Falling for My Runaway Bride

Chapter 30:

Liam’s POV

Two months.

That was all it took to dismantle and rebuild everything I thought I knew about myself—about love, about control, about the way a life can shift in a single look, a single secret, a single name whispered in the right voice.

Ava and I worked side by side now. We shared offices, meetings, ideas, occasional arguments over budget lines, and very inappropriate texts during strategy calls with the board. She was terrifyingly efficient, relentlessly idealistic, and entirely unreasonable when she was sleep-deprived.

And I was in love with her.

Painfully. Shamelessly. Completely.

Which explained why I had two hours mysteriously blocked on my calendar under an entry labeled “Q3 Forecast Placeholder.”

Jamie noticed.

Of course he noticed.

He barged into my office just before noon with his usual flair for dramatics and his usual disregard for knocking. “You have two hours blocked this afternoon. I didn’t schedule that. What exactly is ‘Q3 Forecast Placeholder’? Because unless that’s code for a secret deal or a hostile takeover, I’m starting to think you’re cheating on me.”

I didn’t look up from the contract I was pretending to review. “It’s exactly what it sounds like.”

Jamie snorted. “Please. You’ve never forecasted anything without a deck and two assistants standing by. What are you actually doing?”

I stood, buttoned my jacket and gestured for him to follow me.

We took the private elevator to the roof—a space Ava had always said should be turned into a garden or meditation area, not just another helipad—and as the doors opened, Jamie stopped walking.

Stopped breathing, probably.

Because in front of us, the entire rooftop had been transformed. The city skyline stretched around us like a crown, and in the center, where the concrete had once been bare, stood hundreds of flowers—peonies and lilies in cream and emerald and soft blush, arranged in tight clusters like something from a dream Ava might’ve had once but never dared to speak aloud.

The air smelled like summer. Like beginnings. Like her.

Jamie exhaled. “Holy shit.”

I adjusted my cuffs.

“She’s coming up here later,” I said.

He blinked. “Wait. You’re proposing? Like… today?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve only been dating for—”

“Two months,” I said.

He gave me a long, incredulous look. “Do you have a fever? Did you hit your head?”

I smiled—just barely. “I’ve known longer than that.”

“You’ve known longer than—?”

“Since the first time we almost met,” I said quietly. “When she didn’t show up for the engagement dinner. When all I had was her name, and a chair across from me that stayed empty. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Not then, not after. And when I saw her in that interview room weeks later—completely different name, completely unbothered, completely brilliant—I knew. She had already changed everything.”

Jamie stared at me for a moment. Then, to his credit, he nodded.

And then, “Okay. Fine. I hate how much I like this.”

I handed him a small white card.

He took it, flipped it open.

“It’s a fake agenda for an emergency debriefing on the Copenhagen acquisition,” I explained. “She’ll believe it because she’s been trying to reorganize that portfolio all month.”

He sighed. “You want me to trick her into coming up here.”

“She’s too busy to be romantic,” I said. “She needs a reason.”

“God, you two deserve each other,” he muttered. “I’ll have her up here by five.”

***

At five-oh-five, the elevator doors opened again.

And there she was.

Still in her fitted work dress, heels clicking against the concrete, reading the fake agenda with a frown on her face and a pen tucked behind her ear. Her brow was furrowed, her expression serious—until she looked up and saw me.

And then everything slowed.

The paper slipped from her hands. Her lips parted.

Her eyes scanned the rooftop once, then landed on mine, wide and stunned and just beginning to shine.

I didn’t wait.

I crossed the space between us, slowly, deliberately, like I’d never stopped moving toward her, not once since the moment she crashed into my life and rewrote every rule I thought I’d authored myself.

When I reached her, I didn’t kneel.

I held out the box and opened it.

A large emerald ring sat inside, glinting in the light, the stone as rich and green and impossible as she was.

“I thought about diamonds,” I said. “I really did. But nothing else felt right. Nothing else said what I wanted it to.”

Her breath hitched. I kept going.

“This was never about tradition. Never about legacy. It’s never been about doing what’s expected.”

I looked at her.

“It’s about you.”

She still hadn’t spoken.

“Marry me,” I said softly. “Marry me, Ava Green, because you’ve already rewritten every part of me that mattered, and I want to spend the rest of my life building something with you. Something that’s only ours.”

She stared at the ring.

Then at me.

Then at the flowers.

Then at me again.

And finally—finally—she laughed. Not a soft laugh, not a graceful one. A full-on, giddy, utterly unrestrained Ava laugh.

“Of course it’s an emerald,” she gasped. “Of course you did this on a roof. Of course you tricked me into thinking I had a meeting.”

“I needed a fighting chance,” I said.

She reached out, touched the ring, and then looked up at me with eyes that made everything else fade.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Then louder—much louder—“YES!”

And as she flung her arms around me and kissed me like the city couldn’t touch us, like the skyline had bowed to this moment just for us, I heard Isabella shriek from somewhere below. A few people started clapping. Someone shouted something about a wedding date.

I didn’t care, because she was mine. And this time, no one was taking her away.