to love about that send-off?”

The gears in my mind raced. “He owns the Bobcats.”

“I think I just said that. Really, Red, you’ve never cared about the money before, and this little thing does it for you?” He arched an eyebrow.

“No, it’s not the team…it’s the ice.”

A slow, scheming smile spread across his face. “Oh, I like where you’re going with this.”

“Yeah,” I said with a grin. “Me, too!”

Josh’s last weekend stateside was going to be perfect.