Slow Burn (45 page)

The thought makes me smile as I watch her. We’ve been to hell and back in this past year—gone through more things than any new relationship should ever be tested with—but look at us…. We’re stronger than ever.

She finally stopped pushing.

And started accepting I was in it for the long haul.

“Good morning,” I murmur, my voice catching in my throat as the dream comes flooding back to me. She turns slowly to face me, tears streaming down her face in silence, cell phone clutched in her hand.

My heart drops through my stomach as my eyes flicker back and forth, hoping against hope what I fear isn’t true. I brought her out here so that she’d be occupied instead of sitting at home and fretting endlessly about the results of
the latest scans and tests. The typical four-to five-day wait being the hardest thing to endure in this whole process.

For her and me.

It’s brutal, watching the one you love hope and try to remain positive after enduring rounds of chemo and now radiation to get their hopes dashed and spirit crushed when they’re told the cancer is still there, still eating away at them bit by bit, day by day. It may have shrunk or not advanced, but it’s still there.

It’s hard to fight the uphill battle with renewed vigor each time you have to start it over.

I move to her, tears burning the back of my throat and my chest physically hurting as I watch her sob, so overwhelmed by emotion that she can’t speak. I pull her smaller frame into my arms, careful not to squeeze her too hard against my chest since she’s still sore from the first procedure she had last week to prepare her for possible reconstructive surgery.

“Becks.” She says my name, but I just keep shushing her, trying to soothe her and accept the resignation that we’re going to have to start the cycle all over again. Lose the hair she’s just grown back.

“Becks!” The way she says my name this time pulls me from my thoughts and I look down as she leans back.

I take in the tears streaming down her face, but then I notice the smile spreading over those lips of hers. I force a swallow down my throat, afraid to hope that smile means what I think it means. My heart pounds and my head shakes back and forth as she nods her head up and down, answering the question in my eyes.

“Are you serious?”

Her smile is so wide now, the laughter bubbles up and the sound consumes me, overrides all of the fear and worry—her shadow I’ve carried on my shoulders over the past year—and tells them they have no place here anymore.

“It’s gone,” she says, her body vibrating with excitement, with life, with a future. “The scans are clear.”

I hear a whoop and don’t even realize it’s my own voice as I lift her up gently and whirl her around in excitement. Then I try to process everything as I press my lips to hers over and over and find that I can’t.

I can only focus on one thing right now, and that is how much I love and admire this woman in front of me. How I can’t live without her.

We just went a full twelve rounds and finally got the knockout.

She starts giggling as I proceed to kiss her over and over, the only way I can speak right now after the heart attack I almost had, thinking the results were the opposite.

She pushes me away, trying to speak. “I just got the call before you came out…. I was processing it all. I couldn’t speak. I’m sorry for scaring you.”

“Oh, baby,” I tell her, framing her face and lacing it with kisses, the taste of salt on my tongue from our tears of joy a welcome change.

And then my mind clicks.

“Hold on. I’ll be right back!” I tell her as I bolt from the kitchen.

Disbelief owns my battered body right now, but it’s the most welcome feeling in the world. I’m grateful for Becks giving me a moment so that I can try to process the unbelievable. So I can grasp that I beat this.

Holy fucking shit!

The adrenaline hits, and even though Rex is still barking outside to come in, I’m trembling so much, I lean against the wall and slide down to the floor.

I close my eyes momentarily, seeing Lexi’s face when I
do, and I silently thank her for helping me. My dandelion sister, who used to blow wishes into the wind and hope one day one would come back for her.

Mine just came back. I got the more time I asked for.

My mind switches gears to try to remember more details of the doctor’s call but don’t remember much after
all clear
and
no evidence of disease remains
. I pinch the skin on my thighs, hoping it’s not a dream because if it is, I don’t want to wake up from it.

I need to call my parents and Rylee and Danny, but my hands are having trouble hitting the screen from their trembling. I’m trying again—my mind going five thousand miles an hour—when Becks returns.

