“I think I have feelings for you too. Real ones. But this is a lot. Too much, all at once.”
He nodded immediately. No pressure. No wounded pride. Just patience.
We sat down for dinner — a dinner he had cooked himself, because apparently dramatic proposals weren’t enough and he had to make mushroom risotto too.
And somewhere between the first glass of wine and the end of that meal, the panic inside me softened into something steadier.
No one had ever chosen me this carefully before.
Not for appearances. Not for expectation. Not for what my life could provide them.
Just me.
When we finished eating, I reached across the table and took his hand.
“I will marry you for real,” I said. “But ask me again in six months.”
His eyes widened.
“I mean it,” I continued. “Not because I doubt you. Because this deserves a real beginning. You have a legal war ahead of you, and we both need time to breathe through what this actually means. If I still feel the same in six months — and I think I will — then we do it properly.”
The smile that spread across his face then was worth every strange twist that had led us there.
“So,” he asked, lifting the ring box again, “can you at least wear the ring until then?”
This time, I laughed.
“Yes.”
He slipped it onto my finger, and when he pulled me into his arms, everything about it felt different from our first wedding.
That one had been strategy.
This one, somehow, was beginning to feel like fate.
If you had told me a year earlier that I’d marry a homeless stranger to spite my parents and end up falling for a man who turned out to be far more than he seemed, I would have laughed in your face.
But life has a strange way of humiliating your plans and then rewarding your heart anyway.
