Nothing but him. That thought chased through her like an errant lightning bolt streaking across the dark sky, and she shuddered.

He pulled back and looked down at her. “Is this okay?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it for the wedding?”

“It can be, if you want. But mostly it’s for right now. For us, and no one else.”

She couldn’t understand that. That this was just for a moment. A moment, and not appearances. Not forever. A moment for them.

It all chased around in her head like foxes going after their own tails, and she couldn’t grab hold of any of it long enough to make sense of it.

“I need to ask you something, Sammy,” he said.

“What?”

Hope burned bright and fierce inside her, and she couldn’t quite say why. Or what for. All she knew was that it was blinding and all-consuming. Terrifying.

It filled her, made her want to float into the air, to burst into a million sparkling pieces, because her human body couldn’t contain it all. She needed to become something else. Something new.

Something his, maybe, or something more her own. She didn’t know.

That was at the heart of all of this. This journey that she had been on from the moment she had opened her mouth outside the Gold Valley Saloon and told Ryder that she wanted to have a baby.

On some kind of journey to herself, and she knew that she hadn’t quite found it yet.

And then, suddenly, that big mountain of a man dropped down to his knee in front of her.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even think around it. She had never imagined... Had never wanted to imagine him doing such a thing. Because he was the kind of man who had to stand strong and tall for all of his life. A man for whom absolute certainty was essential. And something like this, getting down on his knee with a question in his eye would never and could never be him. At least, she would have said so.

But there he was, on his knee for her. It was something kind of mind-blowing.

Then he reached into his denim jeans pocket, and pulled out a box. A velvet box. Like on those diamond commercials you saw on TV. Where men always looked hopefully at the woman, and the woman cried. A velvet box that was for normal women, who were cherished and cared for.

Who were normal enough to actually be in a commercial, rather than being somewhere left of center enough that they might never see themselves in anything, except as an eccentric caricature. The friend of the heroine, and never the heroine herself.

It was what she was always cast as, at least in her own mind. What she had always been.

The friend who stood off to the side and gave dramatic bad advice, that led eventually to the heroine getting a ring, obviously. But never the one actually getting it.