Wild Fling or a Wedding Ring? (16 page)

Cali laughing as she discovered a jello mold while riffling through his cabinets.

Cali stretching that languorous stretch of hers some Sunday morning.

Asking him what he wanted for dinner. Smiling as she caught sight of him waiting outside her office to pick her up. Sighing as she fell asleep in his arms.

They were regular things. Nothing particularly special or different about them. Nothing unique. Except somehow they were. Somehow, with her, everything was different. Deeper. Stronger. More vibrant and intense. More than it had ever been with Pam… Because with Cali it was real. Right.

More than he’d ever imagined he wanted. So much more than he could live without.

Sweat streaming off him, he’d slapped the stop button, doubled forward, struck by the singular truth of the situation. The agony of the realization that he’d let her go before understanding it himself.

Cali. Cali. Cali….

Even now, with her tucked in his arms, he could barely breathe for thinking of how close he’d come to losing everything.

He rested his temple at hers, closing his eyes and basking in the heat of her body against him. “I want to be with you. I can give you what you’re looking for, Cali. I was too scared—too blind to see that I already had. You have my heart. You have my future. I’ll give you forever any way you want it.
I love you.
Like I didn’t even know it could be, I love you.”

She met his gaze, and the emotion in her glistening emerald eyes shattered him.

“I love you, too,” she whispered. “From the first night, and a little more every day. I’m…lost without you.”

She loved him. His heart swelled, relief washing over him in a wave.

He shook his head, dropping a slow, lazy kiss against her lips before pulling back to meet her eyes again. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad you came—”

He broke off, stroked her face, met her eyes.

“I get how important this job is to you, that you had something you needed to prove to yourself. And I’m glad you did it. I needed time…to figure out myself.”

“Oh, Jake….” Her voice was cracking. But he wanted her to understand, not to hurt.

“But it doesn’t have to be one or the other, sweetheart. I can support you in your dreams and still be there with you, because more than anything I need you. We’ll make this work, Cali. Whatever it takes. Just believe in me.”

“I do.” She smiled, brushing her fingers through his hair,
touching the shell of his ear, tracing the tendon of his neck. “I still can’t believe you’re here.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, it took me weeks to rearrange my surgery schedule and bribe my old med school roommate into letting me pick up his talk at the cardiac conference here tomorrow.”

Cali slipped her arms around his neck. “You didn’t….” She half sighed as he nibbled his way across her collarbone.

“Mmm, but I did,” he murmured, his fingers drifting along the buttons of her shirt. “I’ve rearranged my patient appointments and my surgery schedule to be in London for six of the next eight weekends—with a few four-day stretches at that.”

She stilled in his arms and met his gaze. “Jake, we’re ahead of schedule. I’m leaving London in four weeks.”

Ahead of schedule. Just like Chicago. He should have figured.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll visit wherever you are.” His hands slipped between the open lapels of her shirt, smoothing over the creamy skin it had been too long since he’d touched. “Where are you headed next?”

When she didn’t answer, Jake dragged his attention from the lacy mounds to her eyes. She was staring back at him with too much focus for a woman whose shirt was open to her belly button.

The very tip of her tongue touched the full swell of that lush bottom lip of hers, lingering over a weighted pause that had his body less interested in where she was moving for work and more interested in moving her into the bedroom.

“Chicago. I’ve taken a permanent position as Midwest Regional Manager.”

He froze, struck dumb and immobilized by her response.

“I’ve met my promise to myself. Now all I want is to be
happy, and in my whole life I’ve never been as happy as I was there.”

Her palms flattened against his chest, her gaze dropping in blatant appreciation of what she found there. His little Cali, who had a sweet tooth for man-candy and didn’t get kissed often enough. He leaned forward, caught her mouth with his, swept a teasing stroke of his tongue between her lips.

Her fingers balled in the fabric of his shirt as her velvety sigh warmed his mouth. “If you want,” she whispered, “we can be happy there together.”

“Marry me.” The words were out before he’d even thought to say them. But he had no desire to take them back. “More than anything, I want you to marry me.”

This time Cali froze.

This wasn’t the way he’d planned, but it wasn’t impulse or desperation either. It was right. “I’ll love you forever. I’ll make you happy, sweetheart. I swear I can.”

Her lips trembled and a single tear slipped from the corner of her eye. Her hands tightened in his shirt as though she were trying to contain him—as if he weren’t hers already. He pulled her against his chest, murmuring into the delicate curve of her neck, “Marry me.”

She pulled back to meet his stare, smile spreading, green eyes shining. “Yes,” she answered, her breath catching on something between a laugh and sigh. “Yes!” she said again, the sound of her voice so rich and sweet. Certain. “I’ll marry you.”

“Thank God,” he answered, with utter sincerity.

The laugh that had first snared his heart bubbled free, and then Cali was covering him with her body and her mouth, showering him in a flurry of kisses, tugging at his clothes, groaning at the sight of his bare chest and driving him wild as only she could.

He’d never have enough of her.

His hands were at her shoulders, his heart slamming against his ribs as he turned and pinned her to the cushions beneath him. His shirt hung open, half off his shoulders. He had to stop before they got any further.

“Wait right here.” Grinning, he tried to escape from the couch.

Her leg hooked around his hip, pulling him back to her, and a little pout formed on her mouth. “We’ve waited long enough.”

Braced on one arm above her, Jake let his head drop forward as he chuckled. “It’ll be worth it; just give me one second.”

Cali peered up at him through her lashes, an impish glint in her eyes. “I’ll give you my whole life….” She bit into that lush bottom lip of hers, pulled it slowly from the clasp of her teeth—damn, that worked for him—before she finished. “If you give me the next few minutes of yours.”

Swallowing hard, Jake glanced at where his coat lay, draped over the bags he’d carried in for her, then back to the woman running her hands over his stomach. “God, I love you.”

Her fingers caught in the waist of his pants and she tugged him down on top of her.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, holding him with her lustrous green-eyed gaze. The corner of her mouth curved as her knee skimmed up his side. “And I’m not letting you go.”

As a man committed to making his wife-to-be happy, Jake closed his lips over hers, then sank into a kiss that tasted like heaven and promised forever. The three-karat diamond ring parked in the interior pocket of his overcoat would have to wait…just a few minutes more.