Page 75 of Bear Naked Truth
Her brows arched. “Why do you sound suspiciously calm?”
He grinned. “What, I can’t just say hi to the woman I love?”
“You can,” she said, squinting. “But you’ve got that look. Like you’re about to suggest something reckless.”
“I resent that,” he said, stepping toward her. “I’m a model of responsibility.”
She laughed one of those warm, real ones he’d come to crave. She stepped further inside, brushing her hand over the edge of a planter box filled with basil and sleepy violets.
“You’re stalling,” she said.
“I might be,” he admitted.
She cocked her head. “Why?”
He exhaled. Pulled the small box from his back pocket.
Autumn blinked.
He didn’t drop to one knee.
They weren’t the kind of people who needed theatrics. What they’d built had already been full of storms and hauntings and messy, sacred second chances.
He just stepped in close, took her hand, and held her gaze like it was the only anchor he had left.
“I didn’t know what home meant until you knocked the dust off this place,” he said softly. “Until you looked at my porch like it might love you back. Until you told me ghosts weren’t the scariest things you’d ever faced—but hope was.”
Her eyes shimmered, just a little.
“So I’m not asking you for perfection,” he said. “I’m asking you to stay. For mornings with bad coffee and long nights with weird ghosts. For every porch light and creaky stair and stolen blanket. For all of it. With me.”
He opened the box.
The ring was simple—silver, etched with runes from Moonshadow Apothecary, a single moonstone set in the center.
She stared at it, lips parted, breath caught. Then somethingsoftrained down between them.
She glanced up.
The vines above had bloomed. Tiny white flowers drifted down like confetti, dusting her shoulders, her hair, her cheeks.
She laughed again, breathless, blinking through petals.
“Yes,” she said, voice cracking on it. “Yes. Yes—of course yes.”
Dorian slipped the ring onto her finger, hands just barely shaking. She threw her arms around his neck and he lifted her off the ground like he’d been waiting his whole life to do it.
They kissed in the middle of the greenhouse while petals fell around them like blessings, while the moonstone on her ring caught the sun and gleamed like it had known all along.
And somewhere in the rafters, unseen butfelt, the house,theirhouse, smiled too.
39
AUTUMN
The sunlight sifted through the canopy like spilled honey, dappling the forest floor in soft gold and mossy green. Echo Woods had always carried a sort of hush to it. A quiet not born from fear, but from reverence. The kind of place where time stepped back and waited at the tree line, letting you be exactly who you were for just a little while.
Autumn stood barefoot on the moss, her heart thudding steady under her ribcage. Not wild. Not frantic. Justfull.
