“Don’t say that,” he said. “We haven’t even talked about it.”
“I know. Which obviously means we aren’t ready, right?”
He moved his hands again, setting them on my waist, pulling me so that every inch of me was tucked up against him, feeling his morning wood at the core of me. He pulled my leg so that my thigh was over the top of his, the angle causing the friction to build without even a hitch of our hips.
“I want babies with you, Violet Banner. I want as many as you want to have. I also want to put a ring on your finger, walk you down an aisle, and make sure the world knows that we are one unit. I don’t care the order those things happen, even if society does. But if you want to work on a baby, then maybe we should go down the aisle first.”
I chuckled. “Was that you proposing to me, Dawson?”
He smiled, joy making his eyes glitter like sparklers going off. “Shitty way to do it, but nothing about us has ever been the norm.”
He sat up, pulling me with him. I was on his lap, both legs wrapped around his middle now. He pulled my hand from his shoulder, kissed the knuckles, and said, “Marry me, Violet.”
It wasn’t flowery words. It wasn’t a candlelight dinner. But it was Dawson giving me his heart and his body and his life. The sixteen-year-old Violet who’d done a touchdown dance after he’d simply called me to come and get him was leaping around inside me. The older Violet just smiled.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” His grin grew.
“On one condition,” I said.
And his smile faltered just a little.
“What’s that?” he said.
“We do it out at sea with just the family. I don’t want it to be a big, societal, Jada nightmare.”
“I love this idea.” His grin returned. “But we’ll have to have two boats. One to get married on, and one for me to whisk you away on our honeymoon. We’ll sail to Hawaii and then maybe go south from there to Fiji and the other Pacific Islands.”
“How long do you think this honeymoon is going to last?” I asked. “We have two companies to run.” But I was already losing all thought because he’d begun a slow kiss down my neck, pulling aside the tank top I wore to bed, kissing the swell of my breast, finger finding the other nipple.
“We have a satellite phone, and we can get Internet access. What more do we need?”
I laughed. “You didn’t answer me.”
“Can we stay away long enough for you to get pregnant and deliver the baby before we come back?” he asked between licks and sucks and tweaks.
My hips jerked against him, heat filling me.
“Dawson! Be serious!”
“Eighteen months I’ve had to share you almost every day with someone. I kind of like the idea of eighteen months of having you to myself,” he said, fingers sliding down from my breast to move my pajama bottoms aside.
“This entire conversation has gotten out of hand, Mr. Langley,” I said.
He pushed me backward, hovering over me as he slipped the pajama bottoms and my underwear away. “Out of hand. Think of all the ways we could get out of hand on a boat in the middle of nowhere.”
It did sound delightful. Delicious. Dawson. Me. The blue sea and nothing else.
My hand found the edge of his boxer briefs, pushing at them, tugging them down.
Our bodies were already moving to the rhythm we’d found. A rhythm that was neither fast nor slow but some heady level of in between. That filled me in a way nothing else in my life did. These moments with him were always like this. Bigger than life. Bigger than dreams. Bigger than science.
He reached for the drawer and then paused. “Condom?”
I wasn’t on the pill. After everything Jersey had been through, after knowing what all the chemicals and devices could do to a person’s body, Dawson and I had agreed to continue to just use condoms. I was sure it wasn’t as satisfying as skin-on-skin for either of us, but he’d never once complained. He’d let me be the guide because it was my body and not his. Yet another reason I loved him. The choices and sacrifices he always made so that I could have everything I wanted.
I stared at him for a long time, weighing the decision. Thinking of the formulas I’d conjured up. Thinking of the