His Love for Her (Carmel Springs Book 10)

Chapter 10

Bexley~

While the shower had reinvigorated Ransom, all it'd done for me was ruin me for the rest of the night. Had it been a cold shower, I might have stood a chance. However, it'd been a hot, long, steamy one, and I could barely keep my eyes opened against the pillow under me.

After Ransom had dried me off, he had instructed me to grab a shirt out of his closet to wear, and after grabbing the first shirt that I'd seen, I had immediately crawled into his bed, ready to sleep the rest of my life away, I was so freakin' tired.

"Not so fast, baby."

I sat up in his bed, and I could feel myself practically drooling as I watched Ransom and that ripped body of his walk towards the bed. A grey towel was wrapped around his waist, and that was the only thing that he was wearing. Though to be fair, the man was so hot that clothes should be illegal on him. Those abs of his were the second sexiest things on him, next to those goddamn dimples.

"What?" I asked, never wanting to go to sleep so badly in my life.

Ransom sat down on the edge of the bed, and I watched as he pulled the drawer to the nightstand out, grab something, then place it on my lap.

It was a ring box.

"Ransom-"

"There's this, too."

I heard him, but all I could do was stare at the box on my lap. I recognized the logo, and my heart started thumping in my chest with how much this thing might be worth. Then I also feared that it wouldn't be to my taste at all. If that were the case, then it'd mean that Ransom really hadn't been paying attention to me all these years. I wasn't the flashy type, so gaudy rings really weren't my thing.

When he placed a slip of paper on my lap, I noticed that it looked like a receipt. My first thought wasn't a charitable one. I mean, there was only one reason that people kept receipts, and that was so a return would be easy if a return was necessary.

I looked up at him, and his mercury orbs were staring at me intently. "You kept the receipt?"

"I did my best to pick something that I thought you'd like, but I kept the receipt in case you didn't like it." He shrugged casually, but I could tell that he was nervous. "I didn't want you wearing something that wasn't you."

Looking back down at the receipt, I saw that it was a gift receipt, so the purchase amount wasn't on it, but that's not what caught my attention.

The date.

Everything started to blur in front of me as the date kept staring back at me smugly. The gift receipt was dated over a year and a half ago, and I couldn't believe how stupid I felt. I had allowed us to become total spectacles because of all my doubts. The entire town of Carmel Springs was talking about what idiots Ransom and I were, and all because I'd been too afraid to hope that I was finally getting everything that I'd always wanted with Ransom.

With shaky hands, I set the receipt aside, then let out a deep breath as I opened the black box, the creaking noise the only sound in the room. Once it was opened, a simple two-carat diamond ring stared back at me, and that's when the first tear fell.

It was perfect.

Though two-carats still seemed a bit much, the design was simple and elegant, and it's exactly what I would have picked for myself had I been the one shopping for it.

"It was either one-carat or two because one and a half just bothered me, so I went with two," he remarked casually.

"It's perfect," I replied honestly. "Really, Ransom. It's beautiful."