“Hey.” Surprised, he tossed the mail into the cab of his truck. “Didn’t expect to see you out this way today.”

After she got out of the car, she picked up the mangled hunk of rope Mike spit at her feet, engaged him in a brief bout of tug-of-war, then threw it—she had a damn good arm—far enough to keep him busy awhile.

Watching her playing with the dog, all Brody could think about was that he couldn’t wait very long.

“I just missed you at the school,” she told him.

“Problem there?”

“No, not at all. No problem anywhere.” She walked to him and slid her hands up his chest, a habit that never failed to pump up his heart rate. “You didn’t kiss me goodbye.”

“Your office door was closed. I figured you were busy.”

“Kiss me goodbye now.” She brushed her lips over his, arched a brow when he kept it light and started to ease back. “Do better.”

“Kate, the bus is going to come along in a couple minutes.”

“Do better,” she murmured, and melting against him shifted the mood.

He fisted a hand in the back of her shirt, another in her hair. And indulged both of them.

“Mmmm. That’s more like it. It’s spring,” she added, tipping back so that she could see his face. “Do you know what a young man’s fancy turns to in spring? Besides baseball.”

He grinned at her. “Plowing?”

She laughed, linking her fingers behind his neck. Yeah, the frogs were still jumping. But she liked it. “All right, do you know what a young woman’s fancy turns to? What this young woman’s fancy turns to?”

“Is that what you came out here to tell me?”

“Yes. More or less. Brody…” She nibbled her bottom lip, then just blurted it out, “I want you to marry me.”

He jerked, froze. There was a buzzing in his ears—a hive of wild bees. He had to be hearing things, he decided. Had to. She couldn’t have just asked him to marry her when he’d spent the last five minutes trying to figure out how and when to ask her.

To get his bearings, he retreated a step.

“It’s not very flattering for you to gape at me as though I’d just hit you over the head with a two-by-four.”

“Where did this come from?” Maybe he was just dreaming.

But she looked real. She’d tasted real. And the thundering of his own heart wasn’t the least bit dreamlike. Besides, in his dreams, he asked her. Damn it. “A woman doesn’t just walk up to a man in the middle of the day and ask him to marry her.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” How was he supposed to think of reasons with all those bees in his head? “Because she doesn’t.”

“Well, I just did.” She felt her temper sizzle into her throat and managed to swallow it. Her fingers shook slightly as she lifted them to begin ticking off points. “We’ve been seeing each other exclusively for months. We’re not children. We enjoy each other, we respect each other. It’s a natural and perfectly logical progression to consider marriage.”