Disclaimer: The Sentinel is a Pet Fly Production and all related characters and situations belong to those who hold legal copyright. No money is being made and no infringement is intended.Spoilers: (For the rest of the stories in this series and pretty much all of the TV episodes)
Rating: PG-13 (for sitcom-level sexual innuendo)
Hearts and Flowers
#9 in The Sparrowhawk Sandburg Series
by
Besterette
Besterette@aol.com
Detective Blair Sandburg glared at his partner as they got back into the truck.
Jim Ellison glanced over at him as he got behind the wheel. "What?"
"You were flirting with that woman!"
"I was not."
"You were too."
"She was flirting with me. I was being polite."
Blair eyed him suspiciously. "So everything's okay. With Beau and everything."
Jim glanced at him with amused exasperation. "Everything's fine, Sandburg. I was trying to get a little more information out of our suspect. You've seen me do that a thousand times."
"Yeah, well..." Blair grumbled. "Haven't seen you do it since you started sleeping with my sister."
Jim smiled. "Beau says I can look at other women. I can look, listen to 'em, and smell them." He shot Blair a sly sideways glance. It didn't take long for Blair to figure out the innuendo, that Beau reserved touch and taste for herself. Jim had never been one to 'kiss and tell' but he seemed to enjoy teasing Blair about his relationship with the younger man's half-sister. Partially because Jim's conventional conservative upper-middle class upbringing taught that having a baby out of wedlock with a woman some ten years younger than himself was wrong, and on some level he was looking for reassurance that Blair approved. But mostly to watch him squirm.
It did make Blair a little uncomfortable. He and his sister had always talked openly about their love-lives, but it was just gossip. This time... he'd known Jim longer, he'd been friends with Jim first. He had an emotional relationship with James Ellison, friendship, and he was the sentinel's guide. Instead of just hearing secondhand stories about a guy he'd probably never meet. Jim and his sixth-grade locker room jokes and Beau passing on slightly edited examples of a sentinel's sex life since Jim had always been too much of a gentleman to report back on any of the previous femme fatales. Blair could handle that by looking at it as the scientific puzzle, like the fact that Jim had zoned in the sack and the resulting, um, repeat performances actually gave some clues about neural function and the autonomic nervous system in the zone state. Enough to make Blair wish he was a physical anthropologist or an MD.
And he did approve, Jim deserved a woman like Beau in his life, and Jim was the right man for her, watching Jim flutter around her in Blessed Protector Overdrive during the pregnancy quelled any doubts there. The way they looked at each other, and at their son.
Back at the station, Blair found his gaze being drawn across the bullpen to Megan Connor. Relationships. Got him thinking about his own. He tended toward over-analysis, he knew, but this was definitely something to think about here. Megan.
It was the longest relationship with a woman he'd ever had. Hell, he'd known her for a year before they started dating. And she was great. Not just in the bedroom, but smart, funny, tough, easy to talk to, god, after Sierra Verde, it was so great to have someone to talk to about Jim and the sentinel stuff. Beau wasn't back in the picture then, and Simon knew about it, but didn't really want to hear it unless there was a problem.
And she didn't play headgames like Sam... the corner of his mouth turned up. Everybody had one of those in their past. Funny how he'd tried to tell Beau that her ex-manipulator Karl was bad for her, but he'd been completely blind to the fact that Sam was pulling the same crap on him.
While he was watching, Rafe stopped to give Megan a file. He leaned over, apparently pointing out something about the case. Megan laughed at something he said, and reached up to tug at Rafe's tie. And Blair blinked at the sudden surge of possessive jealousy that stabbed through him.
The question he was avoiding was, Was Megan the One? Miss Right? The one to live happily ever after with? He loved her. Did he love her enough? And how did you know for certain? You asked someone who already had it figured out.
Beau Sandburg, who only admitted that her given names were Sparrowhawk Rainbow under duress, paced back and forth with an armful of unhappy baby sentinel.
"Jake, shhh. I know, I know, horrible, icky, smelly stuff, that Baby Magic lotion, but its dye-free and hypo-allergenic, its good for you. Shhh..." she chanted in the Guide Voice. Eventually James Jacob Ellison settled down. She laid him in his crib, and crept out, quietly walking down the hallway to her office, and sat down at the computer to call up the latest chapter of her latest romance novel. They had become the main source of her income since she'd grown roots in Cascade.
