Dating Daddy's Best Friend novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: Bronze

I didn't take it off.

Cullen stopped in the workshop doorway in dry jeans and a gray T-shirt, barefoot, with his hair still wet.

He looked at my hand.

He looked at the bench, the sawn cleat, the broken mold.

He closed his eyes for a second.

"That's not how that was supposed to go," he said.

"How was it supposed to go?"

"After the show. On the Wilhelmina. I had a speech."

"You had a speech?"

"I've been practicing it to the radio for two weeks. The fiddles think it's very moving."

I held up my hand under the bare bulb.

The bronze was dark and soft, with tiny pits in it from the sand.

"How did you know my size?"

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"I asked your dad. The morning after the pot roast."

"You asked my father."

"He went into his bedroom and came back with your mother's ring box. He said you have her hands." Cullen's voice went rough. "Then he told me if I cast it crooked he'd put me in the river."

I looked down at the ring.

Then I took it off.

His face went still.

"Come outside," I said.

I walked out of the workshop and down the lawn in the dark.

His dock ran out into the river, long and empty.

The Wren's lines still hung off the cleats into the black water, where he'd left them in June.

He'd never taken them in.

I walked to the end and turned around.

He came down the dock slowly.

He stopped an arm's length away.

"You made this," I said. "You asked my father. You cast it. You were going to give a speech."

"Yes."

"You didn't ask me."

He opened his mouth, and shut it again.

"From now on you ask me," I said. "That was the rule."

"I know it was."

"So I'm asking."

I held the ring up between us, on the end of my fingers.

"Cullen Bray," I said. "Will you marry me?"

The river went by under us.

Somewhere across the water a dog barked at nothing.

He didn't say anything for so long that I started to laugh, nervous, with my hand still out.

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