Page 96 of Forever Finds Us
Her name came out of my mouth like a plea. “Roxanne, if you’ll permit me, there’s some things I need to say to you.”
Her fingers began to tap the counter. “Here? Now?”
I nodded. “Will you listen? Tell me yes.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Roxanne
Brand dropped to his knees in front of me and reached up to set his hat on the counter next to me.
I’d heard his voice at the front door, talking to Drew, and I panicked. My sisters all saw the look on my face and the way my hands began to shake, and instantly they knew who had paid the Fitts household a visit.
When I saw him for the first time in almost a month, he was so handsome that it took me a minute to remember how to speak to ask him what the hell he was doing at my parents’ house on Christmas freaking Eve. And now his hands clutched my hips, his breathtaking face and excited sky-blue eyes tipped up and trained on me, and it felt like he’d infused me with some kind of calming juju.
Instantly my heart slowed, and I felt like I could breathe again.
My nieces and nephews were all in the living room, oohing and aahing over the gifts Mama let them open early, but my sisters and some of my brothers-in-law peeked around the doorway, watching Brand. He didn’t seem to know or care that he had an audience.
“I’m sorry, Roxanne,” he said. “You were right back on that airplane. You’ve been right all along. I didn’t believe it then, but I do now. I’m sorry I let you down, and I’m sorry I betrayed the trust you put in me. I told my family everything. Dixon’s gone again, but that’s not why I finally told them. I’m in therapy, and I’ve been goin’ to a Nar-Anon family group. I started journaling and?—”
Despite my resolve not to give in too quickly, my hands lifted to his hair, and I smoothed soft strands away from his face, realizing just how much I’d missed his touch on my body, the feel of my skin on his, and the possessive love he couldn’t help but show me. “I know. Abey told me.”
He nodded. “Can you forgive me? Please say yes,” he whispered, and he laid his cheek against my stomach and wrapped his hands tightly around my back. “I don’t know what this is, this thing inside me that makes me crave you the way I do.
“Maybe it’s ’cause you’re the only person on the planet who knows me like this. I’ve never let anyone in the way you’re inside me, Roxanne. I don’t know where you came from, but now I can’t picture my life without you in it.
“I love you,” he declared loudly.
My sister, Molly, swooned with the back of her hand pressed to her forehead, three of my sisters had their hands pressed to their chests and hearts in their eyes, and my youngest sister, Cecily, stood to the side, rocking little Jessica in her arms. My brothers-in-law all looked miffed, like Brand was winning some game I didn’t know they’d been playing.
My mama had tears in her eyes, and my daddy smiled from ear to ear beside her. Merv was there, too, watching, and she smiled and nodded when we made eye contact.
He couldn’t know that I’d already forgiven him before he’d even shown up at my parents’ place, but he hadn’t given me the chance yet to tell him.
My family made me see that I had been a little unreasonable about Dixon. “If it was one of us,” Maureen had said, “and you’d been keepin’ our secret, would it be so easy to let it go?”
And she was right.
“You can submit to me,” Brand said, “or I can submit to you. It doesn’t really matter to me, beauty, as long as you’re with me.”
I cleared my throat, my face heating with embarrassment. “Um, Brand, that might be a conversation for another time. We kind of have an audience right now.”
“I don’t care,” he vowed. “Let them see and hear how much I love you. I can’t live without you. I will kneel here at your altar till the end of time if that’s what it takes. Say you’ll forgive me.”
“Baby, seriously, this really isn’t the right time.”
“Yes, it is. Don’t you remember what you said to me?”
“No. When? What did I say?”
“When Merv was in the hospital, and I came to your house and you held me and loved me all night long?—”
Maureen let out some kind of cry-squeak, and she slapped her hand over her mouth, tears collecting at the corners of her eyes.
Cecily elbowed Maureen in the ribs, rocking side to side to keep the baby asleep. “Shhh. I can’t hear over all your blubberin’.”
Brand paid no attention to them. “You said you wanted the man who’d win your heart to be head over heels in love with you, and he’d propose in front of your whole family, and then you’d ride off into the sunset with him.
