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"Yeah. I am."

"We've been together for less than a week."

"I know."

"I still have nine months of fieldwork to complete."

"I know that too."

"And you can't cook, your coffee is an insult to the concept of coffee, and you still don't have a career plan."

"All accurate."

She crossed the kitchen in three steps. Her hands, still dusty from the site, cupped his face and pulled him down to her. The kiss was fierce and brief and tasted like earth and the particular sweetness of a woman who'd already made up her mind and was just enjoying watching him sweat.

"Yes," she said against his mouth. "Obviously yes. Was that ever in question?"

"I was about thirty percent sure you'd ask for a peer-reviewed study on marriage outcomes first."

"I'll do that later." She took the ring from his fingers and slid it on herself, because of course she did, because Stephanie Ward did not wait for anyone to do things for her that she was capable of doing herself. The emerald sat on her finger like it had been designed for her hand. "It's beautiful."

"It was my grandmother's."

"Tell me about her."

"Over dinner. After your shower." He kissed her forehead, the bridge of her nose, the corner of her mouth. Through the bond, her joy ran through him, bright and uncomplicated, and his ran through her, and the loop of it was something he knew he'd spend the rest of his life learning to deserve.

"Criss."

"Yeah?"

"For the record, you do have a career plan now." She held up her ringed hand. "You're going to help me excavate the most significant supernatural archaeological site in the Blue Ridge Mountains. You'll carry equipment, you'll learn to read ward signatures, and you'll keep Emmett off my back when I miss permit deadlines."

"That sounds like a job, not a plan."

"Welcome to adulthood, Holt." She kissed him once more, turned, and walked into the bathroom. The shower started.

Criss stood in the kitchen with sawdust still on his boots, listening to her sing off-key through the thin walls, the bond humming warm and steady in his chest. The ring was on her finger. She'd said yes. And somewhere in the answer, between the dirt and the sarcasm and the obvious, he'd heard something he'd been waiting his entire life to hear without knowing it.

She'd chosen him. Not the charm or the grin or the easy version of Criss Holt that everyone else got. The real one, the complicated, terrified, still-learning version that had shown up when it mattered and was planning to keep showing up for as long as she'd let him.

He started making dinner. It wasn't going to be good. But it was going to be there, on the table, ready for her when she came out. That was the plan. Show up. Stay. Be ready.

He could work with that.

33

STEPHANIE

She'd planned on a courthouse. That had been the rational position. Quick, efficient, no fuss. Sign the papers, exchange rings, go back to work. She'd mentioned it to Criss the morning after he proposed, sitting cross-legged on the bed with coffee and her field journal open on her knee, and he'd said "whatever you want" with the easy sincerity of a man who genuinely didn't care about the venue as long as she showed up.

That was three days ago. Since then, the rational position had been quietly dismantled by the discovery that Stephanie Ward, who had spent her adult life keeping one foot out of every door she walked through, wanted a wedding.

Not a big one. Not a spectacle with centerpieces and a seating chart and a DJ who'd ask if she was ready to party. But something real. Something that said I chose to be here, in this town, with this man, and I'm not leaving.

She'd never had that before. A place that felt like staying.

She was sitting at the Griddle & Grind trying to figure out how to say this out loud when Twyla appeared with a second coffee Steph hadn't ordered and a look on her face that suggested the fae grapevine had been running ahead of the conversation.