“I’m not rubbing it in your face!” I say with exasperation. “I keep telling you, it’s not like that. I’m here to get your blessing. Because it’s important to her, and it’s important to me. We will be together, and your approval will mean a lot.”
“Oh, you will be together?” Rick yells, and I groan inwardly. It’s like I can’t say the right thing. “Then why the hell am I here? You don’t need my approval!”
“But we want it, Daddy,” Casey says, stepping in front of me. I can tell she senses just how angry her Dad is getting, and how important it is to get him to listen. “I want it. He makes me happy.”
“Happy?” Rick blinks, then shakes his head. “You’re just a kid. You don’t know anything about this kind of stuff yet. You don’t even know what you want.”
“But I do.” Casey takes a breath. “Edward is everything I’ve ever wanted. He’s kind to me, takes care of me, gives me everything I want. I know he’d do anything to make me happy. He appreciates me for who I am. The woman I’m becoming. He wants me to follow my dreams and be a success. He wants to give me a family, and I want that, too.”
I can see that Rick is listening, though he isn’t quite calm yet. “How can you be sure?” he demands. “It’s been – what? A week? Less than that? This hasn’t been going on before, has it?” For a second he looks thunderstruck, as if he’s wondering whether I was the whole reason Casey went to London in the first place.
“It’s been less than a week,” I tell him quickly. “But that doesn’t matter. I know what I feel for Casey. She’s the one I’ve been waiting for, all this time. You know I haven’t had other relationships. I never married. I’ve been waiting. And I’ve finally found who I was waiting for. The perfect woman.”
Rick shakes his head. “How can you even tell?”
“I can’t describe it to you,” I tell him. “I just know. When I look at her… I just know.” Casey tilts her head to look back at me and our eyes meet, and for a moment nothing else matters. Just the two of us – happy with one another.
But Rick is still here, and he still isn’t happy, and I have to do something – some big gesture that will show him how serious I am.
“I was going to save this for later,” I say. “I was going to wait to have your blessing first, because that’s how you do this kind of thing. That’s the way it’s done. But I don’t know how else to show you that this is real. It wasn’t just some vacation romance, a fling that I’m going to forget now that Casey is stateside. It doesn’t matter to me how far apart we are – we’re linked forever.”
“Do what?” Casey breathes, her eyes wide and her expression uncertain. I know she can feel it – the way the atmosphere in the room has changed. The new charge all around us. The nervous energy I’m giving off.
I look at her, and make a conscious decision to shut Rick out of my mind and my vision for this moment. This is about her – about me and her. Whatever he does next, it doesn’t matter. I know I’ll still feel the same. As much as I want for both of us to keep a relationship with her father, I know which of the two of them I would put first.
“Casey,” I say, reaching inside my jacket for the thing that took all of that last-minute planning, that rushing around whenever she was distracted, that panic. I sink down onto one knee, holding up the ring box. “I want to make my life with you. There has never been anyone else for me, and there never will be anyone else, just you. Will you be my wife?”
Casey’s hands fly to her mouth, and I can see that she’s blinking back tears. For a horrible moment I wonder if she won’t say yes without her father’s say-so, but then she drops her hands and grabs onto mine, tugging me to my feet. “Yes!” she cries out. “Oh, Edward, yes, yes, yes!”
I pull her into my arms and kiss her deeply, finding my own eyes wet with happiness. I tug the custom-designed ring loose from its case and slide it onto her ring finger, admiring the way it looks on her. Not that it’s about the diamond, it’s never been about anything but her.
“You’re really happy with him?” Rick asks, his voice strangely choked. I look up to see that he, too, has tears in his eyes.
“I’m so happy,” Casey says, the tears streaming down her face as testament.
Rick hangs his head. “Then you have my blessing,” he says, before fixing me with a steely look. “But if you hurt her at all -”
“Don’t worry,” I tell him, still holding Casey close on one side. “I’ll have my own self to reckon with first. And if anyone else tries to hurt her, they’ll have me to deal with.”
I lean down and kiss her again, my fiancée. And no matter what, I know that Rick has caved, that all he wants is to see Casey smile like that, just like I do.
We might just be able to make this crazy thing work, after all.
EPILOGUE
Casey
At the sound of a key turning in the lock, I gasp and shake the rattle at baby Ricky.
“Who’s that?” I say, making him gurgle and laugh at my excited face. “Is that Daddy? Is that Daddy coming home? I think it is!”
“Hello, princess!” Edward calls out. I hear him put down his briefcase in the hall and hang up his coat, and the thud of his shoes finding their place in the rack, and then he appears in the doorway. “How was your day?”
“Somebody managed
