Page 61 of Belong to Me
"Both." She put her hands on his chest. His heart was slamming against her palms. "I came back because of you. But I stayed because of the work. Because I like it. Because it's mine. I came back for you, Alexei. I told you that the first night. I haven't changed my mind."
His throat worked. His hands tightened on her hips. And the thing she saw in his face was a man standing at the edge of something and choosing not to jump but to build a bridge.
"I'll be yours."
Three words. Spoken against her mouth. His lips brushing hers with each syllable.
"I'll be yours," he repeated, and his voice splintered, "if you marry me."
The world stopped.
Her body was still humming. Still aching. Still pressing toward him with an urgency her brain couldn't override. And he was still there, still close, still hard against her, still one motion away from everything, and he had just said marry me.
"That's—" Her voice cracked. "That's not how proposals work."
"I'm not proposing. I'm telling you." His hands moved to her face. Both palms. Thumbs on her cheekbones. His eyes were so dark they were almost black. "I'll be yours. All of it. The name, the empire, the man underneath. But only if you marry me."
"You stopped." She was breathless and furious and aching and crying and she couldn't sort any of it into an order that made sense. "You were about to— and you stopped to—"
"Yes."
"You stopped making love to me to propose?"
"Yes."
"Who does that?"
"I do." His thumbs caught her tears. "Because if I'm going to have you, Mia, I'm going to have all of you. Not one night. Not the gap year. All of it. And I won't take this from you without giving you everything I have first."
The words hit her like a wave. Because underneath the claim, underneath the possessiveness, underneath the Alexei Almazov who moved the world to get what he wanted, was a man who had just stopped on the edge of the thing he desired most because he couldn't take without offering.
"Are you serious?"
"I've never been less serious about anything in my life."
She blinked at him. "You just said you've never been less—"
"More. I meant more." A flush crept across his cheekbones, and if her heart hadn't been trying to exit her chest through her throat, she would have committed this moment to memory as the first and possibly only time she'd ever seen Alexei Almazov fumble a sentence.
"You're blushing," she whispered.
"I'm not."
"Your cheekbones are pink."
"Irrelevant."
"Alexei Almazov is blushing and proposing while we're both—" She gestured between them, at the state of them, her dress rucked up around her waist and his belt undone and the counter wet with spilled coffee and her underwear on the floor next to his dog. "This is the most ridiculous proposal in the history of proposals."
Biscuit chose that moment to nose at the fallen garment. The humiliation was complete.
She was crying. She hadn't decided to cry. The tears were just there, rolling down her face and over his thumbs, and she was smiling so hard it hurt and crying so hard she couldn't see and his face was blurry and beautiful and closer than it had ever been.
"Is that a yes?" His voice was stripped.
"That's been a yes since I was sixteen, you impossible man."
He kissed her. Hard. His hands in her hair, her legs locked around his waist, her tears on both their faces, and the sound he made against her mouth was her name, just her name, the way he'd said it when she held him in the kitchen, like it was the only word left in a language he'd forgotten.
