The Way Home by Jean Brashear

weren’t shocked. They were…” He lost his train of thought as she wrapped her fingers around him.
    “Don’t kid a kidder. They’re horrified.” She grinned as she slowly squeezed, then trailed her fingers upward. “They’re just too mannerly to admit it.”
    James blinked to clear his brain. She did this, mesmerized him with sex, partly out of fun but also, he was discovering, to afford herself an edge when she felt insecure.
    He swept her fingers away and levered himself over her in one swift motion. “I’m the heir. And they’re good parents. They only want the best for me.” He bent to her then, sliding his tongue down her throat.
    A little pleasure hum emerged. “And they’re positive that’s not me. That I won’t fit in here.”
    He’d already fastened his mouth on her nipple, so he didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he concentrated on making certain she felt his devotion. When he’d reduced her to jelly, he lifted his head. “Honey, you fit in everywhere—and nowhere. That’s what I love about you—one thing, anyway. You are one of a kind. I’m crazy about you.”
    It wasn’t often that you could catch Bella off guard. Her life, with its revolving relatives, interspersed with months when her mother’s craziness would subside, had both toughened her and freed her. Orphaned her and deprived her. Bella had learned to flaunt her uniqueness before others could reject her for it.
    But she had the most tender heart he’d ever encountered. Why no one else had discovered that, he could not imagine.
    That understanding was his gift to her, along with the one he wanted to give her now, instead of waiting as he’d planned, until they graduated: the knowledge that he would protect that tender heart for the rest of his life. Give it a home, so that she would be rootless no longer.
    “You just like how I am in bed,” she said. “Some girls mistake great sex for love, but not me.”
    He barely resisted the urge to don his pants. But that was what she was after, to gain distance. To protect herself. She was a walking contradiction, the wild, free, crazy woman and the starved-for-love girl.
    She needed him, he realized. And he wanted to be there for her. Always.
    “You’re full of it,” he said, then charged ahead, though it was not the romantic proposal he’d always assumed he’d make. “Marry me.”
    Her eyes popped wide. “What?” She scrambled upward. “Are you insane?”
    “No. I’m in love with you.”
    “James, you can’t—” she spluttered. “The very idea is absurd.”
    He might have chosen to be insulted, reacted in knee-jerk hurt, if he hadn’t noticed how frightened she was. Yet how she yearned.
    He got right in her face. “Double-dog dare you.” He was amazed at himself, at how he could be so frivolous, so unconcerned about how correct she was. His family would go berserk.
    “It makes no sense.” Her voice was almost pleading. “ We make no sense.”
    But, in an unusual moment of piercing insight, he recognized how much she wanted to be argued out of her stance.
    He could soothe her with sex, but that was her tactic. For the first time in his life, James had no illusions, was not safely blind, cradled in the lovely picture his parents had painted.
    To grant them due credit, they were honestly happy—with each other, their lives, the future they anticipated. He admired that. Had thought he wanted that.
    Until Bella blew through his life like a blue norther, and rendered his world unfathomable without her.
    Honesty was his only angle. “I’m a stick in the mud. You’re a butterfly. I won’t deny either.” He felt ridiculous, kneeling buck naked before her, but intuition told him that they had to slough off both their protective shields. He grasped her hands between his, though in another time, they’d be laughing themselves silly at this Victorian pose.
    “Even a butterfly gets tired of floating sometimes.” Before she could protest that she wasn’t tired or