“Yes, but she was maternal to me back when she should’ve been a kid. I’ve never even had a pet.” Biting down on her lower lip, she said, “You’d be a good dad though.”

Lifting her hand to his mouth, he kissed her knuckles. “You’d be a great mum, Catie. I’ve seen how amazing you are with the camp kids—even the ones who are angry and throw tantrums and hate their life.” No one was as patient or as understanding.

A startled look, a slow smile. “I’ve never thought about the camp that way.” She swung their clasped hands. “Let me guess, you want a rugby team?”

“Half a team will be plenty.” He grinned. “I mean, I gotta give my brothers some motivation to keep producing little mini-mes.”

“It’ll have to wait at least until after the Paralympics in three years’ time.”

“Done and done.”

She narrowed her eyes. “How did you just talk me into having kids with you?”

“By being adorable and charming and so sexy I fry your brain cells?”

A slow, slow smile. “Yeah, maybe. But I think it’s because you love me until I think I can do everything.”

“I do, you know. Love you. To the stars and into outer space.” No point in hiding his heart when she knew it was hers. “We just fit, princess.”

“Yes, hotshot, we do.” Then she tugged his head down and kissed him until his world spun. “I love you too. Right into outer space.”

EPILOGUE

RUN, CATIE, RUN!

Three years later, Danny stood in the stands of the Paralympic Games, all ice-calm focus and love. “Go, go, princess,” he whispered under his breath as the starter’s gun went off.

There she went, a bullet out of the gate.

It had been a long, intense road to get to this point, her training schedule and his often colliding and with long periods where they’d been apart from each other. But they’d always found ways to come back together, found ways to drive each other crazy from continents away. And never, not once, had their bond threatened to break.

Takuro, who’d become one of his closest friends, called him the luckiest man alive. “She loves you like the sun,” he’d said once in an awed whisper. “Such a love… It makes me believe in the stories of happy ever after.”

If Catie loved him like he was her sunshine, he loved her as if she were his air. The two of them, they weren’t into big public displays of affection or sappy social media posts—and had kept up their tradition of cheek and snark—but that they were a tight unit was simple, inalienable fact.