Wife.

It was real.

Husband and wife.

So he did. He grabbed her, and he kissed her like he couldn’t bear to let her go. He kissed her until neither of them could breathe. He kissed her, because he thought maybe it could say something that he didn’t know how to say. Put to order feelings that were riding around inside him that he didn’t have the vocabulary for.

Or maybe he didn’t have the balls for them. He didn’t really know.

And when he pulled away, everybody clapped. Cheered.

Everybody who had always been there was there, including Sammy. At Hope Springs Ranch. It was also the same, and yet so completely different. He didn’t know how to hang on to that feeling and examine it. Didn’t even know what to call it. It was all nostalgia wrapped in a brand-new package. And he was afraid of what he might find if he examined it too closely.

The only pictures they got were on everyone’s phones, and when they cut the cake Rose was chanting for him to smash it in Sammy’s face. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that. He was supposed to take care of Sammy, and he would never in a million years do something to disrupt the reverence that he found today.

She laughed and smeared a little bit of frosting on his lips, then surprised him by licking it off, before laughing and kissing him. Then Logan started to play a song on his guitar, and the demand became for them to dance.

He pulled her against him then, and brought her back underneath that arbor. And he was glad that he had done this with her the night before. A dance that was just for the two of them. Because it was fine doing it in front of his family, but it wasn’t quite the same as it had been to hold her against him when it wasn’t a show.

And when it was all over he fully realized the change that had happened. The shift. Because when he thought of Sammy now she would no longer be his friend first. She would be his wife. And soon, the mother of his child.

His.

That was the bottom line. And wasn’t it what he had always known? That from the beginning she was his?

And when he swept her into bed that night—his bed, their bed—the words played over and over in his head. His wife. His wife. His.

He was living a life that he had never imagined wanting.

One that had actively terrified him for as long as he could remember. To have a woman in his arms, in his bed, his house, his heart, that mattered so damned much. Because life was cruel, and loss could hit you when you least expected it, and he knew it better than most. Because to want to hold on to someone so tight was a terror that he had never, ever wanted to experience. Because he knew that no matter how tight you held, someone could be torn from your grasp. Because he knew that love couldn’t keep someone with you. No matter how fierce you felt it.