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  Each step she took filled her with a sense of anticipation, and yet she kept a fairly leisurely pace. More than anything, Casey needed to prove to herself that she was in control and that she wasn’t rushing, although the thought of being back in Ryder’s arms had her body humming. The cool air had felt good on her heated skin when she’d first left the house, but now she cursed herself for not at least grabbing a sweater.

  Up ahead, she spotted Ryder’s family home and stopped. Was she certain? Was she seriously ready to let go of the past in hopes of a future? There was still a chance that things wouldn’t work out, and if that was the case, could she handle having Ryder break her heart for a second time? Was she ready to take that risk?

  Her feet started moving before her head gave her a definitive answer, and soon she found herself at the base of the steps leading up to the deck. Casey’s hands gripped the railing like a lifeline, and she took one last fortifying breath before taking that first step that would finally lead her to Ryder.

  When she was finally up on the deck, the first thing that she noticed was that the house was dark inside. No lights were on except for a soft one out on the deck. If she knocked, would Ryder even hear her? With no way of knowing except for simply doing it, Casey raised her hand and knocked on the glass and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Had he gone out? She was just about to turn and leave, cursing herself for her impulsive behavior when she saw Ryder coming toward her. Her heart rate kicked up at his approach, and when he reached the glass door, he simply stood there and looked at her. Casey couldn’t read his expression, and she began to really second-guess her decision to come here.

  “Ryder?” she asked with uncertainty. But he said nothing; he simply continued to look at her through the glass. “It’s kind of chilly out here. Can I please come in?” She was certain that he’d open the door right up for her, but instead he turned his head and looked as if he was searching for something.

  Oh no…she suddenly thought with a sickening feeling in her belly. He’s not alone.

  Putting her hand up and taking a step back, she said, “You know what? It can wait. Really. I’m sorry that I disturbed you.” Turning and doing her best not to trip over everything in sight in her attempt at a quick and hasty getaway, she didn’t hear the door sliding open.

  “Casey,” he said gruffly and she turned back toward him. “What are you doing here?” His hair was ruffled and he was shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of cotton pajama pants hung low on his hips.

  She nearly swallowed her tongue.

  “It…it was nothing,” she stammered and continued her less-than-graceful backward walk toward the stairs. “You can just…go back to…whatever you were doing and um…text me tomorrow with the venue that you want me to book for your cousin.” She banged her heel on the edge of a lounge chair and cursed.

  Ryder came toward her slowly. “Are you okay?”

  “What?” she asked nervously. “Oh, I’m fine. Really. Never better.” Looking over her shoulder to make sure that the path was clear, she added a final good night before turning her back on him.

  And that’s when he reached for her and pulled her back against him. Casey’s skin was freezing against his hands and Ryder could feel her shivering. He rubbed his hands up and down her arms for several moments while he simply took in the feel of her against him—the smell of the ocean and the vanilla that always drove him wild. “Why are you here?” he whispered against her throat and heard her moan slightly as she did her best to press her body fully against his without being obvious.

  “I wanted…”

  “Yes?”

  “I needed to…”

  He kissed her neck and then simply blew on the spot and almost had to catch Casey as her knees buckled. “What do you need, Case?”

  “You,” she said, her voice shaking “I need you, Ryder.”

  Without a word, he bent and swung Casey up in his arms and strode back to the house, stopping only to shut the sliding doors and lock them before taking Casey to his bed.

  Gently laying her down, Ryder stood and took in the sight before him. Everything about it was right.

  “Can I ask you something?” Casey asked quietly. Ryder nodded. “Why didn’t you open the door at first? What were you looking for?”

  Ryder ducked his head and felt himself blush slightly. “It wasn’t quite midnight.”

  “What?”

  “Remember, I told you earlier that it’s always best to wait a day before making a decision?” Casey nodded. “Well, I told myself that if it was at least after midnight, it would be all right. I had to wait for it to be at least twelve-o-one.”

  Casey reached out a hand to Ryder to draw him down beside her.

  Neither one bothered to look at the clock again.

  Chapter 7

  The first rays of sunlight were beginning to filter into the room when Casey opened her eyes. There was no confusion—she knew exactly where she was, and it was exactly where she wanted to be. Ryder was curled around her, and she had been held lovingly in his arms all night.

  “Hey,” he whispered, and Casey smiled at the sound of his voice and the feel of his breath on her skin.

  “Hey, yourself,” she whispered back and then shifted even closer, so that her bottom was snug against the arousal that was growing behind her. “A girl could get used to waking up like this.”

  “I hope so,” he replied, trailing kisses along her throat and shoulder. “I was very relieved to wake up and realize that I didn’t dream this last night; you’re really here.”

  “Yes, I am.” A purr of delight escaped her lips as his worked their magic everywhere they touched. She sighed his name and then turned in his arms so she could face him. Reaching up, Casey cupped his face and kissed him on the lips. “Good morning.”

