Free Calling Me Home by Louise Bay Page B

Ashleigh. With her, it felt permanent, fundamental to who I was. With Emma, I hadn’t envisioned things changing. With Ashleigh, I knew it was forever.

    I ran home with the ring in my pocket, reaching for it every block or so, just to check it was there. Like everything good in my life, I wanted to share it with Ashleigh immediately. But I knew I had to be patient. I had to convince her how I felt wasn’t going to change. The switch that had awakened my feelings for Ashleigh was strictly one-way. There was no going back, but she wasn’t convinced, not yet.
    “Hey, I’m back,” I shouted.
    “I’m in here,” Ashleigh called from the bedroom.
    Where was I going to hide the ring? I couldn’t risk her finding it and bolting. “I’m going for a shower.” I hadn’t expected her to be still in bed when I got home. I’d thought I’d stash the ring in the bedroom. “Are you okay?” I asked as I entered the bedroom.
    “Just sleepy. I feel like I could sleep for days.” The urge to kneel beside her and ask her to marry me right then was huge. She filled up my heart. She looked so relaxed and sexy, lying there with her hair fanned across the pillow in the bed that we now shared, her eyes still heavy with sleep. I took a breath, trying to reason with myself. I couldn’t, not yet. I needed to give her a little more time. Convincing her to move in with me was one thing, but I wanted her to say yes without hesitation when I asked her to be my wife.
    “How come you’re so sleepy? You pregnant?” I laughed, and Ashleigh rolled her eyes.
    “Don’t be crazy. You kept me up most of the night, if you remember.”
    I did remember. The sex had been unforgettable.
    I sidled into the bathroom, trying to look as if I wasn’t concealing where the ring was stashed. When Ashleigh wasn’t around, I could carry the ring on me. It wasn’t the most security conscious of ideas but better that than her finding it and going into meltdown. When we were together, I needed to stash it somewhere.
    I turned on the shower and stripped off my clothes, holding the box in my hand while looking around the bathroom for a hiding place. The door handle jangled. “Luke?”
    Shit, I’d locked the door so she didn’t walk in on me while I was holding the ring. “Hang on.” I dove into the cupboard that held all the clean laundry and buried the box at the bottom of a pile of towels. I’d have to think of a better spot later. I quickly shut the cupboard, spun round and unlocked the door. “Hi.”
    Ashleigh knitted her eyebrows together. “Er, hi. I was just wondering if you wanted company, but if you’d rather—”
    “Of course I want company.” I pulled her inside, closed the door and started to undress her.
    “You locked the door,” she said as she held her hands above her head as I stripped off her tee.
    “Force of habit.” I buried my head in her neck and pushed her against the wall. It was part desire to distract her and part my reaction to her naked body.
    “You’re sweaty,” she said.
    “Hence the shower.” I pulled away from her and led her into the shower.
    “I like it.”
    “You do?”
    She nodded.
    “But you always smell so . . . like summer or home or—”
    “You smell like you’re mine.”
    “Well, that’s good, because I am.”
    She wrapped her legs around me as I lifted her and walked under the spray.
     
    Ashleigh
    “That one, you can tell by the way he walks,” Haven said, gesturing at a guy on the other side of the Mexican restaurant. It was dark and loud, but not so much so that the people at the tables surrounding us hadn’t noticed Haven pointing.
    “You can’t talk about another man’s cock when you’re carrying your husband’s baby.”
    “Well, apparently I can because I just did. I’m just saying, you can tell. Everything about a man starts with the size of his penis. I’m thinking of writing an article about it.”
    Part of me was pleased to be out with Haven, but the other part, the part