I side-eyed him. “What kind of movies are you watching?”
He shrugged. “Good ones?”
I chuckled and checked my phone as another wave of anxiety hit. Tess would be home from dinner with the girls any second. I’d asked them to get her out of the house so I could set all of this up, and Delilah just texted that they were on the way to drop Tess off.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous. We’re already married,” I said to no one in particular. I considered the tiny velvet box in my hand and its significance. Yes, Tess and I were married, but I’d never proposed. Not in a way that wasn’t a strategy over overpriced coffees. I never got on one knee and poured my heart out, never slid a diamond on her finger. And she deserved it. She deserved the world, and I wanted to give it to her.
“Because she’s Mommy,” Luke said simply. “And Mommy’s perfect.”
“Yeah,” I replied with a heavy breath. “She is.”
She’d been nothing short of it in the week that had passed since Luke’s court hearing. She was unwavering in her support of Luke, helping him overcome what had happened. She even helped me cope with my own tangled emotions over it. And on top of it all, she still went to the ranch every day to work. Claire and Beau offered to let her work from home for a few days, but she refused, telling them she didn’t want Jeremy to affect another part of her life.
The front door creaked open, and my heart slammed against my sternum. The air thickened to the point I nearly choked on it. Luke giggled when Tess’s gasp rang through the foyer. “Shh,” I whispered, holding a finger against my mouth. His shoulders scrunched up, an infectious grin on his face.
“Babe?”
I cleared my throat. “Back here,” I said.
With every click of her heels against the floor, my heart beat faster. When she came into view, her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes widening as she looked around at our living room bathed in candlelight, the floor covered in rose petals. “What is this?” she cried.
I held out my hand. “Come here.”
Her hand was shaking as it slid into mine, her eyes rimmed with tears. “Hi, babygirl.” My voice came out as nothing more than a shaky breath.
She grinned as a tear ran down her cheek. “Hi.”
“Daddy wants to ask you something, Mommy,” Luke said, like I’d told him to.
“Oh?” she squeaked. Her teary laugh rang through the living room as I dropped to my knee.
“Tess…” I swallowed roughly. “I think you know where this is going, but there’s something I want to tell you first.”
She bit her lip and nodded. “Okay.”
“You said last week that I changed your life, and maybe that’s the case, but it’s no comparison to how much you’ve changed mine. I walked through the world alone most of my life, thinking I’d never know what it’s like to experience true happiness. It was dark and lonely, and I didn’t think it’d ever end.” My smile grew. “But then you walked into my office two months ago.”
Tess’s grip on my hand tightened. “That day, I saw how resilient you were. How you didn’t let the things that happened to you harden your soft heart. And the second the door shut behind you, I missed you.”
“Levi,” she cried.
“Your heart is the thing I love most about you, the thing I fell in love with first.” My thumb slid along her knuckles.
My face hurt, I was smiling so hard, just thinking about what I was going to say. “I look at you and the world just…glows, Tess. You and your soft, sweet heart make everything better: brighter, lighter, perfect. And at the risk of sounding cliché, I want to bask in it forever.”
“That is really cliché,” she agreed. “But I love it.”
“And I love you. I love you more than I ever thought possible, and I want to love you for the rest of our lives.” I opened the box. “So will you marry me, Tess? For real this time?”
Chin quivering, she nodded, dropping to her knees in front of me. She kissed me hard. “Of course, I’ll marry you,” she wept against my lips, kissing me again. This kiss felt almost as good as our first. Both of them were a promise, a commitment to one another, but this time it was real, the realest thing I’d ever felt.
“Yay!” Luke cheered, jumping up and down around us as I slid the ring on her finger.
Tess gasped, wiggling her fingers, the emerald-cut diamond catching in the candlelight. “Oh, Levi, it’s gorgeous.”
“You like it?”
“I love it.” She grinned before kissing me again. My hand slid into her hair, cradling the back of her head as the kiss deepened. My blood simmered in my veins, and the ring box fell to the ground next to me so I could grab her hip, my fingers flexing against the supple curve.
