Hey everyone! I just learned that my posts weren't transferring over from my blog to here. I'm manually putting in the last blog posts this morning. The RSS feed I use to connect my blog to this site looks like it's working, but I think I'll delete it and put it back in again when I start my next book, Isaac's Decision, next week.

I'm sorry for the confusion this has caused.

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Lexie ran up to the gazebo with an excited smile on her face. “Caitlyn’s ready. Chris, thanks for letting her do the wedding her way. I can’t remember when I’ve seen her this happy.”

That made Chris feel good. He liked knowing he made her happier than she’d ever been, and Randy’s memory no longer bothered him. He and Caitlyn were making their own lives together and creating memories that didn’t have anything to do with Randy.

“Where’s your fiancé?” Mark asked her.

Lexie shrugged. “At work.”

“Again?”

“That’s the price he pays for being a surgeon. I better get back to Mother before she tries to talk Caitlyn into something. Lucky me, I get to babysit her until the wedding’s over.” She rolled her eyes before she headed back to the chairs.

“She doesn’t seem happy to be engaged, does she?” Mark commented.

Chris shrugged. “I don’t know how a woman’s supposed to look when she’s engaged.”

Caitlyn’s brother stood by the gazebo and began playing music on his violin. Chris turned his attention to the boardwalk where Sandy walked between the rows of chairs, smiling and holding a bouquet of yellow roses. Right behind her, Caitlyn strolled with her father toward him, and Chris couldn’t help but smile. She looked absolutely radiant, her skin glowing and a big grin on her face.

“That’s how an engaged woman should look,” Mark whispered.

Chris thought to answer, but he was too busy watching Caitlyn to care one way or the other about Lexie. His eyes drifted for a moment to her mother since he wondered if the woman would protest, but her mother simply took a look at the slight mound that was Caitlyn’s belly and rubbed her forehead. Lexie patted her mom on the arm but smiled in Caitlyn’s direction.

Chris sighed but refused to let her mother’s displeasure that her daughter was before family and friends in her white sundress while visibly pregnant deter him from enjoying the moment. They could deal with her mother some other time.

Sandy stepped onto the gazebo and Caitlyn and her father followed. After her father kissed her on the cheek and handed her over to him, Chris took her hands in his, unable to hide how excited he was to be taking part in the Earthly custom of getting married.

The minister began to speak and Chris listened to the vows, wondering why so many people on Earth opted to get divorced when the vows made it clear that the intention was for people to stay married for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health for as long as they both lived. It didn’t seem any different from the life-mate bond on his home world, except maybe there was no way physically out of the bond unless one of them died.

He repeated the vows, and she did the same. Before they slipped the rings on each other’s fingers, he took a moment to look, once again, at the engravings, liking how the symbol for unending love was sealed with the promise that they would be each other’s forever. He was hers and she was his, and together, they were one.