#Awestruck (A #Lovestruck Novel)
Page 26
“Aren’t they already engaged?”
“What kind of froufrou garbage is this?”
“Man, she is going to own him their entire marriage. Look how whipped he is.”
“How many proposals does one woman need?”
I only needed the one. This one. The real, actual one.
As I headed down the steps, Evan made his way over to the wall. When I got to the railing, he yelled, “Jump! I’ll catch you.”
It was a pretty big drop onto the field, but I didn’t even hesitate. I knew he wouldn’t let me get hurt. I swung my legs over the side and let myself go.
And he caught me. My breath left me for a moment when his arms connected with my body. He held on to me tightly for a moment against his smelly, sweaty, padded jersey, and I didn’t even care. Because that look was back in his bright-blue eyes. A look that said he loved me.
Evan put me down on the ground, but I stayed close to him.
“Hi,” he said flippantly. “So how’ve you been?”
It made me laugh, and I felt light and airy, like I might float away. “What are you doing?” I asked. “What is all this?”
“This was me realizing that my feelings for you haven’t changed, either. That I love you.” His hands rested on my waist, holding me close so it was easier for us to talk.
“I love you,” I told him.
He kissed me on the tip of my nose. “I know you do. And since our conversation in my car, I’ve been doing nothing but thinking about you. About us. About what it would take for me to trust you again. It helped that you apologized and owned what you did. But I also realized that a long time ago, you thought I had betrayed you. And you were able to give me another chance. To trust me again. And that was the very least I could do for the woman I love. I decided that it didn’t matter how we got here, that if you were willing to move forward, so was I. I’m sorry it took me so long to figure out. But what I do know is that I want you in my life. Forever.”
“You could have just stopped by,” I told him with a teasing grin, my heart fluttering over his words. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“Rory convinced me otherwise.”
“Rory?” I echoed, looking up at my family in the stands.
Although I couldn’t be sure, I thought I heard her yell, “Grand gesture for the win!”
“I realized I want you to be my wife. The mother of our kids. And I went to your family to ask for their blessing.”
My family? Oh, they had held out on me.
Evan kissed me gently, which elicited a lot of cheering and yells from the crowd. “Your parents took some convincing, but eventually everyone said yes. Even Joey gave me a ‘good job, football man,’ and during a tea party Charlotte haughtily said Uncle Satan could marry her aunt Ashton.”
And I swear, right in that moment, I heard my mother yell, “I’m going to have more grandbabies!”
That made me throw my head back and laugh. I felt unbelievably happy and free. Like I’d found the other half of me and could finally feel complete.
“Your mother did make me promise to stay and fight when things got hard, because love is worth it. And I said I would.”
“I promise to never lie to you again. Ever. About anything. Like that terrible pass to Sanchez in the first quarter. Ugh. Just awful.”
He laughed and pulled me into a hug, squeezing me tightly. I closed my eyes. I had missed this.
“With that in mind,” Evan said, pointing over his shoulder at the Jumbotron, “I have something to ask you.” He walked over to his bag and pulled out a box. A ring box. For a second I was worried. I hoped he hadn’t bought me a new ring. He came back and got down on one knee, sending the crowd into a frenzy. “I told you I’d never propose in a restaurant.”
Being proposed to in one of my favorite places by my favorite person was infinitely better. Both of my hands went over my heart, trying to contain the joy I felt. “It’s a good thing I showed up today! Or else this would have been really embarrassing.”
He grinned at me. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” He’d probably never know exactly how much.
Evan opened the ring box, and tears blinded my vision when I saw it was his mother’s ring.
My ring.
The crowd went insane. Someone started chanting the word yes, and soon the entire stadium was chanting along. “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“I can get you a different one,” he yelled.
“Don’t you dare. This one is perfect. I love it,” I yelled back as he slipped it onto my left ring finger. “And I love you.”
The chanting became deafening, and it turned from “yes” to my name. “Ashton, Ashton, Ashton.”
Evan had to shout, “Ashton! Will you marry me?”
“Do you hear that?” I asked him.
“The sound of seventy thousand people screaming your name? Kind of hard not to!”
“No. The sound of me saying yes!”
Evan got back to his feet and pulled me into a kiss, dipping me backward. The entire stadium went berserk, hollering and cheering.
He pulled back, grinning at me, and I’d never realized this kind of happiness could exist. He kept an arm around me while he waved to everyone in the stadium, and now they were chanting his nickname. “Awesome, Awesome, Awesome!”
I couldn’t wait to become his wife. “I don’t want a long engagement!”
“Me neither! We’d never make it!”
We kept waving and smiling until I felt like my face was going to freeze in a permanent grin. As soon as we left the field, cameras would be shoved in our faces, questions yelled at us, interviews given. But it would all be worth it.
Evan was worth it.
And I wouldn’t have traded him and what we had for anything.
We started to walk off the field toward the Jacks’ tunnel, where a horde of reporters and photographers waited for us.
“In case you were keeping track,” Evan said just before we reached them, “that was Marriage Proposal Number One. And it’s the only one I plan on making in my entire life.”
“Then it’s a good thing I plan on being your wife for the rest of my life.” I paused. “But only if you win this playoff game and then get me one of those Super Bowl rings.”
He laughed. “I will.”
And he did.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thank you for coming along on this journey with me! I hope you enjoyed getting to know Evan and Ashton and reading their love story. If you’d like to find out when I’ve written something new, make sure you sign up for my newsletter at www.sariahwilson.com, where I most definitely will not spam you. (I’m happy when I send a newsletter once a month!)
And if you feel so inclined, I’d love for you to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, the bathroom wall at your local watering hole, the back of your electric bill, anyplace you want. I would be so grateful. Thanks!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For everyone who is reading this—thank you. Thank you for your support, for your kind words, and for loving my characters and my stories as much as I do!
Thank you to Megan Mulder, editrix extraordinaire. I tell you all the time how much I appreciate you, how grateful I am for you, and how thankful I am for our relationship, and this is just more of the same. You are an amazing rock star. Thank you to Alison Dasho for stepping in and stepping up to help bring this book to the world. Thank you to the Montlake Romance team for everything you do that gets my books in the hands of readers. (I want to especially thank Angela, Kris, Kelsey, Adria, and Gabby.) And thank you for helping me celebrate my birthday last April—it was so much fun hanging out with all of you! Thanks as well to Charlotte Herscher. Please don’t ever quit, because I’ve discovered that you make my books infinitely better. And thank you for your long-suffering patience with me and my inability to remember deadlines correctly.
Thank you to Sally, Leslie, and Angela for their copyediting. A special thanks to Erin Dameron Hill for my
beautiful cover and to Wander Aguiar for his photos, which have made my recent covers possible.
For my children—I love you so much! We miss you, Kaleb—can’t wait until you get back home to us! When this book comes out, we will have only eleven more months to go!
And for Kevin, my favorite person in the entire world. Love you more every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bestselling author Sariah Wilson has never jumped out of an airplane or climbed Mount Everest, and she is not a former CIA operative. She is, however, madly, passionately in love with her soul mate and is a fervent believer in happily ever afters—which is why she writes romances like the Royals of Monterra series. After growing up in Southern California as the oldest of nine (yes, nine) children, she graduated from Brigham Young University with a semiuseless degree in history. The author of #Starstruck, she currently lives with the aforementioned soul mate and their four children in Utah, along with three tiger barb fish, a cat named Tiger, and a recently departed hamster who is buried in the backyard (and has nothing at all to do with tigers). For more information, visit her at www.SariahWilson.com.