Chapter 25 #2
"Brooks built on the land," I say. "Put down roots and built a life with Summer on McCallister ground." I pause. "Wade fixed up the main house, the one we all grew up in, made it his and Quinn's." Another pause. "Luke and Addie have the Victorian next door and now his own place on the property."
Riley is watching me carefully now, something shifting in her expression, a dawning understanding moving in behind her eyes that she's not quite letting herself land on yet.
"Three brothers," I continue. "Three houses. Three lives built on this land the right way, with the right person, permanent and without apology." I hold her gaze steady. "I built the fourth house. I built it big enough for a family.
"Jace," she says quietly.
"I knew what I was building it for," I tell her. "I knew who I was building it for. I just had to wait for you to get out of your own way long enough to walk into it."
She lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. "That's not the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me."
"No," I agree. "But it's true."
She looks at me for a long moment, something working behind her eyes, no careful distance, just Riley, all of her, standing in the kitchen of the house I built and finally letting it be what it is.
"What are you saying?" she asks, and her voice is barely above a whisper, not from uncertainty but from the honesty that doesn't need volume behind it.
I reach up and tuck her hair back, my hand settling against her jaw the way it always settles there, like that piece of geography worked out a long time ago that it belongs to me.
"I'm saying this is ours" I tell her. "You, me, and Hadley. This house, this land, this family, all of it." I search her face. "Permanently. The way McCallisters do things."
Her eyes are bright now, steady and certain.
"The cowboy way," she says softly.
"The cowboy way," I confirm.
She puts both hands flat against my chest, feeling the beat of me under her palms the way she does when she needs to know something is real.
"Okay," she says.
Just that.
Okay.
Like she always knew it and just needed to hear it the right way.
I've had a ring for three days.
Three days. Sitting in the inside pocket of my good jacket since the day I drove into town, walked into the jeweler on Main Street and pointed at the one that was exactly right without needing to look at anything else.
I know what I like when I see it.
Always have.
She's on the porch when I come back outside, leaning against the rail in the dark with her face tipped up toward the sky the way she does when she needs the open space of it, and the sight of her standing on my porch under the Texas stars looking like she belongs there, because she does, hits me the same way it hit me the first time and every time since.
I'm not nervous.
That surprises me a little. I expected nervous. I've been cavalier about most things in my life but this is not most things, this is the thing, and I expected my hands to know the difference.
They're steady.
Because this is right and my hands have always known the difference between something right and something else.
I come to stand beside her at the rail and she glances at me, easy and unhurried, and we look out at the ranch together in the dark, the pasture and the tree line and our land to the east where the house sits quietly against the sky.
"Beautiful night," she says.
"Yeah," I answer. "It is."
I reach into my jacket pocket.
She feels the shift in me before she sees anything, that awareness she has of me that I stopped being surprised by weeks ago, and she turns, her eyes dropping to my hand and then coming back up to my face with an expression that does something to my chest I don't have a precise word for.
I hold the ring between us in the dark, simple and certain, not down on one knee because that's not how I'm built and she'd be the first to tell me so.
Just standing at the rail of the house I built with her and Hadley in mind, holding out the ring.
The question already answered in everything we've said and done and have chosen these past weeks but needing to be asked out loud anyway because some things deserve the words.
"Marry me," I say. Not a question exactly. More like a statement. "Build this with me. You and Hadley. Permanent and without apology. The whole thing."
She looks at the ring and then at me and then back at the ring.
She almost laughs. "You've been walking around with this in your pocket for two and a half days."
"Waiting on the right moment."
"And this is the right moment?" she asks, looking out at the dark ranch, the porch, the swing, the stars overhead.
"This is exactly the right moment," I tell her.
She looks back at me, and what's on her face is everything I've been watching build since the day she pulled up to this ranch.
"Yes," she says.
Simple and clean and exactly the right word.
I slide the ring onto her finger and she looks at it for a moment in the low light of the porch, and then she looks up at me with tears running down her face.
I pull her in. Her arms going around me, her face against my shoulder, and we stand there on the porch of the house I built while the ranch holds us together.
"Hadley will be so happy to have her Daddy right here, all the time," she says into my shoulder.
We stay on that porch long after we should have gone inside.
Talking about things that matter and things that don't, about Hadley starting school in the fall and Riley's work and the horse that's already here with no name yet. The room that can be something else when the time comes. Hopefully sooner than later.
About the family that has been building itself on this land one house at a time, one life at a time, the legacy their father left in their hands taking shape exactly the way it was always supposed to.
About the Miller land, what it was and what it became and what it's going to be now, where a family got built on top of it.
About what comes next.
All of it.
The swing moves easily in the night air and her hand is warm in mine and the ring sits on her finger catching the low light of the porch. The ranch spreads out around us vast and patient and entirely ours.
Four brothers. Four houses. Four lives built on McCallister ground the right way.
Built to last.