CROFT POV.
Five months.
One hundred and fifty-two days of watching Jennifer Morgan slowly and beautifully reassemble herself. The haunted look in her eyes had been replaced by a steady, determined light. The trip to Albany had been a risk, but it had paid dividends I couldn't have calculated. She had returned not with the stench of her past, but with the grounding of it. She was stronger, more present, and more mine than ever.
She was more herself than ever, and my desire to make her permanently and irrevocably mine had become a singular, driving focus.
It was time.
The proposal, therefore, could not be a simple question over dinner. It had to be an event, a strategic masterstroke that would overwhelm her defenses and showcase the full extent of my reach and my commitment. It had to b
