Chapter 20 - The Unwritten Future
The sunset over Lake Minnetonka was painted in brilliant streaks of violet, amber, and gold.
Reid’s modern cedar-and-glass home sat perched on the bluffs, surrounded by towering white pines that whispered in the warm evening breeze. The terrace doors were thrown wide open, letting in the cool, clean scent of the water below.
We stood together by the cedar railing, holding glasses of champagne, watching the sun dip beneath the tree line.
I was wearing a simple silk slip dress the color of moss, barefoot on the smooth teak decking, my hair falling freely around my shoulders. I wasn't wearing makeup. I wasn't wearing designer lace.
And for the first time in thirty-five years, when I looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the terrace door, I didn't see an ugly duckling. I saw a woman whose strength, grace, and intellect made her completely, undeniably radiant.
Reid stepped behind me, his arms slipping gently around my waist, pulling my back flush against his broad, warm chest. He rested his chin against the crown of my head, letting out a long, contented breath that stirred the loose strands of my hair.
“You were magnificent today, Willa,” he murmured, his voice rumbling against my back.
“We built something good today, Reid,” I whispered, leaning into his warmth. “Something that will outlive all of us.”
“Yes, we did,” Reid agreed.
He paused, his arms tightening slightly around me.
With a slow, deliberate movement, he reached into his pocket and turned me around in his arms until I was facing him in the fading amber light of the sunset.
The playful, teasing corporate titan was gone. In his place stood the man who had spent eight years holding onto a faded signature in an ICU ledger—the man who had seen through the lies of my family in a single heartbeat and stood by my side while their empire crumbled to ash.
Reid reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a small, dark velvet box.
My heart hammered against my ribs, the breath catching in my throat as he opened it.
Inside was not a six-carat showpiece meant to impress country club matrons.
It was a delicate, exquisitely crafted ring of blackened platinum, cradling a rare, natural amber stone cut in the shape of a teardrop—the exact color of my eyes, flanked by two tiny, brilliant river pearls that matched the earrings my grandmother had given me twenty-nine years ago.
“Willa,” Reid said, his voice dropping into a register so tender, so raw with emotion, that tears immediately sprang to my eyes. “I don't need a public spectacle. I don't need a four-hundred-person society circus, and I certainly don't need a contract to prove to the world who you are.”
He took the ring from the box, holding it between his fingers, his eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that took my breath away completely.
“I love you for your brilliant, fierce mind,” Reid said. “I love you for the compassion that saved my mother’s life. And I love you for the woman you are when the lab coats come off and the doors are closed.”
He dropped down onto one knee against the teak floor of the terrace, looking up at me beneath the vast, violet sky.
“Dr. Willa Vance... will you build the rest of your life with me?”
The wind off the lake caught my hair, dancing around my face as the tears of joy finally spilled over my lashes, catching the last golden rays of the dying sun.
Thirteen years ago, my mother had shoved me out of the frame.
She had told the world that beauty had skipped me.
She had been wrong.
Beauty hadn't skipped me.
May you like
It had simply waited for someone who knew how to see it.
“Yes, Reid,” I whispered, laughing through my tears as I held out my hand. “Yes.”