She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and f**k, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.”

Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—”

She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face.

I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the f**k is that? “What the f**k is that?” I asked.

“You tell me, genius.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.”

“It’s a ring, dummy. For you.”

My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?”

She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle.

“You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?”

She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.”

“So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?”

“You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling.

“Technically you haven’t asked yet.”

“Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!”

“Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing.

“Will you marry me?”

With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.

“Are you always going to be this impossible?”

She nodded, eyes wide, lip caught between her teeth. Fuck. We could settle this later.

“Take my cock.” I bent, pressed a kiss into her neck, and groaned when she reached between us to grip me. “Guide it into you.”

She shifted her hips beneath me until I could feel myself at her entrance. I slid into her slowly, even though every tendon and muscle in my body wanted it rough and frenzied. I groaned, shivered on top of her, feeling myself sink inside.

Shifting my hips back and then forward, I felt her arms wrap around my neck, her face press into my neck as she rose to meet my movements. It took only two more shifts of my hips before we grew louder and more frantic.

“Give it to me,” I whispered into her mouth, licking forward, asking. I lifted her leg, pressed it up to her side and slid in deeper. My eyes rolled closed for a beat and I felt like I was about to explode in her.

She pressed her head back into the pillow, parted her lips to gasp, and I took the opportunity to slide my tongue into her mouth, to suck a little on hers. “That okay?” I whispered, pressing into the skin of her hip with my fingertips. She loved the edge of pain and pleasure, that razor-sharp line we’d discovered early on together. She nodded and I moved faster, filling my head with the smell of her. I tasted her collarbones, her neck, bit a mark into her shoulder.

“Up here,” she breathed, pulling me back up to her face. “Kiss me.”

So I did. Over and over until she was panting and squirming beneath me, urging me to move faster. I felt her abdomen tense and then her legs squeezed hard around me, her cries sharp in my ear.

Clenching my jaw, I pushed my own release to the back of my mind, wanting more, and longer, and to feel her coming again before I would even let myself drift toward orgasm.

Her cries grew louder, and she screamed and then gasped and tried to pull away but I knew she could come again. I knew she was sensitive but she could take more.

“Don’t pull away. You’re not done yet. Not even f**king close. Give me another.”

Her hips relaxed in my hands; her grip tightened in my hair again.

“Oh.” It was just a breath of a sound. There was so much contained in that single, quiet gasp.

I pressed closer, holding her hips and tilting them with my movements. “That’s it.”