Chapter 50
CHAPTER FIFTY
Fiona
I woke slowly to the mattress dipping behind me and warmth settling against my back.
For one confused second, I didn’t know where I was.
The room was unfamiliar, the muted sounds coming from somewhere beneath the floor were nothing like Granny’s quiet house, and there was a heaviness in my body that made it feel as though I had slept for days instead of hours.
Then an arm slid around my waist and pulled me backward against a solid chest, and everything from yesterday came rushing back.
New Orleans.
The Bourbon Bar.
Jasper.
His beard scruff brushed the side of my neck a second before his lips touched the skin beneath my ear, and the last traces of sleep disappeared beneath a slow warmth spreading through me.
I could feel the smile in his next kiss, could almost picture the look on his face without opening my eyes, and something about waking up with him wrapped around me made the room feel less strange.
“Mmm,” I murmured as I stretched beneath his arm. “You’re back.”
“Never left, Cher.”
His voice was low against my neck, rough enough to send another shiver through me.
I tilted my head without thinking, giving him more room, and Jasper took the invitation exactly as I expected him to.
His mouth moved along the side of my throat while his hand rested against my stomach, warm and possessive without trying to lead me anywhere.
After almost a year of him holding himself back, I had become painfully aware of every moment he stopped doing it.
I rolled toward him.
The look in his eyes when I finally faced him made the rest of the room disappear.
I kissed him before he could say anything.
There had been too many interrupted kisses between us.
Too many times when Jasper had pulled away first because he was determined to be the gentleman I had never asked for.
Too many nights wondering what would happen when there was no school, no Granny in the next room, no reason for him to stop because I was too young or the timing was wrong or he had decided patience was some kind of sacred calling.
His hand slid into my hair as he kissed me back, and for a few seconds, I let myself believe this was finally it.
This was the moment I had been waiting for.
The thought had barely formed when Jasper groaned against my mouth and pulled back.
I stared at him. “No.”
His eyebrows lifted.
I grabbed the front of his shirt before he could move farther away. “You do not get to start that and then stop again.”
The laugh that rumbled through his chest should not have been attractive when I was irritated with him, but apparently my body had no loyalty whatsoever. Jasper brushed his thumb across my lower lip, his eyes following the movement with enough heat that my annoyance almost disappeared.
“Ma Belle, you have no fuckin’ idea how sorry I am right now.”
“Then don’t stop.”
His eyes closed briefly, and the expression that crossed his face made me wonder if he was actually suffering. Good. I had been suffering for months.
When he looked at me again, he pressed another kiss to my mouth, softer this time, before rolling onto his back. “We’ve got about an hour before my mama and Aunt Marabella get here.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Mama. Glorianna. The terrifyin’ woman responsible for my beauty, charm, impeccable manners, and most of my childhood trauma.” He glanced at me. “Aunt Marabella is Wade’s mama. She’ll be with her.”
I pushed myself upright, trying to reconcile the conversation with the way he had been kissing my neck thirty seconds earlier. “Why are they coming here?”
Jasper’s expression became far too innocent.
That should have warned me.
Instead of answering, he reached up and tucked my hair behind my ear.
His fingers lingered against my cheek, and the humor faded from his eyes as he studied me.
There was something different about the way he looked at me now, something focused enough that the question I had been about to ask disappeared.
“I need to hear it again.”
“Hear what?”
“That you’re sure about me.”
The words settled differently than they had on Granny’s couch.
Yesterday everything had been too raw, my emotions tangled with fear and exhaustion and relief because Jasper had appeared when I needed him most. Now I was lying in a room above a Bourbon Street bar after willingly climbing onto his motorcycle and crossing half the country with him.
There was still fear inside me, but it wasn’t about Jasper.
He was the one thing I wasn’t afraid of.
His thumb moved lightly across my cheek. “I know what you told me before we left. But I need you to think about it without that parkin’ lot anywhere near the answer. You want this? You want me? All the shit that comes with me?”
I studied his face, trying to find some clue about why he suddenly needed the answer again.
