Ten minutes later she sucked up her courage and dialed his number. He answered on the second ring, his voice heavy with sleep. “What’s wrong?”
“Lily’s okay. I…can you come over for a few minutes?”
“I’m already over. Unlock the door.”
He was standing in the hall in nothing but a pair of sleep pants, with his hair mussed and the phone still held to his ear. She felt a pang of guilt for calling him in the middle of the night—he must have thought something was wrong with the baby and literally run across the hall.
“What’s the matter, Beth?” he asked, coming in and closing the door behind him.
“Nothing.” Lily squirmed in her arms, wanting her daddy. “We were…”
She stopped as Kevin set his phone on the table so he could take his daughter, giving her cheek a nuzzle. It sounded stupid now, Beth realized, and she shouldn’t have dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night.
“You were what?”
Sighing, she resigned herself to telling him the whole story. “Lily and I were dancing in the kitchen and…we missed you.”
“You did, huh?” He moved closer to her, cradling Lily in one arm. He didn’t look like he thought she was stupid for calling. And he didn’t look angry or sad, either. He looked hopeful and that made her feel hopeful, too.
“Yes.” She swallowed hard when he stroked her cheek with his free hand. “It didn’t feel right without you there.”
“I’m here now.” He slid his arm around her waist, tucking Lily in between them, and started swaying a little.
She swayed with him. “We made you something.”
“Wow. Dancing. Arts and crafts. I had no idea my girls were so busy in the middle of the night.”
His girls. Warmth flooded her and she handed him the napkin before she could change her mind. He had to let go of her waist to take it, but he stayed close enough so she had a front-row seat to his reaction.
She didn’t own a Do-Me Fuchsia lipstick, but she had a dark blush color that showed up against the white. Above the Jasper’s logo were two lipstick kisses—hers and a tiny, puckered imprint of Lily’s. Under the logo she’d painstakingly written her message in the same lipstick. We love you.
He looked at it a long time, until anxiety started gnawing at the warm glow she’d had going on. Even Lily started squirming, as though she felt the tension suddenly making her mother’s stomach hurt.
Then he looked at her and the hot intensity in his gaze turned her breathless. “We?”
“I love you.” It was so much easier to say than she’d thought it would be. It felt so right and seemed to loosen a band constricting her heart.
“You kissed a napkin for me.”
“It must be true, then.”
“Just so we’re on the same page here, I want it all. I want you to be my wife. I want to find a nice house outside the city with a big backyard.”
She looked up into his eyes, almost afraid to believe it. “I want that, too.”
“And someday, when this monkey finds a guy willing to marry her, I want to dance with you at her wedding and look at you the way Pop still looks at my mother.”
“Yes.” She wanted that, too.
Holding Lily in his right arm, he scooped Beth close with his left and kissed her. “Dance with me.”
She put her arms around Kevin and their daughter and laid her head on his chest. “Always.”
Epilogue
Beth Hansen became Mrs. Kevin Kowalski two weeks later, on a balmy Saturday night in the middle of a playground. She wore shorts, a relatively clean white shirt, a streak of marshmallow in her hair from pre-wedding s’mores and an accumulation of at least a half-dozen layers of bugspray.
She carried a bouquet of wildflowers Kevin’s nephews had picked for her in the woods. While she couldn’t identify them all, she’d been assured—by Mary, not the boys—that none of the leaves were poison ivy and all the blossoms were insect-free. Lily snoozed in her stroller, the entire thing draped with mosquito netting, and Kevin wore a T-shirt with a fake tuxedo pattern printed on it, a last-minute gift from his brothers.
Her father walked her down an aisle lined with strings of lit Chinese lanterns borrowed from a camper, while her mother sobbed and Paulie, her maid of honor, tried not to swear at a particularly determined horsefly.
Every year the entire Kowalski family made the trip to northern New Hampshire to camp for two weeks, ride their four-wheelers and swim in the pool. It wasn’t exactly primitive camping, since they were all bedding down in very nice RVs, but there were s’mores and hot dogs on sticks and plenty of mud. Kevin and Beth’s shiny new RV—an extravagant wedding gift from Joe and Keri—was parked by itself in an isolated spot across the pond from the others, on account of it being their honeymoon.
She’d questioned the wisdom of bringing a two-month-old baby camping but Kevin had pointed out that Lily didn’t really care where she was as long as she was fed, changed and cuddled. Plus, he’d said, she was a Kowalski. She could take it.