Chapter 8 #3
When the officiant finally pronounced them married, Draven kissed her slow and certain in front of everyone who actually mattered, no audience of strangers whispering at a coffee station, no performance for anyone but the small circle of people who’d earned a place in that room.
Diane stood immediately, clapping and crying at the same time, while Hugh let out a whoop that echoed off the high shelves loud enough to draw an amused look from the librarian standing near the door, and Renee threw both arms around Sloane the second the kiss broke, sobbing happily into her shoulder about how she’d known this was coming since that very first rooftop night.
* * *
The small reception afterward spilled out onto the library’s side lawn under a row of old oaks, a single long table set up just beyond the front steps, Diane insisting on serving the food herself for the first round before finally allowing Hugh to take over so she could sit and actually enjoy her own daughter’s wedding.
Renee gave a toast that started out as a joke about Draven’s eyebrows and ended with both of them in tears again, and Hugh stood up after her, quieter, more sincere, raising his glass to a brother he said he’d watched spend years building everything except a life worth coming home to, until now.
* * *
They didn’t tell anyone, not even Diane, about the second gift waiting until two days after the wedding, once the small gathering had wound down and the last of the well-wishers had gone home.
Draven flew Sloane to Orlando under the same vague pretense he’d used for the proposal, refusing to answer any of her questions on the drive from the airport, his hand resting warm on her knee the entire way while she alternated between curiosity and the particular exhaustion of being eight months pregnant in the Florida heat.
The estate sat behind tall iron gates at the end of a long, oak-lined drive, a sprawling house with wide porches and a guest cottage visible near the back property line, the whole place wrapped in the kind of quiet, established landscaping that suggested decades rather than months of careful planning.
Sloane stepped out of the car slowly, taking in the size of it, the warm brick facade, the wide double doors standing open like they were already waiting for her.
“Draven.” She turned to him, breathless. “What is this?”
“It’s ours.” He came to stand beside her, his hand finding hers. “I bought it the week after the proposal.”
He led her through the main house first, room by room, pointing out details he’d clearly considered with care rather than excess, a sunlit kitchen with windows looking out over the back lawn, a study he claimed already as hers for the nonprofit work, a nursery on the second floor done in the same soft gray she’d chosen back in Miami, the crib he’d assembled himself already moved in and waiting by the window.
“You had it shipped down here,” she said, running her fingers along the rail of the crib, recognizing the slightly uneven bracket she’d caught him on weeks ago.
“I wanted something familiar waiting for her, even somewhere new.” He stood in the doorway, watching her take it in. “I didn’t want her first home to feel like it started from nothing.”
He guided her finally toward the guest cottage near the back property line, three bedrooms, its own kitchen, a small porch facing a garden bed already planted with the kind of flowers Diane had once mentioned missing from her old house.
“There’s a guest cottage in the back, fully furnished.
” He nodded toward it. “I thought your mother might like somewhere of her own, close enough to walk over whenever she wants, far enough to keep her independence. I know how much she means to you. I wanted her close to all of us, not just visiting on weekends.”
Sloane felt her eyes fill, overwhelmed in the particular way she’d grown more comfortable letting herself feel since meeting him, no longer bracing instinctively against good things the way she once had. “You bought my mother a house.”
“I bought our family a house.” He turned her gently to face him, his hand settling against her cheek.
“All of it. You, me, Aaliyah, your mother close enough to spoil her rotten whenever she wants. I told you once I intended to spend the rest of my life making sure you never doubted whose you were again. This is part of that.”
She leaned into his palm, closing her eyes briefly, letting the weight of everything they’d built since that rooftop settle fully into her chest. When she opened them again, he was watching her with the same steady, certain expression he’d worn since the very beginning, patient and unwavering, exactly the kind of presence she’d spent years convinced she’d never actually find.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, “for showing up. Every single time.”
“Always.” He pressed a slow kiss to her forehead, then guided her gently toward the open doors of the house that was now, finally, entirely theirs. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
She walked through the doorway beside him, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach, the other laced firmly through his, the old wound from a freezer doorway months ago finally, completely, closed.