Sitting back, I spied Roman fingers touch each neatly wrapped gift but mine. He politely thanked his mother for the leather laptop bag and Lailah and Jude for the gift card to get detail work on Lola.

As his hand rested on my neatly wrapped gift, he paused.

“You haven’t opened any, Cara,” he said as his gaze found mine.

“I was just watching for a while. You know how I love to be last,” I said, my fingers shaking.

“Open one.”

“Okay,” I agreed, grabbing the first one I found.

“Not that one.” He smiled. “Or that one.”

He continued this game until I found him in front of me, holding out a tiny velvet box.

“This one.”

“Roman,” I whispered, seeing him drop to one knee.

“Just breathe, Cara.” He smiled.

I took the box with my shaky hands and opened it. Inside, I found my hopes and dreams, a future and a family.

“There was a day when all I wanted was to be remembered for how well I ran my father’s company. It was my only ambition. But then a young woman from the Midwest showed up and changed my entire life.”

I laughed softly as a single tear fell down my cheek.

“Someday, someone is going to look through a dozen boxes of photos from our life and find a picture from this night. They’re going to see the joy on my face because I was about to ask the love of my life the most important question a man could ask. They’re going to know our lives were filled with love because of the family that surrounded us, and we will be remembered, not because of the name we had or the money we made, but because of the epic love story we created. Starting now.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house now, including the big, beautiful man kneeling before me.

“Cara, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife? Will you marry me?”

“Yes!” I cried, jumping in his arms.

Everyone cheered as he stood, twirling me in his arms.

“But wait!” I yelled. “You didn’t open my present!”

“Babe, no offense, but can you really top this?”

I gave him an impish grin. “Open it.”

He set me down and grabbed the large flat box, and his skeptical eyes returned to me. Everyone else in the room was just as curious.

I hadn’t even let him put my ring on yet.

Still clutching the velvet box in my hand, I watched him rip the paper away, revealing a plain shirt box. His eyebrows rose in amusement as he lifted the lid.

Inside, he found a T-shirt.

“A shirt? You paused my perfectly planned engagement for a T-shirt?”

“Just read it. And, really, you took the words right out of my mouth. ’Cause perfectly planned couldn’t be any truer.”