had about a minute. And I’ve waited my whole life for you.”
“I’ve been here all along.”
“I couldn’t before. I couldn’t until I realized, as I’ve started to over the last few months, that I’ve stopped letting what happened to me hurt the way it used to because it brought me to you.”
“Is that a yes, or are we still going to dance around it?”
She drew back, framed his face. “What if I said I would turn that second bedroom into a nice, pretty guest room?”
“I’d say that’s not even in the area of negotiable.”
She smiled at him. “Good. Because I’d hate to marry a pushover.”
“Wait.”
She stared after him when he walked out of the room. Shook her head when he came back again. “I thought that was a moment.”
“Here’s another.” He opened his hand, showed her the ring. The little diamond sat in a simple white gold setting. “It was my mother’s, the one my father asked her with. She gave it to me when she knew how I felt, what I wanted. She said it was fine, she wouldn’t be hurt, if you wanted something that suited you better, but you should have this so it got passed on.”
She pressed a hand to her heart first, then held it out. “How could anything suit me better?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
In the morning, Cate found Julia in the henhouse gathering eggs.
“You’re up early. And I’m a little on the late side.” Julia added another egg to her bucket. “I missed Dillon before he headed out to the fields.”
“I have to get back, but I wanted to . . .” She held out her hand with its small, winking diamond.
Even as her eyes filled, Julia’s face went bright. She set down the bucket, managed an “Oh, oh!” before she pulled Cate to her.
“It means just everything that you’d want me to have your ring, that you’d want me to wear it.”
Julia drew Cate back, then pulled her in again. “I need another minute. He loves you so much. I’m so happy for him, for you, for all of us.”
Drawing back again, Julia took Cate’s ring hand. “I’d hoped he’d ask you with the ring his father gave me. Now that he has, if you want something else, something new—”
Quickly, Cate interwove her fingers with Julia’s. “My family values legacies, cherishes them. That’s what this is to me. There’s so much ugliness going on, and I don’t know if it’ll ever stop. But I have this, and I can look at it and know what really matters. I bring complications with me, and that’s why I tried to say no—or at least slow it all down. Next steps are scary. But I love him, and if I didn’t take the next step with him, I’d still be locked in a room, alone.”
“Life brings complications with it, and the way I see it, you and Dillon taking this next step together? It’s a damn good way to give that ugliness the finger.”
On a laugh, Cate looked down at their joined hands. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now that I do? Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
She drove back to Sullivan’s Rest smiling at the thought. The hell with it, the hell with all that greedy, grasping, sensationalized bullshit. She’d take the next step, and the step after that, live her life, build a life with Dillon.
They’d build that life in a place that meant home to both of them, close to family that mattered so much. She’d have work that fulfilled and challenged her.
And if she wanted to milk a cow or make cheese now and again, well, she could do that, too.
Sky’s the limit, she thought. And the limit was what you made it.
She parked, headed toward the main house, then spotted her father and grandparents at a table by the pool. Shifting directions, she started toward them.
Her father raised a hand in greeting, called out, “We weren’t sure when you’d get here, but we got an extra cup in case.”
“Excellent.” She skirted the pool, took a seat at the table. “I’m ready for coffee. But I don’t see bathing suits.”
Hugh tipped his sunglasses down, peered over them. “We decided this was a day off.”
“Yesterday was a day off.” She added cream to the coffee her father poured for her. “But I’ll tell you what, we’ll change the schedule, have water aerobics late this afternoon. Say four-thirty. Followed by Bellinis. It feels like a Bellini kind of day.”
“It’s hard to say no to Bellinis,”