A long one. He needed it. Evie was his center. She was the reason he’d been able to do all this—get over his junk with his father, send Clara to school and not die.

Also, he really loved kissing her. He wondered if he would ever get over this. If he would stop being delighted by the way her body tensed slightly when their lips first touched. The way she always followed that by opening her mouth, doing one of her signature breathy moans, and relaxing in his arms.

He pulled back just as things were getting good. “I’m sorry. I interrupted you. You were saying something?”

She pointed down the hall toward the pink room.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Let’s go work on your number.”

He laughed and followed her.

“I really have to redo this room,” she said as they entered. She’d cleaned it up a bit, but it was still, elementally, the same. Still a pink shrine to the things she had loved as a girl.

“No you don’t.” He’d been arguing for keeping it. He liked it. It was a memory of happy times. And of sad times. Of all the times, and all the stories, that had gotten them here.

“But it’s so pink. Who’s going to want to be in here?”

“Us.”

Oh, crap. He hadn’t meant to say that. Not yet. Well, okay, he could backtrack. He could spin it to mean “us” as in right now. “Us” as in “Let’s go in there and work on our number.”

He opened his mouth to do that, but what came out was, “It can be an owner’s suite. For us. Not that I’m the owner. You’re the owner. I’m just the owner’s boyfriend.”

She blinked rapidly.

It was too soon to bring this up. It had only been a month since the parade.

But also, it had been eleven years and one month since the parade. And today was a day for breakthroughs, apparently.

He took her hand. “I don’t want to pressure you. So tell me to back off, and I will. But I want to wake up with you every day, or crawl into bed with you after a night shift.” He sighed. He was making a mess of this. “Evie, you came back. I never thought that would happen, but at the same time I feel like I’ve been waiting so long for exactly that to happen. I just…I think we should move in together. I don’t want to wait anymore.”

She smiled. “I don’t want to wait anymore, either.”

His breath caught. Before he could say anything, she added, “But what about your house?”

“I hear Jeannie Wilkerson is a really good Realtor.”

She rolled her eyes at him, but it was a loving roll. “You’re not emotionally attached to the place?”