Jim had been very supportive, offering to take over as primary parent if she wanted to take a travel assignment. She was reluctant to leave, maybe when Jake was a little older. There was plenty of work here, writing romance novels and re-editing old travel articles into collected books. She reread the last couple of paragraphs she'd written to try and get into the flow of the plot, set her fingers on the keyboard... and the doorbell rang. Jake let out an angry bellow at the noise that intruded on his nap.
Beau looked ceilingward with a weary sigh, "I suppose You think this is funny" and went to answer the door.
It was Blair. She glared at her brother, after the distant wailing broke for breath, told him, "I just got Jake back to sleep."
He winced and smiled sheepishly. "Oops. Sorry."
She stood aside to let him in, and he followed her to the nursery. Jake seemed happy to see his uncle and quieted again after Blair picked him up. He held his nephew for a few minutes and then laid him back down and followed Beau out to the kitchen.
"Why aren't you using the white noise generator?"
She frowned, opening the fridge. "I don't want him to get dependent on it. Jim uses it too much as it is." She handed him a can of soda, taking one for herself. "Jim's a little... paranoid... about the baby hearing us. I'm afraid that if we keep putting Jake down for the night with the generator and a CD of lullabies, he isn't going to be able to sleep without it."
Blair smiled. "Not exactly covered in Doctor Spock, is he?"
"Nope. I just hope he takes after his father. Bill said Jim's senses faded to normal and didn't seem to climb back to sentinel levels until he was four or five."
They moved into the living room. Beau curled up on the futon couch, and Blair sat down on the matching chair, slowly rolled his can of cola between his palms. "So... how are things? With you and Jim?"
Beau thought about it. "Fine." There was that rough patch awhile ago, the week of cold withdrawal, but they had recovered nicely. She felt a twinge of guilt for neglecting her consortly duties. As his guide Blair was Jim's partner and backup, trained him, honing the sentinel's heightened senses into a tool and a weapon to protect the tribe, his city. As Jim's consort, she raised their child, and Jim being Jim, tried to show him that his senses could bring him more pleasure as well as more problems. She'd just been too tired to try anything inventive lately. "Why?"
Blair shrugged. "No reason. Just—you've been together for awhile now, constantly together, and you have a kid. And, y'know... they say that kinda puts a damper on things..."
Beau shook her head slightly. "Not that I've noticed. I'm beginning to think Carolyn divorced him because she needed the sleep." Blair smirked at her, she shrugged. "Of course, that might be Laura McCarthy's parole hearing last week. Those pheromones in an enclosed space for hours..." She smiled at the memory of a hormone-addled Jim. A good glimpse of what he must have been like as a teenager. It had been fun. Except for the rug burns. "They seem to be wearing off. He didn't zone again or anything, but he came close a few times. Just really, really focused." But maybe that rough patch wasn't as over as she thought. "He hasn't said anything, has he?" She made a mental note to pick up an ostrich plume feather duster. Couldn't hurt.
"No. Nothing like that," Blair said quickly. "It's... things are getting serious with Megan... and I'm trying to figure out how serious I want things to get."
Beau sat up and studied her brother, smiling slightly. Ah yes. Blair was seeing everything he never knew he always wanted in the shape of Megan Connor. She knew the feeling.
"So... how'd you know you were in love with Jim? In love, in love, he's the last guy you're gonna sleep with, have his babies, in love?" Her smiled widened. "Other than the sentinel/consort thing?" Blair rolled his eyes.
"Well, the first time I ever saw him, when I was waiting for you at his desk, and he walked in behind you..." she sighed. "That was definitely a 'have him stripped, oiled, and brought to my tent' moment. He's just... gorgeous. But what made me fall in love with him was little things. He made me feel safe when David Harrington was trying to kill me, not like he thought I couldn't take care of myself, but that he was going to do everything he could to protect me. And that made me feel safe. The way he listened when I told him why we hadn't seen each other... he didn't take sides, he didn't give me some soppy reassurance that I was only doing what I thought was right, or remind me that you were a grown man and I was still treating you like my kid brother. He just listened."
Blair glanced at his hands, and back at her.
"Other things," she continued. "The night he made dinner. That apron... rowrrr!"
Blair looked at her, eyes widening, and grinned in disbelief. "The apron. The green, flowered, ruffled apron is sexy?"
