Scars of Yesterday (Sons of Templar MC #8) - Anne Malcom Page 0,146
found myself afraid, and that was unfamiliar. When was the last time I’d felt afraid for myself? To see the look on a man’s face, to see if it was painted with rejection.
He didn’t give me anything. The master of the poker face.
It was torture.
“If you want me, you have to know that,” I continued. “That I’ll always love him. He will always live for me. I can’t change that.”
“Baby,” he murmured, lifting his hands to cup my face. “There’s not a single thing I want to change about you, sure as fuck not the way you love. I can handle you loving your dead husband. As fucked up as it is, I’ll only love you more for it. I’ll make it my personal mission to stay alive longer than you do so you don’t ever have to feel the pain of that loss ever again.”
“Don’t ever leave me,” I whispered.
“Not a worldly or other worldly thing can take me from you,” he promised, having proved this six months ago. The doctor had told us—after he’d woken up—that his recovery was nothing short of miraculous.
So Kace had kept the promise he’d made all that time ago. About preforming miracles.
“What do you think about us getting married?” I asked, sitting in front of the empty pool on a rickety sun lounger.
“I think you need to not suggest things like that when I’m staring at what is quite possibly a dead rat being consumed by one of its own kind. I need a little romance, please,” Kace replied from his own sun lounger.
I smiled. “What? The dead rats aren’t doing it for you?”
“They do it for my plenty. But I have an ego. I like control. As you well know.” His gaze went dark, and my stomach dipped in a delightful way.
“So because of all of this, and because I do only plan on proposing once and plan on you only being proposed to once, I’m gonna need to take the lead on this. But if you want, when I do mine—at an undisclosed place and time when I catch you by surprise—if you aren’t enchanted, we can tell everyone the dead rat story instead of mine. That okay?”
Warmth bloomed in my stomach. An unfamiliar feeling in this place. This place reserved for my wounds and scars, my sorrows.
I put my drink down, moving from my chair to straddle him on his. My hands framed his face. “That is more than okay with me.”
Then I kissed him.
He kissed me back for a while.
When things started to heat up, he pulled away. I made a sound of protest and glared at him.
“As much as I want to continue this, and I really fucking do,” he adjusted himself to communicate just how much he wanted to continue, “I can’t with a good conscience fuck you in one of those rooms.” He titled his head, regarding me. “We make enough good memories here, baby?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
He stood, taking me with him. “Good, then we’re going to that fancy as fuck hotel an hour away.”
“An entire hour?” I whined.
He grinned wickedly. “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll make it worth the wait.”
And he totally did.
Three times.
Then, two months later, he proposed to me.
That was worth the wait too.
Epilogue
We had lived hard.
Both of us.
Life gave us pockets of easy. Of love. Happiness.
But we also had hard times. Ugly, traumatic times. Blows that were meant to kill but only scarred us. Even together, there were more wounds. More scars from yesterdays coming back to hurt us.
So our epilogue, our ending, whatever you want to call it, needed to be soft. Gentle.
Of course there were things we couldn’t control. Both Kace and I had chosen a hard road in life. Choosing to love is harder still.
But things were softer now.
Things were quieter.
We’d both healed from the wounds that we’d obtained, each of them joining all of our other scars. Now memories.
There were no babies for us, although I had thought after our wedding that maybe that was going to happen for us. I’d wanted to give that to Kace, despite not being sure if I wanted more kids myself. More than anything, I wanted to give him the gift of fatherhood. Wanted to see a child who was a mix of the two of us. He would be patient with my pregnancy. He’d hold my hand while giving birth. Cut the cord. He’d get up in the middle of the night with me. Change diapers.