Page 68 of Where the Roses Bloom

Like the wordsget me pregnant right fucking nowwere still ringing in his ears and his brain hadn’t caught up.

Then something snapped.

He let out a low, broken sound, and I was in his arms before I could blink—lifted straight off the grass like I weighed nothing, his grip steel around the backs of my thighs as I locked myself around his waist.

“You sure?” he whispered, voice shaking. “You sure, baby?”

He’d asked so many times. I didn’t know how many times he needed to hear it before he believed it…believedthat I wanted a future with him.

“I’m sure.”

My mouth found his jaw, his throat, tasting the salt on his skin. His hands flexed on my thighs, and he turned away from the porch like he was too worked up to make it back inside.

We didn’t need a bed.

We had the whole damn world.

Rhett strode toward the tree line with me wrapped around him, breath ragged, teeth clenched. He didn’t speak. Just walked like a man possessed, one hand tangled in my hair, the other gripping my ass. We didn’t go far—just stopped right inside the privacy of the forest, the whole world alive with an old and watchful kind of magic.

He dropped to his knees with me still in his arms, then laid me back in the grass, so gentle it nearly broke me.

“Look at you,” he whispered. “Goddamn, Willow. You’re everything. Everything.”

He practically tore the t-shirt off and stared down at my bare chest, my flushed skin, the wet heat waiting for him between my thighs.

“You want my baby?” he asked. “You want me to fuck you full right here?”

I nodded, reaching for him. “Yes, Rhett, please?—”

And then he was there.

Inside me with one deep, perfect thrust, the moment we’d been trying to reach all fucking morning.

His lips found my neck as I arched into him, nails skating down his spine…but he wasn’t just kissing me. He was talking, like Carter leaving had opened the floodgates.

“I’ll give you everything, Willow Rhodes,” Rhett growled. “You hear me, baby?Everything. A home. A life. A family. You’re mine now.Mine. And I’m yours, damn it, every part of me, everything I have to give…”

He pulled out and thrust in again, deep.

My back arched off the grass, my thighs trembling around his waist. He was everywhere—his hands braced beside my shoulders, his body heavy and perfect, driving into me like he could bury everything that came before. And maybe he could. Maybe he already had.

Because nothing in this world had ever felt like this.

“I love you,” I choked out, gasping as he hit that spot again. “Rhett—I love you?—”

His head dropped to my shoulder with a sound that was part groan, part prayer. “Say it again.”

“I love you,” I whispered, wrapping my legs tighter around his hips. “I want this. I wantyou.”

He was shaking. His breath stuttered as he slowed, grinding into me deep, grinding until I felt him in places no man had ever touched.

“I’ll be so good to you,” he promised. “So good to our baby. Willow…swear to God, I’ll spend the rest of my life makin’ this right. Every day. Every goddamn day.”

“Then give it to me,” I begged, my voice breaking. “Rhett—please—give it to me. Fill me up. Breed me. I want you to come inside me—please,please?—”

“Marry me,” he rasped, thrusting into me, holding me close. “Fuck, Willow, marry me…tell me you’ll stay.”

“Yes, yes…yes, of course I’ll marry you, of course…”