She grinned back at him. "It... a straight man has to be real secure in his manhood to wear something like that, and confidence is always sexy. I mean, I bet he never thought about it, how it would look. He just needed something to keep his clothes neat, and, its an apron, that's what its for. So he uses it. Y'know. So macho he doesn't even have to prove it any more."
Blair just shook his head again. She shrugged, admitting it was a personal quirk. Then, growing pensive, Beau got to her feet and walked over to the windows overlooking the bay, folding her arms. "When I got home from that visit... I looked up the News Update article. Jim's return from Peru. That photo of him on the cover, when they first found him... you look at that picture long enough and you can see the slopes of Hell reflected in his eyes."
She turned back, leaning against the cool glass, to face her brother. "You know what Mom taught us about the military. Bunch of organized bullies, heartless, soulless thugs who never had an original thought in their lives, blindly committing atrocities in the name of following orders... but Jim... a man who was the ideal of everything the army claimed to be, duty, honor, loyalty not just words to him... losing the men under his command who trusted him with their lives, and being the only survivor, that was the worst thing that could happen to him."
Her voice was quiet in the sudden heavy silence between them. "Somehow he found the courage to survive being the survivor." She shook her head, breaking the spell. "We met up again when that big cop convention turned out to be at the same hotel as Mimsy's wedding, and we got to know each other better. Music, food, movies, when-I-was-a-kid stories. But... it was too easy, it was all so easy with him. I was used to having to work for it. You know how it is, when you meet someone new, and you're nervous, you want to know more about them, and you're worried about making a good impression, if they'll like you as much as you like them. The mating dance. There wasn't any of that with Jim. It was relaxed, comfortable, like being with an old friend. Maybe that's part of the sentinel/consort thing, pattern recognition, maybe that's why I never really got serious about anyone because I had this Jim-shaped space in my heart and no one else fit, and since we met it was..." She laced her fingers together and tugged. "Like two pieces of a puzzle fitting together, interlocked."
"I know you two really clicked from the start," Blair admitted.
"He's a good, kind, decent man, a great dancer and a better kisser, he laughs at my jokes, and when he smiles, it just transforms his face." She smiled helplessly, shrugging. "We were dancing, and I remember thinking that it wouldn't be so bad, spending the rest of my life, trying to make him smile. So when he came up to my room that night... I let him in." Her gaze turned inward, remembering the primal passion of that night.
"And, uh, you two..." Blair encouraged her, making a vague yet explicit pounding gesture.
"Oh yeah," she sighed. "And it was... amazing... but the morning after I kinda freaked about the sentinel stuff. I didn't want to believe it was an uncontrollable instinctual response, there's a difference between animals and people. But I couldn't believe I'd fallen so hard, so fast. I'd never felt that way before. I was a little gun-shy about commitment, and the thought that I might be part of some ancient genetic mated for life pairbond thing scared the hell out of me. It was all happening so fast and even when I was trying to slow things down I couldn't stop thinking about the big lug. I tried to date, but there was just no spark, the guy wasn't Jim. I suppose I could have gone on with that nameless empty ache inside, but then you went to England and I came to Cascade, and stayed with Jim... and... he's Jim. I realized that if there is a sentinel/consort bond, its subtle, and it doesn't matter, just another layer. I'm attracted to Jim because he's a sentinel and because he's tall and has ice-blue eyes and a body by DaVinci, and because he is the man he is. So I let myself love him."
"Sounds great. Happily ever after," Blair nodded.
Beau ran a hand through her hair and went back to sit down again, took a sip of her soda. "Oh, life isn't all perfect. It does mean giving up a lot, but you get more back. Life isn't 'me me me' any more, when you're part of an us. You can be alone when you want to be, but there's no more loneliness. Trying to keep a long distance relationship going wasn't easy... is Megan going home after the exchange program is over?"
Blair slumped forward. "I... haven't asked."
Beau nodded slowly. "And that's what this is all about, huh. You want to ask her to stay, and you aren't sure if you should."
"Yeah. I love her, but I don't want her to think I think she should move to the other side of the world for me. Her career and her family and friends, and everything—her whole country! Cause, what if it doesn't work out?" He let out a nervous laugh. "She does all that and we break up, well, I'm a real schmuck, huh."
"It would be her choice. And no one's fault," Beau said gently. "You should at least ask what her plans are so she knows you care whether she goes or stays."
Blair took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I know... but that'll lead into the whole 'do you want me to stay' discussion and I don't want to get into that until I have an answer," and then he looked at her, eyes narrowing. "What did you mean, life isn't all perfect? You said things were fine."
