“Just a few more feet,” I tell Begonia.
She clings to my hands, her eyes blindfolded, her steps slow but steady as we reach the end of the gangplank. “Why does it smell like the ocean is right under my feet?”
I hold her by the waist and guide her the last few steps, then tug at her blindfold. “Because it is.”
She blinks in the bright sunshine, and then her eyes go round and she shrieks.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur, pulling her tight against me. “And we’re not going anywhere. We’re docked. Won’t leave the pier unless you beg. Cross my heart.”
Marshmallow’s plastered to my leg, as if he gets just as seasick as Begonia does.
“Whose boat is this?” she asks.
“Mine. And it’s a yacht, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, is that so, Mr. Fancy?” She grins at me as we stand on my ostentatious vessel, and I find it impossible not to grin back.
“So very so,” I reply, parroting a phrase I heard her use with Hyacinth not four hours ago. “You feel okay?”
She leans into me and sucks in a breath so big, I can feel it in my own toes. “Fresh sea air, gorgeous fall trees, sunny skies, and the sweetest, most thoughtful boyfriend in existence holding me and ready to pull me off this boat if I start to feel woozy? I feel so amazing, I might have to dance.”
Marshmallow harumphs.
“I can too dance,” she tells him. “And even if I couldn’t, I should. Anyone can do anything they enjoy.”
“I enjoy doing you,” I offer.
And there’s that gorgeous Begonia beam. “You knew I’d chicken out if you let me see where we were going.”
“I suspected as much.”
“You took the leap for me and pulled me along for the ride.”
“Bluebell, you’ve led me to the cliff of so many leaps I never thought I’d take. It’s only fair to return the favor.”
She laughs. “We are so weird.”
“We are so us. Would you like a tour?”
When she nods, I loosen my hold on her so that I can turn her to look out to sea. “We are standing on this boat.”
“Yacht,” she corrects.
I smile and point over the covered cockpit. “That is the ocean.”
Marshmallow sighs.
Begonia cracks up. She twists and points to the Maine shoreline. “What’s that?”
“That is the most beautiful fall display you’ll see anywhere in the world. And it’s even more gorgeous when you sail up and down the shoreline, which we’ll only do when you’re ready.”
Violins strike up on shore, and she gasps, then pulls away and claps her hands. “You hired the Oysterberry Bay Island Orchestra.”
“And if you don’t feel too ill after your adventure on a boat, I do believe there’s a feast waiting for us.”
“Hayes.”
“Yes, my bluebell?”
She reaches her hands up to hold me by the cheeks. “This is love,” she whispers.
Ah, this woman. She has my eyeballs suddenly going hot. “And it’s my favorite kind of love,” I whisper back.
She rises on her tiptoes and presses her lips to mine. “You are my favorite kind of everything.”
And this is why it’s so easy to love Begonia.
Oh, yes. Love.
It hasn’t been four full months since she startled the hell out of me at the house she now insists we call Driftwood Manor—all your houses need names if one has a name, and I was driftwood in your house when you found me—and in those four months, we’ve spent most of our time in Virginia, with Begonia making list after list of things that need to be done to the summer camp to bring it back to its original glory, and me making list after list of improvements on her ideas.
Razzle Dazzle does nothing small, even if the end result might look like a normal summer camp. I’m not destroying her vision. Merely putting additional support beams beneath it so that it runs as smoothly as if it were the next Razzle Dazzle Village.
But I was talking about love.
And about living with Begonia, who gives it so very freely, to everyone, with no expectation of anything in return and no fear of rejection—if they don’t want love, I can’t fix that for them—that I’ve rediscovered the meaning of the word.
The way it’s meant to be used.
She makes love her own.
She claims it.
She doesn’t hide from it or let other people tell her what it is.
And so I’m following her lead, and in our house, there’s only real love.
Unselfish, whole-hearted, freely-given love.
This woman is helping me heal my very soul.
And she insists that my easy acceptance of her joy for the little things in the world is something she could never find in another man, nor would she want to.
It’s so foreign to me to think that anyone wouldn’t love her for exactly who she is, and perhaps that, more than anything, means I truly am the right man for her.
It’s mind-boggling that simply accepting a person can mean so much, and yet here I stand, contemplating how easily I love this woman who’s accepted me and all of my broken and ugly parts too.
She kisses me once more, then goes flat-footed again, drops her hands from my face, and grabs me by the arm. “Show me the dance floor.”
I give her the grand tour while the violins play, and as we reach the private quarters below deck, where I intend to give Begonia the best part of the tour, Marshmallow appears.
He’s soaking wet and carrying a fire extinguisher.
Begonia’s eyes go wide.
One wrong squeeze of his jaw, and we’ll be covered in the contents of that thing.
“Put it down,” I tell him. “And then go dry yourself off.”
We have a fifty-fifty shot that the dog will obey.
He’s quite a nuisance.
And we can’t help but love that about him.
Especially now that the houses we spend the most time in have all been Marshmallow-proofed.
Mostly.
The dog drops the fire extinguisher, shakes his whole body, coating us and the sleeping quarters in wet dog-scented droplets, and Begonia makes a noise that I’ve learned very well these past few months.
“Let it out, bluebell,” I tell her.
She does, and before long, I can’t help laughing with her.
She’s joy, and she gives me joy.
“When we get back to Driftwood Manor, we’re locking him in his room, and then I’m going to recreate the day we met,” she informs me.
My cock stirs. “Are you?”
“I am.” She slips her arms around my neck and smiles at me. “Except without the hot wax and hair dye.”
“And the singing?”
She laughs all over again, and I couldn’t hold myself back from kissing her if the world depended on it.
There’s nothing in the world like my happy Begonia.
“I love you,” I murmur against her lips, my heart kicking up as it always does when those three words leave my lips. “I love you and adore you and want to spend the rest of my days cherishing and worshipping you.”
She sighs, a contented sound that eases the lingering anxiety I still sometimes feel when I utter that four-letter word, her breath warm and delicious against my skin. “I love you isn’t enough for how I feel about you.”
I kiss her softly, slowly, until she’s slipping her hands under my shirt to push it up and over my head, and then her shirt is gone—bra too—and slow and soft won’t cut it anymore.
I need her.
I need her more than I need air.
And thanks to a little twist of fate, I’ll never be without her again.
