I WOKE UP ALONE IN OUR BED LATER. ASLEEPY glance around showed that Bones wasn’t in the bedroom. Curious, I went downstairs and found him on the couch in our family room.

Bones was staring out the window at the mountain ridge in the distance. Vampires had the ability to sit with utter stillness, as immobile as statues. Certainly, Bones was beautiful enough to be a work of art. Moonlight made his hair look lighter than its deep brown shade. He’d changed it from blond back to its natural color to be less noticeable when we were on jobs. Those faint silvery rays also caressed the dips and hollows of Bones’s crystal skin, highlighting his lean, rippled physique. His darker brows almost matched the color of his eyes when they weren’t lit up by vampire green. Shadows made his high cheekbones look even more perfectly etched when he turned his head and saw me standing there.

“Hey.” I tightened the robe I’d thrown on, feeling his tension in the air. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, luv. I’m just a touch nervous, actually.”

That got my attention. I sat next to him. “You never get nervous.”

Bones smiled. “I have something for you. But I don’t know if you’ll want it.”

“Why wouldn’t I want it?”

Bones slid off the couch to kneel in front of me. I still didn’t get it. Only when I saw the small black velvet box in his other hand did it hit me.

“Catherine.” If I hadn’t already guessed, his one and only use of my real name would have clued me in. “Catherine Kathleen Crawfield, will you marry me?”

It didn’t hit me until right then how much I’d wanted Bones to ask me that. Sure, we were married under vampire law, but having Bones cut his hand, slap it over mine, and declare me to be his wife didn’t feel quite like the white wedding fantasies I’d had as a little girl. Plus, Bones had done it to prevent an all out brawl between his people and his sire Ian’s people over the issue of who had dibs on me.