"Oh, just the little surprises and adjustments you have to make when you're used to being on your own and get set in your ways. And big surprises, like our little luff child."
Blair glanced at the hallway leading to the rest of the apartment. "Your love child," he corrected her.
Beau smirked. "L. F. Latex failure." Blair snorted, and she continued. "Jake was... an unexpected gift... I think we dealt with remarkably well, but we were just getting used to being lovers, and oops, we were parents. Then there's the everyday bumps and potholes of getting along. Jim and his House Rules. What is it with him and wastebaskets? Why have one in the bathroom or my office when as soon as I throw away a piece of paper or a Q-tip, he has to go empty it in the trashcan in the kitchen? But even when he's being really obnoxious and annoying the hell out of me... I can't imagine not having him in my life."
Blair was nodding thoughtfully, and then blinked. "Oh, man. I didn't mean to be hanging out here so long. Sorry." He got to his feet.
So did Beau. "No problem. I'm your big sister, that's what I'm here for. Hope I helped."
"Yeah, you did. Thanks."
She saw him out. "Anytime." Beau stood there after closing the door, troubled. She liked Megan, thought she was a good match for Blair... She shook her head, and went back to work. At least in the fictional realm you could give your characters happy endings. Too bad real people didn't always follow the script.
After work, Blair said something about stopping to see his sister, so Jim ran a few errands, picking up some staples they were running low on at the loft. Milk, eggs, bread, paper towels, that sort of thing. And something for dinner.
He made it home first, so he put the groceries away, started dinner, and watched the early news. He had a mouthful of tuna casserole when Blair walked in the door, so he waved a combination greeting, supper's in the over, get it while its hot. Blair served himself and came over to the table. They talked about the case, cross-town traffic, whether No Yolks instead of regular egg noodles really made that much of a difference in the casserole, their plans for the weekend, the gift shop Naomi was running for some friends of hers, and back to the case.
Jim finished eating, so he took his plate into the kitchen, rinsed it, and put it in the basin to soak, then started to scoop the leftovers into some Tupperware. "I'm gonna go over to Beau's for a few hours tonight."
The clink of his fork against the plate as Blair pushed the remaining food around. "You really love her, huh?"
Jim half-smiled and turned, leaning against the kitchen island. "This isn't about that woman this morning, is it?" A sudden flutter of uneasiness in his chest. "You didn't mention it to your sister, did you?"
Blair shook his head with a snort. "Yeah, Jim. Just like in grade school, I went over there to tattle on you." He got up, bringing his plate over to the sink. "I just... how do you know when you're really in love with someone?"
"You and Connor, huh." Jim started washing the dishes, hiding a smile. He'd had a feeling about those two... since about the third time she'd called him Sandy. Took the two of them long enough to figure it out for themselves.
"Yeah." Blair started drying. "I mean, I never really felt like this about anyone. Maybe I was starting to, with Maya, but that was... just a mess. So, uh, you have a lot more experience here. I could use some advice."
The corner of Jim's mouth turned up bitterly. "You sure you want my advice? Look at my track record. You're right, one thing I do have is experience with messed up relationships."
Blair was staring at him, mouth partly open, a stricken look. "Jim, I didn't mean..."
He tugged the damp dishrag out of Blair's unresisting hands and hung it up to dry, then went to the fridge. This kind of touchy-feely talk required beer.
"It's okay. Most of the women in my life were using me for one thing or another, except Carolyn, we were just wrong for each other." He handed Blair a bottle, and gestured invitingly to the living room.
Blair followed. They settled on the couch. Blair prodded him to continue. "You didn't know you were wrong for each other until after you were married?"
"I guess we just had different expectations. And we were both married to the job more than to each other. The work came home with us... a rookie would foul a crime scene and she'd end up taking it out on me, I'm waiting on some tests to come back from the lab and make a crack about some Mister Wizard Wannabe hamstringing real detective work and she'd take it personally... hell, you talked to her for the thesis, you know. She'd ask what I was thinking and I'd tell her the truth, that I was thinking about the Jags' chances for the season, and she was expecting some big emotional introspection, so she'd get snippy."
Blair let out a snicker and Jim wondered, not for the first time, exactly what Carolyn had told him. "I don't have a fear of intimacy, I'm just the strong silent type."
"So after this long string of femme fatales, how'd you know to hook up with my sister?"
