Her warm brown hair rippled in the early winter wind. It was in the forties outside, and yet she wore only a long sleeve black shirt and a pair of black leggings, not a jacket in sight. Only the basic bits of makeup coated her skin — a little bit of mascara, something she called bronzer, and a smattering of blush. From the front, I could barely tell she was pregnant from the dark clothing, but the moment she turned halfway down the dock to look over her shoulder at the dry land where Sophie stood, I could see the roundness there, could see how much she’d grown since I’d last seen her at the Botanical Gardens three months ago.
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and as I drew a shaky breath in, her gaze snapped back to me and what I stood in front of.
She paused, one hand covering her mouth, her other forearm resting just above her bump and just below her breasts. I knew she was reading it. I knew she could see the bold, curling font behind me on my yacht, could read what I’d renamed it to.
I Love You, Olivia.
She wouldn’t move, so I did.
“I love you,” I said, and God, it was so easy, now. I stopped in front of her, some twenty or so feet away from the boat and at least two from her. “I love you, and I’m so sorry that it took me so long to be able to say that.”
She shook her head in what I could only hope was disbelief. “I don’t—”
“Please, Liv, understand that I only struggled with admitting that because of Noah. The idea of cementing someone in his life like that and committing to you wholly when you had the potential to break not only me, but him as well, scared the living shit out of me. I loved you then, and I love you now, and I love our daughter and everything you’ve done and will do for her.” The words were coming and I couldn’t stop them if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to, not now, not ever, not when it came to her. “I love you, and I don’t deserve you.”
Her glossy eyes glanced behind me at the yacht again.
“What?”
A little shaking sound came from her, and the hand over her mouth made it impossible to tell if she was taking short little breaths from the buildup of tears or if it was something worse, if she was laughing.
“Liv?”
She uncovered her mouth, revealing a wide grin beneath it. “It’s so cheesy,” she snickered. “The name.”
Oh, for fucks sake.
“I’m sorry, thank you for saying it, but that — that is so funny, Dame,” she laughed. She took a step toward me, her shoulders bouncing from her breaths between cackles. “Your neighbors are going to make fun of you.”
“I don’t… I don’t care if they make fun of me—”
Her arms wrapped around my jacketed torso, her stomach pressing against mine before the rest of her slotted in. “It’s so dumb. I love it.”
Her words, however silly, hit me like a punch in the fucking chest. But instead of knocking the air from me, it loosened me, it relaxed me, it opened up my airways and holy shit, I could breathe. She was here. She was here, and she was holding on to me, and she wasn’t yelling at me or walking away.
I let myself hold her. I let myself lift her, let my fingers dig into her clothed flesh, let my myself breathe her in and keep her to me. “Hey, hey, you’re not supposed to lift pregnant women!”
“Shit, sorry,” I laughed, dropping her back to her feet. She pulled away and for the shortest, horrifying second, I wasn’t sure how far she’d go or if she’d run off. I grabbed her and brought her back to me, cupping her face in my hands, directing her bright green eyes up at me. “Please don’t leave.”
“I wasn’t,” she said.
My chest fucking cracked.
“I get it, Dame.” A tear slipped from her eyes and I swiped it with my thumb before it could make her colder. Why the fuck isn’t she wearing a jacket? “Genuinely, I do. I’ve had a lot of time to sit on it and I think I realized a while ago that you couldn’t say it because of him.”
I couldn’t help myself.
I pressed my lips to hers, felt the chill of them against mine. She parted for me instantly, and the second I delved into her mouth, all I could taste was the lingering flavor of a pumpkin spice latte and the rest was all her. I kissed her desperately, held her to me, wrapped my hand around the back of her neck and kept her from pulling back.
I didn’t realize how much I needed that. It had been at least four months since she’d let me kiss her, and from the way my body reacted instinctively, I could tell that I hadn’t been fixating on something that wasn’t real or something I’d built in my own mind. She was here, she was real, and she was coming back to me, finally.
