“Blue.”
Aaron’s voice, smooth and low and gorgeous as the rest of him.
When I didn’t turn immediately, Grouch spun me with both hands on my shoulders.
Aaron stood before me with that charming, devil-may-care grin on his face, the same one that warned me he was trouble the first time I saw him at this very spot months ago.
“I think you got somethin’ to give me,” he prompted.
I blinked dumbly at the black plastic bag from the jeweller and lifted it toward him.
He accepted it but shook his head, eyes sparkling so bright I had to blink away the sun spots.
“No,” he said slowly. “Think there’s somethin’ else you’ve been meanin’ to give me.”
Surprised jolted through me like electricity, setting my heart to racing. My hands were damp with sweat and trembling as I reached for my backpack and unzipped it to reveal the uncontested divorce papers I’d wrapped as a surprise gift.
“You mean these?” I asked, incredulous when he grinned. “But how did you know?”
He shrugged. “Bikers are worse than girls when it comes to gossip, and they absolutely can’t be trusted when it comes to romantic gestures. They’ll give up everythin’ without even the threat’a torture.”
I gaped at him as he pulled the papers from my hands, rolled them up, and stuck them in the back of his jeans. When he stepped closer, the amusement was wiped clean from his face, replaced with the vehemence that existed only for me.
The unserious man who took everything about me and our love seriously.
“You’re free’a him. Free’athem,” he corrected as he took my tingling hands into one of his. “And I knew, the moment we broke the cage that’d bound you for so fuckin’ long, I had to make you mine in this last way if you’d have me. You might wanna be untethered for a minute to fly free for the first time ever, and I get that, so I won’t be hurt if you’re not ready. But the real present I wanted to give ya today was my last name to erase the onehegave you. One I think you can be proud’a.”
I didn’t know when I’d started to cry, but I didn’t care. My vision fixed on the beautiful biker before me through the blur of tears. I wasn’t even willing to blink and lose a second of this beauty.
A name had never sounded so perfect as Blue Clare did to me.
“Want you to be my wife more than I’ve ever wanted anythin’ else,” he admitted. “Not just ’cause you’re hot as shit.” He grinned when I laughed wetly. “But ’cause you make me feel seen straight through to my bones and the kind love we share electrifies my life. So Blue baby…” He dropped to his knee, and I went with him, unwilling to allow the space between us. His smile was brighter than the huge sapphire ring he pulled from the black shopping bag and presented to me. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” I cried, lunging at him so hard he fell back on his ass on the concrete, one hand braced so we both didn’t fall farther and the other wrapping around me instinctively. “Yes, yes, yes!”
He was still laughing when I fixed my mouth to his, but it was okay because the taste of his happiness was the headiest drug, and I was addicted to it.
“Can I put the ring on your finger, baby?” he asked against my eager mouth.
“Later,” I offered, climbing more comfortably into his lap.
A chorus of growling motorbikes built like thunder in the air until suddenly, the lot of Evergreen Gas was filled with Fallen men and their women. Horns blared and brothers hollered. Loulou, Lila, Harleigh Rose, Bea, Cressida, Mei, Hanna, Maja, Tempest… all The Fallen women lurched off the back of their men’s or friend’s bikes and surrounded us, throwing blue confetti by the handfuls out of backpacks.
I tipped my face up into the coloured paper, clutched Aaron tight enough to imprint the shape of me into his bones, and laughed with all the happiness in my heart up into the cerulean sky.
