Page 95

All it took was the trying.
Everly had taught him that.
She shuffled out to the porch with her coffee when it was ready, the way she always did. She laughed when she had to pull on only a sweater. No winter layers today. No snow, no arctic winds.
She sat in her favorite chair, and he watched her for a minute while the Alaskan breeze played over her face. Green eyes, red hair, and the freckles he was obsessed with. That smile that lit up his life.
He had no idea how he’d gotten this lucky.
“You asked me what comes after this,” he said.
“This what? This coffee?”
“Alaska Force.”
She caught his serious tone, and set her coffee mug down on the wide arm of the chair. He waited until he had her full attention. Then he pulled the little box he’d been hiding for weeks from his pocket and went to kneel down in front of her.
And didn’t comment on it when she held her breath.
“You, Everly,” he told her, very solemnly. “You’re what’s next. You’re my future. I want to watch you smile for the rest of my life. I want your laughter and I want your body and I want you next to me, no matter what. I want to be the man you see when you look at me. I want to make you happy.” He cracked open the box while herhands crept up to cover her mouth. “Marry me, baby. Please. I’m nothing without you.”
She was crying again, but her eyes were shining.
“You’ll never have to find out what you’re like without me,” she whispered. “Never, ever.”
“It’s a yes or no question, little girl,” he said.
And that got him that big, wide smile that still made him giddy. He understood, from the way his heart lurched at the sight, that it always would.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course, yes. You jerk.”
Blue slid the ring on her finger, and she let out a sound of pure joy, throwing her arms around him. She kissed him, then kissed all around his face, murmuringI love yous between each one.
“And I have one more thing for you,” he told her, very seriously. “One very important thing.”
“How could there be more?” she asked, sounding happy and emotional and all things good and Everly. “This is everything. Blue, you’ve given me everything.”
He had a few ideas about how to express his feelings about that, to this woman who was going to be his wife, but he picked her up out of the chair instead. She flushed at the show of his strength the way she always did, and he loved it more than he could say when she got a little red. Still. Always.
He set her down carefully on the edge of the porch.
“Look over there,” he told her. “By the shed.”
She looked over and found it immediately. He knew when she clapped her hands over her mouth again.
“You didn’t,” she said through her hands.
“I did.”
“What if I hadn’t said yes?” she demanded, pullingher hands away, the diamond he’d just slid onto her left ring finger glinting in the morning light.
“Then, obviously, I would have ritualistically destroyed it and made you watch,” Blue said blandly.
Everly laughed. That deep, wide sound that burrowed into him and made him feel as vast and unconquerable as the Alaskan sky.
So alive he felt electric. That was what she did to him.Forhim.
“I love you so much it hurts, Blue. It actuallyhurts,” she told him, and then she was scrambling down the steps and moving over the little patch of hillside he called his yard. It was fairly level here, and she took advantage of it. She jumped on the gift he’d propped up by the shed, still laughing.