Jasper had never lacked confidence about us.
He had apparently known what he wanted before I even realized there was an us to consider.
Learning about the La Croix curse helped make more sense of that now, though I still wasn’t sure I believed a family could inherit destiny along with eye color and cheekbones.
I believed Jasper believed it.
More importantly, I believed what the last year had become.
“I want you.”
His gaze held mine. “All of me?”
I almost smiled. “That sounds threatening.”
“It probably should.”
“I’m still saying yes.”
The tension in his face eased, and for one second, I thought he was finally going to kiss me again.
Instead, Jasper smiled.
“Then marry me.”
I was out of bed before my brain caught up with my feet.
“What?”
Jasper stayed exactly where he was, one arm behind his head as he watched me pace two steps away and turn back toward him. If anything, he looked pleased with my reaction.
“You heard me.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Nope.”
“Jasper!”
He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Still sane, Ma Belle.”
“You just asked me to marry you.”
“I did.”
“An hour before your mother gets here.”
His mouth twitched. “Timin’ could use work.”
I stared at him, waiting for the joke that had to be coming.
Jasper joked about everything. He could turn a threat into a punch line and somehow make flirting sound reasonable while surrounded by armed bikers.
But the longer I looked at him, the more obvious it became that there was no joke hiding behind the question.
“You’re serious.”
“Completely.”
My pulse started climbing again.
Marriage.
Yesterday I had gone to work worried about telling Jasper I had given birth to Charlie. Less than twenty-four hours later, I was standing barefoot in New Orleans while the same man sat on the edge of a bed waiting for me to decide whether I wanted to become his wife.
There should have been more steps between those two things.
There should probably have been several states between them.
“You can’t just decide we should get married.”
“I didn’t.” Jasper leaned forward, forearms resting on his thighs while he watched me. “I decided a long fuckin’ time ago that you were it for me. The only thing I didn’t know was when you’d be ready to decide I was it for you.”
The answer stole some of the panic from my lungs.
I thought about all the conversations I had mistaken for jokes. The imaginary house. Christmas. Children. Nebraska. Him telling me he wanted to see me in one of his shirts as though he had already pictured me waking up beside him enough times to know exactly what I would look like.
Maybe Jasper had been talking about marriage for months without ever using the word.
He stood and came toward me slowly, giving me plenty of time to move if I wanted. I didn’t. His hands settled at my waist, and when I looked up at him, the amusement was gone.
“If you don’t want this, you tell me no and that’s the end of it.
I’ll still want you, and I’ll still be a pain in your ass every day you let me.
” His fingers tightened slightly against my waist. “But if what you told me yesterday is true, if you’re ready to be mine and you want me to be yours, there is nothin’ on this earth that would make me happier than puttin’ my name beside yours and callin’ you my fuckin’ wife. ”
My heart hurt.
Not painfully.
I looked at the man standing in front of me and knew my answer was already there. It had probably been there before he asked. But Charlie rose between us again—not as an obstacle, but as the last door I had refused to open.
I couldn’t walk into a marriage while Jasper still stood on the other side of it.
I caught my lower lip between my teeth and watched his eyes follow the nervous movement.
“Before I answer, I need to tell you something.”
Jasper sighed and started to smile. “Baby, whatever you tried tellin’ me before we left can still wait. I told you already, unless there’s a trail of dead husbands somewhere—”
“No.”
The word stopped him.
I put my hands against his chest—not pushing him away, only needing the small space between us so I could look at him properly. “Not this time. If you’re asking me to marry you, you need to know everything.”
His expression changed immediately.
He didn’t argue again.
I took a breath, but the words I had rehearsed so many times still refused to arrange themselves neatly. There was no clean way to tell the story because nothing about it had been clean while I lived it.
“Charlie isn’t only my nephew.”
Jasper didn’t move.
I watched his face so closely that every tiny change felt enormous. The slight pull between his eyebrows. The way his mouth settled. His attention narrowing completely onto me.
I nearly lost my nerve.
“I gave birth to him.”
For one horrible second, Jasper gave me nothing to hold on to.