  Ryder smiled down at her in pure wonder. When he’d heard the knock on the door last night, he had thought he had been dreaming. As he’d made his way to the door and saw Casey standing in the moonlight, he was certain that he was dreaming. After their discussion earlier in the night, he had figured that she would need at least a day, if not several, to decide whether or not she wanted to be with him. Relief had swamped him when he realized that Casey didn’t need the time, that she was just as anxious for him as he was for her. There was so much about her life that he wanted to know, and as much as his body was screaming for him to make love to her again, he didn’t want her to think that what he was looking for was only physical.

  Putting a little distance between them, Ryder lay on his back and tucked Casey in at his side. “So tell me,” he began, “how is it that you’re still here in Wilmington, in your parents’ house? Are they still here?”

  She shook her head. “They retired to Arizona several years ago. I was just getting the business going and wanted to stay local, and so I offered to buy the house from them. They immediately declined and said that they wanted me to put my money into the business. I thought that the plan was for me to just live in the house and pay the utilities, since the mortgage was completely paid off. It wasn’t until after they moved that I received the papers saying they had deeded the house over to me.”

  “That was very generous of them.”

  Casey nodded. “I was a little angry at first; I didn’t want them to give up on their dreams for their retirement because of me. My parents are pretty private people, but after weeks of me arguing with them, they showed me their financial statements and assured me that deeding me the house wasn’t hindering their lives at all. Apparently they had saved more than they spent throughout their marriage, so they are living quite comfortably in the desert right now.”

  “Good for them.”

  “They’re the only people I know who willingly moved away from the beach,” she said with a laugh. “Most people work their whole lives so that they can live on t
he beach and mine wanted nothing more than to move far away from it.”

  “Well, in their defense, they lived with it their whole lives; it was time for something different.”

  “I suppose.” She was silent for a moment, simply enjoying listening to Ryder’s heartbeat while her fingers skimmed their way across his chest. “Tell me about California.”

  Ryder shrugged. “Not much to tell. I have a house similar to this one, and it’s right on the beach. My office is less than five miles away, and I moved there, went to school, got that branch of the company up and moving, and now…” His voice trailed off.

  Casey pulled herself up and looked at him. “Now…what?”

  He studied her face. Even without makeup, she was the most beautiful woman in the world to him. “Now…I want more.”

  There were at least a dozen ways that Casey could read into that statement, but decided to not jump to any conclusions and let Ryder explain himself. When he didn’t expand right away, she began to fish a bit. “You want to grow the company some more?”

  Ryder shook his head. “No. I’m a little burned out with the business. I’ve worked seventy to eighty hours a week since it started, and now I’m confident that someone else can take over and I’ll be okay with it.”

  “One of your brothers?”

  Again he shook his head. “I don’t think that either of them are all that interested in putting in that kind of time. Actually, I know that James doesn’t want anything to do with it and Zach has his own agenda. He does a lot of our international stuff. I don’t think he’d want to be tied down to one place.”

  “So you’d let an outsider take over?”

  “I don’t think of it like that. Besides, it’s not just my brothers who would be up for the position, I have at least another half-dozen cousins—besides Mac and his brothers—that would be good candidates to slip right into the position.”

  “And what would you do with yourself?”

  I’d spend the next forty or fifty years making things up to you. Ryder reached out and stroked a hand down Casey’s cheek. “I’ll still be involved in one way or another, but just not as the CEO of that particular branch of the company. My dad and my uncles have offices all over the country, and I think if I put it out there, one of them would find a place for me.”

  Casey was growing frustrated with Ryder’s somewhat elusive answers. “Where would you want to go?” She couldn’t help but ask.

  “Well, that would depend,” he said softly, his eyes never leaving hers.

  Now they were getting somewhere. Casey sighed and rested her cheek into the palm of Ryder’s hand. “On what?”

  It was now or never. Ryder usually took his time working things out in his head; he always had a plan. For some reason, however, where Casey was concerned, he couldn’t wait. He had already lost so many years with her, and he wanted their future to start now.

  “I want to be wherever you are, Case,” he said solemnly, watching her expression.

  She sighed his name. “I think I would like that very much.”

  “Really?” he asked, unable to believe that he had heard her correctly.

  “Really.” Casey leaned forward and touched her lips to his, loving the fact that this was reality and not something that she was dreaming. Ryder was here; she was in his bed, in his life, and as he rolled her beneath him, she knew that he was her future.

  * * *

  By the time they surfaced from the bedroom, the sun was starting to set in the late afternoon sky. Ryder had grilled a couple of steaks while Casey had prepared a salad, and they were eating out on his deck watching as the tide crashed on the shore.

  “I never get tired of that sound,” she said as she took a sip of wine. “I can sit outside for hours, no matter what time of day it is, and just listen to the waves.”

