Christ, he needed to sit down.
She unlocked the door, but didn’t open it. “Don’t freak,” she said. “If I overstepped the bounds, it can all go back.”
She swung the door open.
And his house had furniture. Holy shit, it was filled with original Stickley pieces. It was gorgeous, and it had to cost at least . . .
Now he really had to sit down. And damn, if there wasn’t a turn of the century sofa right there, four steps away.
He sat on it.
He had to ask. “Where did you get the money?”
“I had some left over from my inheritance,” she told him. “You know, from Lenny? I’ve been investing. I had a couple of good years and . . .”
“I’ll say. Christ, Teri. This furniture’s almost worth more than the house.”
Teri set his seabag down. Tried to make a joke. “I figured as long as I was planning to spend a lot of time over here . . .”
He tried to make a joke out of it, too. “For that kind of money, you better be planning to stay forever.”
“Well,” she said. “Yeah. Actually forever sounds about right.” She looked him in the eye, squared her shoulders, and he realized suddenly that she was forcing herself to confront him. She didn’t realize . . .
“I’m giving you another day or two,” she told him staunchly. “But that’s all you’re going to get. After that, I’m just going to go ahead and ask you. You know. To marry me.”
Stan laughed. This must be what Dr. Frankenstein had felt like. Like, holy God, look at this beautiful monster he’d helped create.
His laughter threw her and she looked around the room. “You were right about this furniture,” she told him. “It’s really beautiful. It turns this house into a real home.”
“The furniture’s great,” he said. “Have I said thank you yet?”
Silently she shook her head.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve never been given a gift like this before.”
“You really like it?”
He reached for her. Tugged her down so that she was sitting next to him. “I love it,” he said. “But what I really love is you. You make this house a real home. Please, will you stay forever?”
He put the ring box into her hands.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You already got me a ring?”
“Will you marry me, Teresa?” Stan asked. “I can’t promise you that it’s going to be a constant ball of fun being a senior chief’s wife, but I can promise that I’ll love you and be faithful to you until the end of time.”
Teri was looking at him with so much love in her eyes, he thought he might be the one who was going to start to cry here. “Yes,” she breathed. “I’ll marry you.”
She kissed him and he kissed her, and they both pretended he wasn’t crying.
And then she opened the ring box. Stan told her Hershel and Annebet’s story in between long, slow kisses, and she didn’t bother to pretend not to cry.
And their kisses got longer. Slower. And he pulled her shirt free from her pants. She drew in a long breath as he touched her. “Did the doctor say you could . . . ?”
Stan smiled at her. “The doctor said I should listen to my body. My body says oh yeah.”
Teri smiled back at him. “In that case, I have something else to show you.”
She slid out of his arms, unbuttoning her shirt and kicking off her boots. Her pants, underwear, and socks followed in record time.
“Very nice,” Stan said. “I’ve noticed that about you. You’re very good at getting naked. I think that’s an excellent skill for a wife to have.”
She laughed. “This isn’t what I want to show you.”
He laughed, too. “Bad plan, then, because I’m completely unable to look at anything but you. Damn, you’re beautiful.”
“Follow me,” she said.
He stood up. “Is there any doubt in your mind that I won’t?”
She laughed as she disappeared into . . . the kitchen?
“Bedroom’s upstairs,” he called. “I was kind of hoping what you wanted to show me was my beautiful new Stickley bed frame. . . .”
God damn, as he got to the kitchen, Teri opened the back door and walked outside. Naked.
He was moving slowly, but he was definitely moving. He pushed open the back screen and . . .
There was a hot tub in his backyard.
Teri’d put up very tall wooden fences on the two sides of his property, providing privacy from his neighbors. The view out to the ocean, however, was still wide open.
“We can probably be seen by someone on the bridge with a telescope,” she told him from her perch on the side of the tub. “I figure if they go to that much trouble, they deserve to see us naked.”
Stan lowered himself into one of the new lounge chairs that had appeared on his patio, courtesy of his fiancée—who clearly had had more than a few good years with her investments. “My body’s telling me no hot tub for me—not yet. But I’m going to sit here and enjoy watching you.”
And he did.
And it wasn’t too much longer before someone—provided they managed to stop their car on the bridge and set up a telescope—would’ve gotten quite an eyeful as the senior chief of SEAL Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters Squad and his bride-to-be seized the day.
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