Page 136 of Even After This
“Traitors.”
His shoulders shake. “Are you complaining?”
“Never.”
“I talked to your family yesterday.” His gorgeous rumbling voice fills my ear. “Molly almost didn’t grant me permission to marry you.”
“My sister knows?” Craning my neck, I glare at him. “Of all the times not to be codependent and share inappropriate information. I’m going to kill her.”
Harlan loosens his hold so I can turn in his arms to face him. “She wants me to pass along a message to you.”
I brace myself. “What’s that?”
“She took you off Famous People Probation.”
Giggling, I say, “I don’t think that matters anymore.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No.”
“If I’m not famous, then what am I?”
I lean up and whisper in his ear, “You’re just mine.”
He draws back and throws me a heated look before he captures my lips with his. When we stop kissing, he says at my temple, “She also thinks we should go camping for our honeymoon.”
“Liar.”
“I’ll table the camping thing for now,” he says. “But I insist on dancing at the reception.”
“Can surgeon general warnings be put on wedding invitations?”
I study his face, then shift my gaze to the precious ring and finally to Twelve Bluebells Ranch. Wrapping my arms around him, I rest my cheek on his chest.
My Hercules. My family. My love.
Even after this.
Epilogue
“How manydifferentshades of pink paint does one person need?” In the Home Depot parking lot, Harlan stares into the back of his Jeep, his daughter on his hip.
Alex holds out her silver wand with silver and pink streamers coming out the top of a plastic star. She pops each of the paint cans with her wand as she counts. “One. Two. Free. Four!”
He looks at me. “I thought we were getting paint for the set of our backyard play. Apparently I shouldn’t have left you in the paint section unsupervised for”—he uses air quotes—“‘one more thing.’”
“We did get paint for the play. Those are the fifth and sixth cans. The pink cans accumulate to be the”—I use my own air quotes—“‘one more thing.’”
“Uh-huh. And why do we need all the pink?”
“We’re painting my room!” Alex booms before she pushes up and gives her daddy a loud, demonstrative kiss on his cheek.
He leans in and stage-whispers to me, “I thought we painted her room pink last week—”
“We did—”
“Pepto-Bismol pink.”