“He’s going to be so fucking happy,” I mumbled against her lips. “He’s missed you so much. Maybe more than me, if that’s possible.”
She pulled her lips away and bounced up on her tiptoes, looking over my shoulder at the boat behind me. “Is he here?”
“God, no,” I laughed. “He’s with Carrie and Lucas. If you were receptive to this, I wanted you to myself for at least a few hours.”
She beamed up at me. “I am, in fact, receptive.”
“Thank fuck for that,” I grinned.
————
The setting sun over the horizon set the sky on fire, shooting orange and rose colored rays across the water beneath us as we stood on the edge of the bow of the ship. We’d anchored almost an hour ago, and the moments of calm where she hadn’t been telling me all about her least favorite classmate at the birthing studio and how that woman’s husband shelled out multi-level-marketing smoothies, I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily we slotted back into normalcy.
She hadn’t been able to stop smiling, even when she was complaining. She missed cheese and wine and sushi and her usual overabundance of coffee. She missed sleeping comfortably, she missed her ankles and feet not hurting. She missed me. But she said it all while looking at me with an unmovable grin, her eyes almost twinkling, and I knew I’d done the right thing. I didn’t give up.
Even when it seemed like all hope was lost. Even when I’d pulled myself together for Noah.
I wrapped my arm around her bump as I slotted myself in from behind her, careful not to put too much pressure as she leaned against the railing. The jacket I’d given her was keeping her sufficiently warm, but that left me a little too cold, a little too vulnerable in the cold air.
“I apologize if this is presumptuous,” I said softly, my lips just an inch from her ear, “and you might think I’m fucking insane. But I don’t want to waste another second with you after not seeing you for three months.”
Her head turned, her face just slightly too close to be able to focus on. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I am more sure about you and our future together than I have been about anything in my entire life,” I said. I swallowed past the lump in my throat as I sunk my fingers into the pocket of my slacks. “I was terrified when Noah came into my life. I was terrified when you told me about her. But with you, Liv, it was always easy. Marrying you didn’t scare me the first time.”
Her eyes narrowed as I slowly pulled back just a few inches from her. She spun around, leaning her back on the railing instead. “Damien,” she deadpanned.
I pulled the little wooden box from my pocket. “Olivia,” I parroted, pressing my lips just briefly against her desperately hidden grin. I popped the lid open and held it between us, the light green, oval cut sapphire in the center reflecting and glinting off the last few rays of sunlight. Along the sides of the gem, lab-grown, circular diamonds tapered off until it was just the golden band.
Her glossy eyes flitted between mine and the ring I held in front of her.
“For the record, I bought this before Ethan gave me the papers,” I said, swallowing down my pride. We hadn’t brought up any of that since we’d been on the dock, and mentioning it now, in the midst of this, felt like a stab. But I needed to make it clear. “I told myself then that if, by some miracle, you wanted to stay married to me, I’d give it to you. I wanted to give you a proper wedding. I wanted to do it right, even though we’d started it wrong.”
“Are you serious?” she croaked, her shaking fingers plucking the box from my hand.
I nodded. “I missed you every fucking second of the last three months,” I rasped. “And I’ve loved you for longer than that. I just wasn’t ready to admit it to myself.”
She sniffled as she lifted the ring off of the moss-covered pillow. “I love you. Is this ethical?”
I couldn’t stop the creeping laugh coming up and out of my throat. “Of course it’s ethical. Who the fuck do you think I am? I didn’t just waltz into a Kay Jewelers and pick the first thing I saw—”
Her lips met mine, her shaking hand resting against my cheek. “I want to see the receipt,” she giggled against my lips.
“Absolutely not.”
“Just for the date of purchase!”
I snorted. “Okay, fine, I’ll show you that. But you don’t get to see the price.”
She kissed me again, and again, and again, her mouth like a saving grace or a whispered prayer for salvation against mine. I didn’t want it to stop, didn’t want to ever have to pull away from her, didn’t want another three months or another three seconds without her touching me.
