25. Chapter 25 #3
My legs walk of their own accord, drawn to the man in front of me like a magnetic field.
They don’t stop until I’m standing before him, my hazel eyes meeting his clear aqua-green irises.
He blinks, and I shift on my feet.
"Hi," he exhales.
"Hi."
"You look well."
"I haven’t slept." I say.
"And you took off. Ran away from me, just like you did when you slipped out of my bed in Tulum," he says. "Again."
"I had things to do."
"You had an entire plane?"
"I always have a plan."
He takes a step toward me. "I’m sure it was color-coded."
My chest tightens, every inch of my body on the verge of breaking.
Declan looks so handsome I could cry.
And he’s standing there, teasing me about my notebook, about my life, like I didn’t just break his heart less than forty-eight hours ago.
I sigh, looking at the flowers in his huge hands. "Those are from Jessica's wedding."
"Not exactly. I had them recreated"
"Why?"
"Because you loved them. Because I watched the way you look at them. Because I couldn’t take my eyes off you."
“Declan—"
He takes another step. “Darcy, I’ve spent twenty-four years being very good at not wanting things and approximately two months being catastrophically bad at it, and I'm done trying to find the middle ground."
I open my mouth.
"Don't tell me about the annulment," he says.
"I wasn't—"
"Don’t tell me about your father or my father or what happened between them."
Another step.
"Don’t tell me about the trust, the dossier, or what you just did in that building—"
His mouth twitches once, humorless.
"Wyeth’s lawyer told me about forty minutes ago,and for the record, it might be the single most impressive thing I’ve ever heard in my life."
My eyes are filling.
"Then what do you want me to tell you?"
He stops directly in front of me—flowers and all.
"Tell me you're staying," he says. "At the company. In New York. With me." A beat. "Tell me you're keeping your name."
"Which name?"
"Mine." His voice is quiet, certain. "Tell me you're keeping mine."
Behind me, I hear Bria make a sound that she will later claim was a cough, and I peer up at him.
At the silver hair and the green eyes and the ridiculous armful of flowers.
At the man who spent years fighting.
Who is still, apparently, not done.
"I already filed PTO with Wyeth and his assistant," I say.
"I know. I un-filed it."
"You can't un-file—"
"Wyeth un-filed it. On my behalf. It took four minutes."
"That's very presumptuous of you."
"I come by it naturally."
"Declan—"
"Is that a yes?"
If I could talk, I would.
But I can’t.
No words can make up for the love for him that’s filling my heart. No syllables can accommodate the apologies still on my tongue.
So I reach up, taking a fistful of his lapel as I pull him down to me.
And I kiss him.
I kiss him in the full, blinding July heat on a Miami tarmac with birds of paradise crushed between us.
I kiss him with Bria loudly crying somewhere behind me and Jessica almost certainly already thinking about what to name the baby.
"Yes," I say against his mouth. "That's a yes. To all of it."
He pulls back, and I see it on his face—the relief he's trying to contain, the way it cracks through anyway at the edges, the way Declan Shaw looks when he's stopped performing and is entirely himself.
"I need to say something," I tell him.
"You don’t."
"Please."
He closes his mouth, and I take a breath.
"I came to New York thinking I had to do it alone," I tell him. "But I'm saying it now. I don’t want to do any of this without you. Not the job, or the baby, or the figuring out who I actually am when I'm not running from who I was."
I look up at him. "I choose this. I choose you. Not because I accidentally signed a piece of paper in Tulum. Because you are the first person who made me feel like staying was possible. And I am done leaving early."
He says nothing for a long moment.
Long enough that I hear Bria shift her weight behind me.
Long enough that I start to wonder if I've said too much.
Then he sucks in a breath, letting it go slowly.
"I watched my father trust someone completely. And I spent twenty-four years deciding that was the mistake."
He exhales. "The trusting. As if the mistake was him and not the man who chose to use it."
He takes my face in his hands. "I’m not good at this. I’ve never been good at this. But I am going to choose you every day until I get better at it."
His jaw tightens. "That’s my vow."
"It's enough," I whisper. "It's more than enough."
"Good." His thumb traces my cheek. "Now stop crying on my tarmac."
"It's not your tarmac."
"I'm paying for the jet. It's my tarmac."
I laugh, and he does too—a rare and wonderful sound that’s worth every anguished hour it took to get here.
Behind us Bria makes absolutely no effort to pretend she is not openly weeping, and Jessica says something quietly that sounds like "finally." The Miami heat presses in from every direction and none of it matters at all.
Because Declan wraps one arm around me—flowers and all—and the other hand comes up to cradle my face.
For the first time in my life, I’m done running.