Lovely Pink

nodded up at me before mouthing three words I understood as clearly as if she’d been able to shout them. “Stay with me.”
“I’ll be right here the whole time. I won’t leave you,” I assured her with a confident wink solely for her benefit, even though I didn’t feel so confident on the inside.
My emotions were all over the place, and for good reason. I’d waited far too long to make my move with Reese. By the time I was ready to settle down, she’d already found her professor with the PhD in Pre-Colonial Amazonia or some ridiculous shit, and to my horror, agreed to marry him.
I’d blown my chance with Reese, and then it was too late. Someone else had won her heart by being there with her. While I was down in South Carolina finding my footing as head of the family after my father’s death, someone else was stealing my woman away.
I learned an important lesson about priorities. I also learned never to assume the outcome of a relationship with another person. My feelings for Reese became crystal clear the moment I realized someone else was taking her to bed every night. She didn’t belong in any other bed but mine. It sucked to realize I’d lost her, but I did accept that I was fully to blame.
I’d pushed her away once before and regretted it ever since. She had tried to offer comfort to me when my father died, and I didn’t handle myself well at the time. If I’d done things differently with her, we’d surely be married by now with a child or two, or at least working on it. But nope. I was just too fucked up in my own head to see that I was denying myself the one person who was exactly what I needed.
So, Reese found someone else and she moved on. I tried to move on as well, but I found I sucked at that too.
I buried myself in work and forged ahead with my campaign for Attorney General of South Carolina, which I easily won. The night the election results came in and we started celebrating, I’d learned what a hollow victory it was without Reese by my side sharing it with me.
And then four months ago a miracle happened.
Dr. Doolittle went to Brazil and decided to stay there without her. Money won out over love in his case. I had a strong suspicion that Reese’s grandfather paid the professor to break off their engagement. I never knew any details about a deal, and went the extra step of telling Theodore Pinkarver up front, that I didn’t ever want to know. I kept myself at a distance until that fool was out of the picture. My involvement never extended any further than praying for some powerful juju to make Dr. Doolittle decide to take the fucking money and leave.
Tonight wasn’t the first time I’d asked Reese to marry me. I’d posed the question to her once before, but my timing was bad because she’d just had her heart broken. I’d also been an ass by presenting it as more of a business plan hatched by our families, than something I really wanted. And then we ended up having a night of mind-blowing sex after a lot of wine and…yeah—
This was where the confusion came into the picture for me. I knew I wanted Reese, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted Reese. Did I love her, or did I love the idea of merging our families into a magnificent political dynasty? I needed to get my shit together and figure that out so I could explain it to her. She deserved the truth most of all, and I wouldn’t lie to her by telling her I’d been in love with her for years. It hadn’t been like that for me. My feelings for Reese had surfaced with more of a slow burn than anything else. The one thing I was certain about was how much I wanted to make a life with her. There was no one else for me.
She’d had some time to think about it, but not nearly enough. We were just getting started figuring everything out so maybe it was best to have a meeting with her grandfather to clarify exactly what was at stake here.
It was only fair that she hear from him, what had been decided for the two of us a long time ago.
Our families wanted us together, and I wanted her, so…
The ambulance coming to an abrupt halt brought me out of my little trip down Memory Lane and back to the present—the emergency bay of GWU. The rear doors opened to the outside, and I was relieved to see there was a gurney waiting to take her right in. The EMTs did the transfer efficiently, reporting her medical stats for triage to evaluate where she should go next as I followed closely behind.
“Her name?” the intake nurse, Barb according to her ID badge, asked me as we rolled down the hallway toward what I hoped would be a private room.
“Reese Pinkarver.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-four. She’ll be twenty-five in two months.”
“And you are?”
“Grayson Lash,” I answered, bracing myself for the question that would come next.
Right on cue, Barb shot inquisitive eyes up from her clipboard. “Like the president?”
I nodded once and left it alone.
“Your relationship to the patient?”
Ahhh, a question I was more than happy to answer for Nurse Barb. I’d given the same reply to the EMTs when I’d demanded to ride along with Reese inside the ambulance.
“My fiancée.”

Chapter Four REESE
Fiancée?
Gray and I needed to have a little talk about his false assumptions. Make that a big talk, rather than a little one. Too bad it would have to wait until I could actually talk and breathe at the same time. God. I’d been so stupid in not recognizing the signs of an impending asthma attack. I’d been given plenty of clues, like the headache from a