  “It is a great sound. So tell me what your schedule is usually like. What does a typical week in the life of a wedding planner look like?”

  She laughed at his question. “There is no typical week,” she said with a smile. “My weekends are usually pretty full during the season, but just like with you, things come up unexpectedly, and while most of my days are nine to five, there is the occasional time where I have to go out at night to tour a venue with a couple.”

  “That’s understandable. How do the next couple of weeks look for you?”

  Casey had to take a moment to get her head back in business mode. “Let’s see, I have a consultation on Monday afternoon, a tasting to go to on Tuesday, I think your uncle is coming out either Wednesday or Thursday and—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why is my uncle coming down? I thought that we had everything covered?”

  “For the most part we do, but when I last spoke to him I was trying—”

  “You were trying to get rid of me,” he said with a hint of disbelief. “Why?”

  Casey looked at him with exasperation. “Seriously? Haven’t we covered this already? I didn’t want to work with you, Ryder. I was sort of annoyed that you had come back to town and were involved in this wedding at all. I didn’t think too highly of you after the way things had ended between us, but now…well, it just took a little time for me to stop being childish and to see that it was time to stop living in the past.”

  He nodded. “So do you still need my uncle to come down here, or can I simply finish helping out?”

  Casey reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “You have gone above and beyond the call of duty. But maybe…hey, wait a minute. Have you decided on the venue? Do we need to call Mac and Gina and let them know?”

  Ryder burst out laughing. “You’d think I would have remembered that, right? I have decided on the second venue. In the end, I like the fact that it was an all-inclusive resort and that the guests can stay there after the reception. I hate to think of anyone having to drive. The food was great, the service was top-notch, and the rooms were luxurious.”

  “Call your cousin and let him know while I call and book it. They were only holding the date for me until today, and it’s already later than I had planned on calling.” It was only then that Casey realized she had left home last night with nothing but her keys and the clothes on her back. When she looked back at Ryder, he was smirking. “What’s so funny?”

  “You just suddenly looked a little lost and it was adorable. Let me call Mac and then you can use my phone to make your call.”

  “Fine,” she muttered, but wondered if maybe she should run home for some of her things. Maybe it would be better for her to go home anyway; she didn’t want to make Ryder feel like she was ready to move in with him or anything. She did have work to do in preparation for her week. Once he got off the phone with Mac, she’d make her excuses and head home.

  “Wow, that was impressive,” Ryder said, snapping Casey out of her inner dialogue.

  “What was?”

  “That whole conversation you were having with yourself. It was fascinating to watch.”

  “I wasn’t having a conversation with myself. Much.”

  Ryder stood and took Casey in his arms and kissed her. “Yes, you were. Much.” They laughed and Ryder stepped away, grabbing his phone and pulling up Mac’s number. He was surprised that he actually caught him. Truth be known, he had no idea what the time was over in England and wasn’t sure if he was waking Mac up or catching him in a meeting.

  “Hey, Mac. It’s Ryder. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “No, I am actually done for the day here. Thank God,” he sighed. “What’s up?”

  “I made a decision on the venue and wasn’t sure if I needed to call you first or your dad. I don’t have Gina’s number, and although Casey does, I thought maybe you’d want to hear it from me first.”

  Mac chuckled. “Did you want to claw your own eyes out by the time you were done?”
>
  Ryder laughed along with his cousin. “It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I had the opportunity to observe two different weddings—one at each venue—so that I could see how well organized they were during an event.”

  “Gina had wanted to do that, but our schedules never quite meshed. So? Which one did you choose?”

  “I chose the all-inclusive one.”

  “Yes!” Mac said. “Honestly, that one made the most sense to me. Gina really liked the other place because they do the ceremony on the beach, but personally, I’m not a huge fan of sand.”

  Ryder rolled his eyes. “While that is the lamest excuse I have ever heard, I can understand it.”

  “So the place was good in action?”

  Ryder relayed the details of the wedding the previous evening, including the five ex-aunts he and Casey had sat with. They were both laughing and Ryder made a mental note to send a bouquet of flowers to each of them. They may have been major pains in the rear, but if it hadn’t been for their egging him and Casey on, they might not be where they were right now. He looked over and saw her clearing away their dishes, wearing nothing more than one of his shirts. It looked good on her.

  It was going to look even better when he peeled it off of her.

  “Ry? You there?”

  “What? Sorry. My mind wandered for a minute. What did you say?”

  Mac chuckled again. “I asked how things were going with Casey. When she mentioned that the two of you used to date, I almost cringed. My dad is on a matchmaking kick after having a hand in mine and Lucas’s and Jason’s love lives. I thought for sure he was going to get up and do a jig at the thought of doing it again.”

  “Well, remind me to thank him,” Ryder said, unable to hide the smile in his voice. “I looked Casey up even before I got the call about you needing help with the wedding, and thanks to the time we had to spend together, I think that things are damn-near perfect.”