the bed and put his hands behind his head as if he didn’t have a thought in his mind.
“And that’s it? End of discussion?” Darcy stuttered as she sat up, pulling the sheet with her.
“Discussion? You just said there wasn’t one.” He was being intentionally obtuse.
“And you have no thoughts about our last names?” Darcy could feel her temper beginning to stir.
“I think MacBride is a great name. Why? Don’t you like it?”
“I like yours better,” she muttered and started to climb from the bed, but he moved, pulling her under him, pinning her with his body.
“What was that?” he asked.
She refused to look at him because he was intentionally making this hard. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Really, I could have sworn that you said you liked my last name better. Do you?”
“You know damn well I love your last name and I want it to be mine too.”
“So you are asking me to marry you.”
“No!”
“Very well.” He rolled off and away from her, and Darcy was about to make a disparaging comment about his person when he turned back to her. Instead of holding—dare she even think it—a small leather box, he was holding a small silver cross. She recognized it immediately.
“That was Sister Anne’s.”
“The day we were going to meet, I was going to give this to you. I wanted to give you something that conveyed how I felt about you and this was the only thing I had of value.”
Tears filled Darcy’s eyes, but they never left Lucien’s gaze. “You were going to give me her necklace?”
“It was all I had to give.”
She was about to throw herself into his arms. Oh my God. What a gesture. But he stopped her. “I’m not done.”
“Sorry,” Darcy said, but she couldn’t manage disgruntled. She was just too damn happy.
“I was going to give this to you as a promise, a promise to never hurt you, to never leave you, to always find my way back to you even when we were pissed off and wanted to kill each other. A promise to love only you as long as I drew breath.”
His hand closed over the necklace. “But you didn’t show up.”
“What?” And then she punched him because he had made her cry again with the most perfect words ever.
He laughed before he unhooked the clasp and secured it around her neck. “I was a kid then.” He climbed from bed and returned with a small box in his hand.
He handed it to her. Her hands shook when she lifted the lid to see the sapphire, the color almost the exact shade of her eyes, surrounded by diamonds.
“But the man I’ve become still loves you as desperately as the kid I was. Marry me, Darcy.”
Darcy had fantasized about this moment so many times through the years and, every time, it was the most beautiful and poignant moment: he confesses his love, she confesses hers, and they live happily-ever-after. In real life, it didn’t happen quite that way.
“I’m going to throw up,” she managed before she stumbled from the room. The sound of her hacking filled the silence.
Lucien sat on the bed, a little dazed at the turn of events. “I can honestly say I didn’t see that coming,” he said to himself.
Darcy appeared in the doorway, and the look on her face made Lucien concerned. For a minute, he thought she was going to turn him down.
“What’s wrong?”
“What are your thoughts on babies?”
It took him a minute and then his eyes moved to her stomach before looking back at her. “Are you serious?”
“Yep.”
He jumped up and kissed her. “You have to marry me, now.”
“I was always going to marry you, you fool.”
“A baby.”
She sobered for a minute before she asked, “Do you think Brandon will be upset?”
“He was an orphan, so no, I doubt it.”
He kissed her so tenderly that his heart ached. “We’ve our futures to think about, which includes children,” he whispered against her lips.
“More than two?” she asked.
He flashed her a grin. “The more the merrier.” He lifted her in his arms. “And think of all the practice.”
He carried her to their bed and made his point slowly and with great attention to detail.
Dane scanned the restaurant for escape routes. Lucien Black wanted to have lunch with him. Fabulous. As if he didn’t have enough shit going on in his life, he now needed to deal with the mysterious Lucien Black. And he was still sober; he should get a fucking medal.