Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) (35 page)

There it was.

He turned to face her.

“A dozen or so wineries. Amazing potential. They just need to work together to be the next great wine region. It’s a little place, probably less total acreage than Mondavi, never mind Napa. It’s called Puget Sound. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” Maybe, just maybe you’ll remember that you proposed to me among the Italian vineyards and forget that I was too wrapped up in my own world to hear it.

The boat drifted a few feet closer to the dock.

“So I was thinking. We could, um, sail all over the Sound, up the Inside Passage to Alaska on occasion and... Then, you know, we’d…” what Cassidy?

“. . . together we’d…” What is it you really want? Help me, Daddy.

That was it. He already had.

She stood up straight, moved to the edge of the dock until her toes hung over the ocean, raised her arm, and pointed a finger at his heart now so close as the
Lady
drifted near.

“As long as we’re together, that’s all that matters.”

The stern bumped against the dock, closing the last of the gap between them, her finger actually came to rest against the center of his slicker-covered chest. He looked at her with the eyes she remembered, the ocean-deep eyes she’d gotten lost in the first time she’d seen them.

This time she knew what to say and how to say it.

“You are my home.”

My apologies to Brown Point Lighthouse for the addition of a dock. The original, much larger dock, installed to service the logging on the hills beyond, was removed in the 1930s.

My joy, to take a year and travel with my wife to the dozen lighthouses pictured on a calendar that she gave me for Christmas. She is my home.

Matthew J. Booker has been critically acclaimed for his romantic suspense fiction as M.L. Buchman. He also has published both science fiction and fantasy under the name Matthew Lieber Buchman. He is happiest, no matter how cliché it may seem, when walking on the beach holding hands with the mother of his awesome kid… or when he’s writing. In among his career as a corporate project manager, he has rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world. He is now making his living full-time as a writer, living on the Oregon Coast. Please keep up with his writing at www.matthewjbooker.com.