But she hadn’t answered me yet. “Is that a yes?” I breathed, my lips just an inch from hers, my hand tucked against her jaw and neck just beneath her ear and my other around the small of her back.
“You haven’t actually asked me, yet,” she laughed. “You’ve just said a lot of sweet things and showed me a ring.”
Oh, fuck. She was right.
I must have gotten so swept up in her reaction that I hadn’t even said it.
“Marry me,” I grinned, pressing my lips against hers. “Marry me again, princess.”
She let out a dramatic, over-the-top sigh, her giggles only barely concealed. “I don’t know, Dame, you’re almost twice my age—”
“Oh, for fucks sake, Liv, I’m taking that as a yes.”
————
Bare, beautiful, and strewn across my bed as the ship rocked so gently that we could barely feel it was exactly how I wanted to keep her forever.
I kissed her lips, her jaw, her neck, her collarbones. I kissed her breasts, careful not to brush over her nipples because of the soreness she’d vocalized earlier. I kissed her stomach and the roundness of it, stopped to watch in awe as I held either side of it, feeling the brief little shifts of our daughter. I kissed her thighs, and I kissed what lay between them.
I spent far too long there.
Her moans ripped through the cabin of the yacht as she came around my fingers, her hands tugging at my hair, my tongue against her clit. I tasted every drop of her that coated my hand, relished the flavor of her and the slight differences it had now. Still perfect. Still her.
But my cock was straining against the only pieces of clothing still left on my body, and although my shirt and sweater had long since disappeared, I was aching to remove everything from my lower half. I was aching to be inside of her.
“What’s most comfortable for you?” I rasped, coming up for a mouthful of air as she twitched around my sunken fingers.
“What… what do you mean?” Her lashes fluttered as the haze of her orgasm left her slightly delirious. I couldn’t help but chuckle at how easily I managed to make her undone.
“Liv,” I grinned, repositioning myself above her as I slowly slid my fingers out of her. She whined her disappointment at the emptiness. “I’m going to fuck you now, princess. What position would be the most comfortable?”
A blush spread across her cheeks. “Um… shit, I don’t know,” she breathed, her stomach rising and falling with every intake of air. “Me on top, maybe.”
“You got it.”
In record time, I slipped myself out of my slacks and underwear, the sweet feeling of relief washing over me the moment my cock was set free. I wrapped one single arm around her waist and lifted her higher up the bed toward the headboard, stopping only to collapse against it myself.
She crawled to me on instinct, and somehow, impossibly, my length became even more rigid.
Her lips met mine with my back against the headboard, and lazily, desperately, she kissed me. She raised up on her knees as she settled in astride me, her hands cupping my cheeks, her head above mine. Even like this, she seemed so breakable, so fragile.
But then she was sinking down onto me, and my brain ceased to function.
Inch by inch, she adjusted to my size, her quick little breaths against my lips painting me in warm air. Slowly she sank, devouring me, pulling me in, and the moment her legs met mine and she had no more room to give, she started to move.
I could have sworn I saw stars.
“Fuck,” I groaned, pushing my fingers into the deep brown waves of her hair and clutching it. “I missed this. Missed you.”
I slid my hand into the space between us and found her swollen, sensitive clit, forcing a yelp out of her as her hips ground into me. Her walls squeezed in response to the added stimulus, and I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d last long. But Noah was at Carrie’s for the night and we had nowhere else in the world to be, and I could do this over, and over, and over again.
Her head tipped back as I pulled a little harder on her hair, her lips breaking from mine. I kissed along her jaw, along her stretched neck, giving my attention to that space beneath her ear that drove her wild.
“Oh my God,” she choked.
Her hand came to rest against the side of my cheek, and for a split second, I could see the ring she’d placed on her finger. My chest cracked just a little bit further. “I love you,” I mumbled against her skin. “I love you.”
Her answering giggle almost drowned out her, “I love you too.”
