“That’s right, Cate. I hope you don’t have plans for tomorrow because I do, and it involves all your favorites. Cheesecake, scones, muffins, and me.” He turned and winked at me before quickly refocusing on the road.
Between my muddled thinking and my vagina throbbing like a marching band in the homecoming parade, I couldn’t even pay attention to where we were heading. All of a sudden, we were speeding down a palm-tree-lined highway with blue skies overhead. I shivered, and Blane turned the air off. It wasn’t because of that, but I didn’t say anything.
We got off at an exit, and I tried to focus as Blane made a few turns. Eventually he slowed and turned into an enormous golf course community. We drove past houses that got larger and larger, until toward the end of the course, we turned right into a gated housing community. Monstrous mansions sat far apart from each other, and lush green grass—the ultimate luxury in the Florida heat—separated each property.
The few cars we saw on the neighborhood roads were mostly Cadillacs and Mercedes; since the houses all had three-or four-car garages, the driveways were empty. I smiled at the sight of a couple of kids speeding down the sidewalk in those little mini versions of Escalades. Through breaks between the houses, I caught glimpses of the course. A few golfers zipped along in electric carts, braving the heat as they headed to the green.
Blane gave me a curious glance. “Like it?”
I nodded, mostly because I was speechless. “When did you do this?”
“Put in a bid a couple of weeks ago when talk of the trade began, and closed a few days ago.”
I turned to face him, raising an eyebrow. “Cocky much?”
“Hopeful.” Of course he had a comeback.
Finally, he turned into a driveway. The house was the last one on the road, bordered on the right with a man-made lagoon, complete with a fountain, and separated by heavy landscaping from his neighbor on the left.
Blane gunned it down the drive and threw the car in PARK in front of a three-car garage.
“The place is new, bought the last unit available,” he explained as he unlocked the car doors.
I hopped out of my side and took in Blane standing next to me in the driveway, looking at his house.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
Then it dawned on me. This was a guy who grew up in a trailer park; his dad drove a truck for a living, and his mother worked as a waitress. He’d never owned a house, and this was his first one. I figured it could have been a ramshackle fixer-upper, and he would still want to know what I thought.
“It’s spectacular. Almost like a dream.”
And it was.
It wasn’t one of those single-story stucco villas common in Florida. Instead, it was a two-story all-brick home, and the grounds around it were landscaped to show off the house.
“See that?” Blane pointed to the house’s facade. “The front reminded me of the barn in Ohio.”
It did.
I didn’t have any words.
“See the way the wooden slats crisscross on the door? It’s just like the big barn door where I took you.”
I swallowed, my emotions getting stuck in my windpipe. “That’s not why you bought this?”
“Yep.” He took my hand and walked me toward the front door.
“You can’t do that, buy a house because it looks like the barn.”
“Well, I did. Never had a house before, Cate, and I wanted this one. It made me think of you, and then I found out it was all new, never been lived in by anyone else. It didn’t have any memories. It’s all ours.”
My eyes welled up with tears, and I groped at my face to be sure I was still wearing my sunglasses.
“I wanted a place where I could make a life with you.”
I couldn’t speak. There was nothing I could say, no words at all. No objections or arguments could be made against this, because what he just said touched the deepest, most inner part of my being.
And I wanted that too. A life with him.
Squeezing his hand, I brought Blane to a stop and stood on tiptoe so I could take his face between my hands.
“I don’t have an answer,” I said softly. “I just know that whatever you said makes my heart beat at a frantic pace, and I like it.”
“Thank fucking God,” Blane said on an exhale before he bent and kissed me.
It wasn’t a slow kiss, or a simple press of his lips against mine. No, it was hungry and passionate, involving tongue and moans.
I stood up higher on the balls of my feet, and he lifted me in the air so we didn’t have to stop. There was no one around to see us kissing passionately in the driveway, the humid Florida air swirling around our already hot bodies, the only sound the fountain in the yard next door.
“Come on.” He finally broke free and led me through the front door.
As he toured me through the house, he exclaimed over everything like it was Christmas morning. “How about this?” he said when he showed me the jaw-dropping view of the golf course from the floor-to-ceiling windows in his huge living room. “Look at that!” he said when we walked into the master bathroom with its Jacuzzi tub and shower large enough for four people.