A mysterious, secretive smile flirted with Ellie’s lips.
What the . . . ?
“What? Am I missing something? Did I say something funny?”
“No,” she answered hurriedly, eyes drifting up over the old Evangelical church. Abruptly she stopped. “We’re here.”
“Where is here?” I looked around. There were no vintage shoes in sight.
Ellie glanced at her watch and then out at the traffic on the cross junction, then back at her watch, then back at the road . . .
“Ellie?” My heart started to thump as the day’s events began to fall into place, like pieces of a puzzle. “What is going on?”
Her eyes were wide when they hit mine.
“Jesus C, Ellie, what is it? You’re freaking me out.”
For once, however, her lips were tightly sealed. Literally. They were pinched closed so tightly the color was bleeding from them. Her eyes swung back out to the road and as I watched her shoulders deflate with relief, I followed her gaze.
She was smiling at an approaching black cab.
That excited, eyes-twinkling-bright-with-utter-joy smile swung my way. “I’m going to go now.”
Uh . . .
I whirled around as she strode past me, heading back the way we’d just come.
Baffled, I threw my hands up. “Ellie?”
She was still grinning as she looked back at me over her shoulder. She pointed behind me and I turned back to see the black cab had pulled up to the curb beside me.
The door swung open and I was greeted by a surprising but always very welcome sight.
My boyfriend.
“Braden?” I gave him a quizzical smile as he leaned toward me. He was wearing one of his fitted, expensive three-piece suits I loved. This one was a dark gray and was molded perfectly to his broad shoulders and fit physique. The sight of him sitting in the cab in that suit on this spot where we first met—
My heartbeat skittered to a stop as I finally processed the intensity in his gaze and the fact that the floor of the cab he was sitting in was strewn with dark red rose petals. Fuckity, f**kity, shit, f**k. His distraction this morning, his shooing me out of our room . . . it all added up and the breath just whooshed right out of me at the realization of what this meant.
“Get in,” he said, his voice low, brokering no argument.
Limbs trembling, I took his offered hand, ducked my head, and let him settle me close to him on the cab bench. “Braden, what is . . .” My words trailed off as he held up a gray suede ring box.
Everything around me stopped.
There was no cab, no rose petals, no nosy cabdriver grinning at us in the rearview mirror, no traffic going by . . . nothing but Braden and a ring box that symbolized so much to me.
Years ago I’d lost everything that meant anything to me.
Losing that left me lost.
Until Braden.
I’d given him the fight of his life when he’d tried to convince me that loving him was the best thing for the both of us, but when he won, when I eventually realized the truth in that, I knew our path wouldn’t always be smooth. I’d thought if this moment ever came, I’d be searching for a brown paper bag to stem my panic attack. To my utter surprise, I felt no such thing. Yes, the fear was there. The fear of giving in . . . only to lose him to life’s unpredictability. However, greater than the fear was my excitement. My excitement that this impossible, too-perceptive-for-his-own-good, arrogant, stubborn, kind, caring, sexy man was about to ask me to spend the rest of my life with him.
Braden’s pale blue eyes shone with emotion as he flipped open the ring box to reveal an elegantly simple platinum band with a princess-cut diamond perched upon a raised prong with a small diamond nestled on either side of it.
It was so me.