Off Limit: Claimed by My Ex-Fiancé's Stepdad novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Yes

He crossed the deck to the stage-left wing and stopped in front of my desk.

Close enough that I had to tip my head back.

The god mic was still keyed under my hand. Every speaker in the building was breathing with us.

He held up what he'd taken out of his pocket.

A small velvet box, the corners worn gray.

"I've carried this since the ferry," he said.

The speakers carried it into every room in the Stanton.

"Since April?" I said.

"Since the first boat. I bought it on the way home, at a shop that opens at eight."

He opened the box.

"I wasn't going to ask you," he said. "You'd made the rule. I was going to carry it till you did."

It was a thin gold band with one small square stone.

Somebody in the dressing rooms said, "Oh my God," and the speakers carried that too.

"That's not an answer," I said. My voice was shaking all over the building. "I asked you a question. On the god mic."

"Yes," Ward said.

He said it to me, and twelve speakers said it to everybody else.

"Yes. Every night. Yes."

His eyes were wet.

Across the wings, the flyman held up his twenty-dollar bill and shook it at the callboard.

I let go of the god mic.

Ward took my left hand and put the ring on it.

It fit. He'd measured one of my rings while I was asleep without asking, and I let him have that one.

I put the silk button in his palm and closed his fingers over it.

"That's yours," I said. "You stopped at it."

He put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket.

Then he kissed me at my desk in front of the whole company.

The wings came apart, and the ensemble screamed.

The girl from Baltimore was jumping up and down in her pin curls.

Joanie came down from the booth at a run with the coffee can from the callboard.

"Okay! Okay! Payouts!" she shouted. "'Yes' pays two to one. 'Cries' pays eight to one, and that's the flyman and the wig master, you lucky bastards."

"I didn't cry," Ward said.

"Sir, the whole building heard you sniff," Joanie said. "I have it on tape."

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