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“Bianca.” He slid his h

ands into her hair, tilted her face to his. “I’ll give it up if I have to. STUD. If that’s what it takes—”

She put her fingers across his lips.

“Foolish man,” she whispered. “That last night we were in your beautiful house, watching that beautiful sun fall into that beautiful sea…”

He laughed. Kissed her. She smiled, though her eyes were still filled with tears.

“That night,” she said, “ I was going to tell you that I had made a decision.” She took a deep breath. Despite everything he’d just said, this—what she was about to say—might be more than he was prepared to hear. Then she thought of what he had told her, that the only way to deal with fear was to face it. And she knew that if ever there’d been a time to take that advice, it was now. “That night,” she said, “I was going to tell you that I was ready to give up my job. Move to Santa Barbara. Make a life with you.”

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.

Had she said too much? She could hardly breathe. Because if he didn’t love her as she loved him, if he didn’t want her forever and ever and ever…

“Bianca,” he said. His voice was gruff. Raw. But his eyes were full of tenderness, and the hands that cupped her face were gentle. “Bianca, my love, will you marry me?”

Bianca laughed.

And said, “Yes.”

EPILOGUE

El Sueño, the Wilde ranch in Texas, a late August weekend

Chay had not thought about weddings.

For starters, he was male. And he’d never even imagined himself married.

Bianca hadn’t thought about weddings either. She knew that some girls grew up planning their weddings, but she’d never been one of them. Finding a man, getting married—those things hadn’t been on her To Do list.

Not at all

So, when Alessandra said, You just let us plan everything, Bianca and Chay figured, Why not?

Tanner, overhearing the long-distance conversation, had snorted.

“Dude?” Chay had said, and after some incomprehensible whispers on the other end of the phone, Tanner had cleared his throat and said it had certainly worked out well for him and Alessandra.

Which turned out to mean the wedding was, well, kind of a production.

But, as even Chay had to admit, a pretty damn nice production.

Chay had met the seemingly endless bunch of sisters and brothers, half-sisters and half-brothers, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, babies and toddlers at Tanner’s wedding. They’d all seemed nice enough, but it was different meeting them now, the weekend of the wedding, as his new in-laws.

Turned out they weren’t just nice. They were great.

They were pleasant. They were fun. They could be serious, too, as Chay discovered the night before the wedding when the brothers—two of them—and the half-brothers—they came in a set of three—took him into the study for a drink and told him, earnestly enough to make him damn sure they meant it, that they were happy for their sister and happy for him—but that if he ever did anything to hurt her, they’d stake him out and skin him alive.

Chay had given half a minute’s thought to some kind of snappy rejoinder, maybe along the lines of saying that, hey, he was the Lakota here and didn’t that make him the skinning expert? And then he’d realized that this was a serious moment and a joke might not go over well, so he’d have to explain that he meant he was talking about skinning a buffalo, except he’d never skinned a buffalo in his life. Besides, by then, after those thirty-something seconds of silence, the men’s eyes had all narrowed to slits. Logic had superseded being a smartass, which was why he’d hoisted his bottle of ale, nodded his head and said, in solemn tones, “Sounds like a plan to me.”

The wedding arrangements belonged to the sisters.

“You’re going to be so busy moving all your things to California, looking for a job, that kind of stuff,” Alessandra had said, “we’ll just handle the details for you.”

It had seemed the kindest, sweetest of suggestions.

And, it turned out, it was.