Jim gestured with his beer bottle. "Right there. She isn't always trying to get me to talk about our relationship, because we're too busy having one to talk about it. We talked it all out when we were deciding if we were going to have a relationship. since I wasn't sure about dating someone who lived in Boston, and she had some initial misgivings about maybe being genetically predisposed to being my love-slave..." he smirked.
"Can't imagine why," Blair said dryly.
"Anyway. We talked, we're done," Jim shrugged and took a gulp of his beer. "She doesn't pull any of that stereotypical crap. She'd rather watch an action movie than a chick flick, and I figured I was in for it when I was a day late on the When We Met anniversary, but when I gave her the earrings... she'd totally forgot." Jim smiled, thinking of her hasty improvisations. "Told me anniversaries are a new thing for her, she's never really been with the same guy long enough to hit all of the major holidays twice in a row."
"She doesn't make you play the 'guess why I'm mad at you' game," Blair nodded.
Jim pointed a finger. "Yep. All straightforward and up front. She is what she says she is. No nasty surprises yet."
Blair gave him the gotcha look. "Yet."
Jim winced. "Yeah, well, after my usual run of luck, Beau's so great I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. She really is a travel writer, right? It isn't a courier cover story or anything?"
Blair snorted. Jim was lost in thought. Veronica, who turned out to be an adulteress murdering con artist. He'd kept his hands off Chopec women since the only single gals in the tribe were jailbait. Lila the assassin. Carolyn, no amount of rationalizing what a mixed-up jerk he'd been back then could excuse it, they'd only hurt each other. Laura McCarthy, the jewel thief with the pheromones that still spelled 'Love Potion No. 9' to his libido, they'd just gone through her parole hearing and Beau had happily helped him burn off the extra testosterone.
Alex in Sierra Verde. I shouldn't make jokes about Beau being horrified that she might be bound to me beyond her control. Blair, of course, had a theory about that. Jim's biological clock going off, the primeval urge to find a mate and breed. He hadn't met Beau yet, and Blair had rejected the passes Alex made at him. Blair believed that sentinels were more likely to mate with guides of the appropriate sex, or other sentinels. That explained why the human race wasn't hip deep in sentinels, the genes going recessive. Jim had been looking without success, Blair had refused Alex's attempt to claim him as her consort, the territorial battle over Cascade, her attack on Blair, then meeting up on neutral ground... Hating Alex, sick and disgusted with himself, kissing her. Unable to not kiss her. And the taste of bile at the back of his throat. Nobody knew that he'd killed her. The dreams started up again, worse. A wounded wolf, the sparrowhawk Beau had been consecrated to as her spirit animal and namesake, a black jaguar cub that even in the dream he'd recognized as his infant son. All tortured, dying.
He'd tracked Alex down before anyone knew she'd broken out of prison and returned to Cascade. She'd been following them, threatened to kill Blair, or Beau and Jake, or Megan. Jim had intended to arrest her and return her to prison, but he knew she wasn't making empty threats. And he also knew that the only way to protect someone was to remove the source of the threat. He'd thought of that moment, running up the steps to Hargrove Hall, when he'd seen Blair's jacket over the rim of the fountain out of the corner of his eye. That made it easy to pull the trigger.
"Maybe that's why I went for your sister. Figured out that my type wasn't exactly healthy."
"Why did you go for her? What, like, attracted you to her?" Blair asked. "And don't say the sentinel/consort thing, that doesn't exactly help me."
"Maybe that's part of it." Jim thought back to the first time he saw Beau. "She's cute, she's got a great figure, and she's smart and funny, a good cook, and she keeps her head under fire. I liked her, but I didn't think it was going anywhere. She was just visiting, and she was your half-sister. I was just pulling your chain with Naomi, but I really liked Beau."
Blair laughed a little. "Yeah. I could tell. That kiss goodbye was a clue."
Jim smiled, considered a line about Sandburg women and tongue, and took another pull at his beer instead. "Then there was your cousin's wedding and the conference. We got to know each other, the jewelry store robbery, she figured out I'm a sentinel and we figured out she's a guide... I took her to the reception, and one thing led to another..." He remembered tucking a drunken Blair in for the night, and then going up to her room. Drawn there by the sentinel/consort thing or by the romance in the air. Something. Feeling eager and nervous. The prom-night fun of peeling her out of the bridesmaid's gown and the architectural underwear, petticoats and pushup bra. It was intense...