I let my phone drop in my lap as I try to brush the tears from my face, knowing it’s going to do no good.
I earned these tears
. When I glance up to him standing in front of me, he has this look on his face, eyes intense and full of love, that makes my breath falter.

“What?” I ask him, suddenly self-conscious under his scrutiny of my short hair and bandaged chest so that I start to cross my arms over it.

“Uh-uh,” he says as he lowers himself to the ground beside me and takes my hands in his so that I can’t cover myself up. “Don’t you dare cover up that beautiful body of yours.”

I roll my eyes and get that lift of his eyebrows in reprimand, which causes me to smirk. He leans forward and brushes a soft kiss to my lips before settling on the floor next to me. He blows out a breath before nodding his head in complete acceptance—of what, I have no idea.

“Today I had planned for your family and Ry and Colton to head on out here and have a barbecue. I had grand plans of entertainment and fun to keep your mind occupied and free of
the shadow
.” I smile at him and his thoughtfulness. He’s so damn good to me. “I had plans for a bonfire down by the pond. Friends, family … surround you with love so
that I could do something…. I had it all planned perfectly.” He looks down at our joined hands and laughs softly. “But as we’ve both learned over the past year, sometimes fate has different plans for us.”

I snort at the truth in that statement. At how cancer tested me. At how HaLex should have failed with my preoccupation with my treatment, but how instead Danny stepped forward and offered to help, and now it’s thriving and in demand. At how I broke my own rules and tied those strings I didn’t want into double knots around the heart of the man in front of me.

“That’s so sweet of you. We can still have them over, have a celebration instead,” I tell him, mistaking his fixation on our joined hands as one of disappointment.

He slowly lifts his eyes to meet mine, and that soft smile on his lips owns my heart like I never could have imagined before. “What’s the one thing we’ve learned through all of this?” he asks me.

“That cancer sucks ass.”

He throws his head back and laughs loudly, the sound so welcome to my ears when he’s been so worried himself over the scans. “Well, that’s true, but that wasn’t what I was going for.”

“Um … that wall sex is definitely hot.” I say, my fingers walking their way up his bare chest, my thoughts turning to how I want to be festive with Becks.

“You are incorrigible!” he says, grabbing my wrists and holding them in his grip, humor in his voice and his pants beginning to tent.
At least I know it’s a possibility
. “But very right again. And maybe if you can be serious for a second, we can have some very hot wall sex in a few minutes.” He raises an eyebrow at me and mixes it with that cocksure smirk of his, and I know he’s just thrown down a challenge that I will willingly accept.

“So I answer the question right, I get wall sex?” He nods,
causing my libido to stir to life and my mind to scatter, trying to figure out what the answer could be.

“Hm. Let’s see…. You like rules.”

“And you like to break them, you smart-ass.”

“I need help, Mr. Daniels, because you mentioned wall sex, and now all I can think about is you pinning me over there”—I point to the wall behind him—“and you sliding your rock-hard—”

“You’re distracting me.” He laughs as he leans forward and presses another kiss to my lips, his tongue lingering with mine for just a moment before he leans back, the gravity in his eyes again. “What’s the one rule we’ve lived by this whole year? Our motto?”

I angle my head to look at him and wonder how Lex’s motto that we’ve adopted as ours holds any relevance when it seems we have all the time in the world now.

“Time is precious. Waste it wisely,” I tell him, a ghost of a smile on my lips at how that advice in the voice mail she left me—that I still listen to—has come full circle in this moment.

“Exactly,” Becks murmurs. “If that’s our motto, then we need to wise up here…. I don’t want to waste another precious moment without you as mine, Haddie Montgomery.”

I begin to tell him he already has me when it hits me. My hands begin to tremble again, but this time for a very different reason. I watch as he reaches into his pants pocket and produces a black box, which I never even noticed because I was so stunned at my good news. I suck in a breath, his words and the sight causing my mind to leap ahead to what he’s about to do.

And I’m not sure where I want to look more: at the box as it’s opened or at his eyes as he asks me. I look up because I’m only going to get one chance to catch this moment—this look in his eyes—and I’ll have forever to look at the ring on my finger.

