my hand over his bare chest. “Do we have to do this big wedding thing? Can’t we just run away this weekend, get married and I’ll move in?”
“Who knows where we’ll live,” he said.
“What do you mean? We’ll live here, right?” And it came to me—we had never discussed where we’d live.
“I don’t know. I was thinking, maybe we could talk about moving to Ponte Vedra. That’s where most of the players live.”
“Yeah, but that’s not where your mom lives, or Daddy or Brian or . . . Charlotte.”
He put his hands on both sides of my face, kissed me. “You can’t live in your hometown forever.”
“Oh,” I said. “But you’ll be gone so often and I’ll be there . . . alone.” The word “alone” haunted me tonight.
“You’ll get to know all the other players’ wives and make tons of friends.” He pulled me closer. “And we do not have to talk about this now. Those are decisions we can make later. Don’t get upset—right now let’s focus on the wedding, on us.”
“Let’s elope,” I said. I sat up and drew my knees to my chest.
“You know we have to have the wedding. Could you imagine canceling it now?” He rolled over and propped his head on his palm, with his elbow denting the mattress. “The magazine crews and photographers that are coming . . . the planning. At this point it would be harder to cancel than just have it. All that hard work we’ve done.”
I pushed at his elbow; he fell back on the pillow. “We’ve done? Who’s done, mister?”
“All the work you’ve done, my sweet. You. You. You.” He pulled me toward him again. “But you can move in now, I’ve already told you that.”
“I couldn’t . . . it would break Daddy’s heart.” I lay flat on my back, then glanced at the far wall, where a signed picture of Payne Stewart hung. “Did you ask your other fiancées to move in?”
Peyton sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Okay, let’s talk about this and get it over with.”
I sat up, pulling the bedspread up to my chin. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“I love you. That should be enough. I didn’t love them—I just thought I did. I said this before—they were the mistakes I had to make to get to you. I didn’t understand what love was . . . is, until I met you.” He turned to me and held his right hand in the air. “I swear to God.”
“But why didn’t you tell me about them?”
“I was so afraid of losing you . . . of making you upset enough to leave me. That is the one thing I couldn’t take—you leaving.”
“You didn’t tell me because you didn’t want me to leave?” I pulled a pillow tight to my chest, repeating the words to see if they tasted true.
“Yes.” He leaned toward me, and there were tears in his eyes. “Exactly.”
“You shouldn’t hide things from me because you think they’ll upset me. We can’t have a life like that. Do you believe I am that damn fragile?”
“No, baby. No.”
I slid down on the bed, curled into the pillows. “I just don’t want secrets between us.”
“No secrets,” he said. “Just hurry up and live with me, take care of me. . . .” He lay down next to me and wrapped his arms around me.
“Take care of you?”
“Hmmm . . . ,” he said. “I can’t wait until I can come home to you every day, every night. When we can cook our own family dinners and decide where to live, where to go, when and how. When it’s just . . . us.”
In moments, his slow, even breaths let me know he’d fallen asleep. I twisted quietly from the bed, dressed, and drove home with his last words resonating in my mind: when it’s just . . . us.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The gerbera daisies I’d brought couldn’t mask the antiseptic smell in Maeve’s room, which caused the knot in my stomach to tighten. I sat in the large club chair in the corner and stared at her. She sat in bed fully dressed, her hair twisted into a braided knot on top of her head. Her eyes were closed, but she didn’t appear to be asleep.
Something curled and asleep, cold and stable, within the middle of me—somewhere near my heart—stretched and awakened every time Maeve told more of her story. I wanted this arousal, this open feeling, yet it brought