"She came out here while you were in England and we got a little taste of living together. We decided to start seeing each other, whenever we could see each other, she could get to Cascade. And, uh, I got her pregnant, she moved here, had Jake, and here we are."
"Yeah, but why do you love her?" Blair persisted.
Jim paused, trying to put it into words. She was... soothing. Being with her, knowing she was there, made him feel good. Even if they weren't doing anything together, even now, when she was on the other side of town, just thinking about her spread a warmth through him. And because she was smart and brave and funny... and she loved him.
He certainly had no complaints about their love-life. Not just her consort-tests, but the utter delight in her eyes when she looked at him in love-play. He wasn't conceited, but he knew he was good-looking, in a rugged, rough-hewn way, and he kept himself in good shape... still, there was a little less hair to comb lately, and he remembered his awkward adolescence, before he'd grown into his height and he looked like a newborn colt, a body all elbows and knees.
When she looked at him with that light in her eyes, and she could almost hear her think, "Oh boy, I get to touch him! It made him feel sexy and unselfconscious. She was the mother of his son, just when he'd about given up on fatherhood. Truth was, his life was good before Beau came into it, but now it was better. Now there were a million possible futures and she was at the center of them all.
"I don't know why I love her, but I do," he finally said.
Blair snorted. "Great. I'm trying to have a serious heart-to-heart here and you're giving me song lyrics." He shook his head. "Does it bother you that she didn't want to get married?"
Jim leaned forward and set the beer bottle on the coffee table. "A little. At first." His grin went smug. "But we are married, sort of, she just doesn't know about it."
Blair squinted at him. "Wasn't that a storyline on Friends?"
"You're her closest male relative. And when you were drunk at Mimsy's wedding, you said I could have her. And technically, you are a Shaman of the Chopec, so when you gave us your blessing..."
Blair lit up. "I married you? Cool!"
Jim shrugged. "Like Beau says, we're together, we love each other, we're raising our kid, anything else would be paperwork and a party."
Blair's expression went sly and teasing. "You know, Jim," he said thoughtfully. "My sister's a good woman. Young, strong, pretty, and she's already given you a healthy son and heir..."
"Yeah?"
Blair glared at him. "You owe me some livestock, man!"
Jim rubbed his chin, playing along. "That's true. And she did bring a fine dowry of household goods. But she doesn't seem interested in planting, or weaving. I put all my llamas and goats into the bride-price, how can I support her in the style she's accustomed to?"
Blair laughed. "Let me make a pot of garlic potato soup without complaining about the smell, we'll call it even."
"She's worth a lot more than that, Chief," Jim told him seriously. "I don't know what I'd do without her."
Blair nodded thoughtfully. "That's a good definition of what being in love is."
Jim got to his feet, stretching. "Glad I could help. Next week I'll explain the Meaning of Life." He headed for the bathroom to take his shower, and shook his head, grinning at the soft "Think you just did."
Megan mumbled and burrowed closer. Blair pushed the satin comforter down a nit, so she could settle her head on his shoulder better, staring at the yellow rose wallpaper across the room. Then down at her. He loved her. He wanted to share his life with her. He tried to imagine what he'd do if she went back to Australia. Back to flirting with every woman he saw, knowing he'd be shot down nine times out of ten, one night stands... he grinned guiltily... which were fun in their own way. He toyed with a lock of her hair snaking across his chest, stroking it with a fingertip.
"Meg... you awake?"
"Mmmm," she sighed against his skin. "Maybe. What did you have in mind?"
"We need to talk."
She pushed away a little, looking down into his eyes uncertainly.
"When the officer exchange program is up, will you be going back to Sydney?" He took a deep breath. "Because I want—I'd like it if you stayed in Cascade. I love you, I don't want to lose you."
She snuggled back down again. "I've already looked into emigrating and signing on with the Cascade PD."
A silly grin stretched his lips. "Oh?"
"Uhhuh. Love you too, Sandy."
The proposal came out of his mouth before he could think about it. "You know the easiest way to get a green card is to marry an American citizen."
She pushed herself up on one elbow again, looking deep into his eyes. "Not for a green card, luv. Not now."
"Not now... but I'll ask again." They kissed deeply.
"The answer's yes, Blair... just... not now."
He snuggled closer. "If its not now for a few years, Jake could be our ring-bearer."
She laughed softly. "That would be sweet."
They fell asleep.
~ End ~
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Page last updated 8/15/03.