Slow Burn

HADDIE

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.