I laugh nervously, realizing he’d better be asking me to marry him because I just mentally agreed.

“We’ve been to hell and back, and I love you more for every single step of that journey. I only hope you feel half of what I feel when you look at me, when you love me, or when you laugh with me. The world stops for me—time stands still—when I put my arms around you. I love that feeling, and I love that I’ve only ever felt that way with you. I want to be the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you taste at night before you dream. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Had…. I want to stop wasting that precious time. Will you marry me?”

I launch myself at Becks with a shriek, our bodies colliding and falling backward as I rain kisses all over his face, repeating how much I love him again and again. Somewhere in my barrage of expressed love, he manages to hold my hand still enough to slide the oval-shaped diamond solitaire onto my ring finger.

“Is that a yes?” he laughs out as I straddle his hips and lean down to kiss him again, my lips on his. Smile, kiss, smile, repeat cycle.

“Yes!” I cry out at him, my heart so full of love and the future that all I can think about is that this gorgeous, caring, wonderful, sexy man beneath me really wants feisty, tell-it-like-it-is me to be his.

My city to his country.

I lean forward and press my lips to his again, slipping my tongue between them, my hips grinding against his out of pure physical response. He groans at the sensation, and I start laughing.

Wall sex
is
hot.

But just-got-engaged-sex-on-the-kitchen-floor is even better.

Why waste time maneuvering to the wall? It’s a precious thing after all.

You saw how they fell in love.

Now see how Becks and Haddie first met.

Turn the page for a bonus scene!

T
he
bass of the club’s music hits hard as I scan the nearly naked women surrounding us—every single one of them ripe for the picking. A bat of fake lashes. An accidental lean over the bar, tits on display, and painted lips offering up what is literally and figuratively on the table.

So why am I not finding some hot piece, offering to take her up to our room? Shit, I could use a little release after the stress of a long week.

It’s Wood’s fault. That’s my go-to answer.
It’s always his fault
. And hell if I’ll tell my best friend he was right when he said, “She’s got a hot friend.”

Hot friend,
my ass
. Haddie Montgomery’s more like molten fucking lava.

I sweep my eyes across the crowded dance floor and try to move past her, but it’s no goddamn use.
Don’t kid yourself, Daniels. You’ve been looking at her all night
. I toss back the rest of my drink, but my damn eyes remain fixed as she throws her arms up in the air and swivels her hips. Those long, shapely legs move to the beat, and hell if I can’t get the thought of them and those sexy-as-fuck heels wrapped around me somehow, someway, out of my damn head.

I avert my gaze, try to distract myself with one of the
many easy targets in the club, but no one else calls to every part of me like Haddie does. And of course my eyes shift back to the floor just in time to see her dress sneak up some. Every toned inch of those thighs is on display as she grinds her hips to the beat. I groan. And I don’t even care that I do, because hell if a sane, red-blooded American male would look away from that perfection.

“Hey,” I hear to my right as Colton’s hand, which is holding my fresh drink, bumps against my arm.

“Thanks,” I say, forcing myself to pull my eyes from the sight of her and focus on the man who’s like a second brother to me. But when I meet his eyes, they’re studying me, amusement mixed with confusion.
Here we go again
. I hate when Colton gets this damn look. “What? What the fuck is that look for?”

“Seriously? You have the two-point-five look on your face, dude,” he says, taking a sip of his beer and shaking his head as if he’s ashamed.

“Two point five?”
I sputter, completely shocked that he of all people would say that after the revelation he dropped on me earlier. The one where he admitted that he, the man who’s the king of condoms, is sliding skin on skin with his girlfriend, Rylee. Taking that giant leap of trust for the first time ever to bareback with a woman. The confession still staggers me even after more than a few cocktails.

And he’s accusing me of the two-point-five look? I don’t think he has any room to throw stones in the fucking glass house he built. “Two point five?” I repeat. “This coming from the barebacking cowboy himself?
Whatever
. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Have another.”