"Yes." His "new" house was a breathtaking five-thousand-square-foot custom-built home that sat on a hill overlooking Malibu Beach. She'd spent the past six months consulting with Grey over tile squares, carpet samples, fabric swatches and wallpaper samples, along with selecting all new furnishings for each room. "The decorating was finalized two days ago and furniture should be delivered the beginning of the week. You should be able to move in by Friday. I'd be more than happy to help you box stuff and move it-"

He pressed two fingers against her lips to stop her babbling. "Mariah, there's something very important I want to ask you."

Her stomach flip-flopped, then a batch of butterflies hatched. He looked nervous, more nervous than she'd ever seen him. Beneath her palms, his heart raced. God, she was crazy in love with him, had known after a few months of dating that he was a man she could spend the rest of her life with. She'd been patient with him. Had he finally realized he loved her, too? That marriage was the only logical progression left to their relationship?

She'd waited forever for this moment, when some man would ask her to be his wife. Maybe it sounded a bit corny, but ever since she was a little girl she'd dreamed of getting married and having babies. In all her fantasies, she'd never envisioned Grey proposing in quite this way, but then Grey never did anything conventionally. All at once she was aware of her disheveled state after their evening together, her skin still tingling and glowing from his earlier possession.

She dampened her bottom lip with her tongue. "What is it?"

His intense gaze focused on her face. The stubble lining his jaw gave him a dark, dangerous edge. "We've been dating for eight months now," he stated, his tone rough.

She smiled, trying to lighten the moment for him and put him at ease. "Longer than you've been with any woman, I do recall you saying."

"True," he agreed, skimming a hand along the curve of her waist to her hip. "I don't want anyone but you. You're everything I've ever wanted. You're intelligent, beautiful, amusing and sexy as all hell."

"Flattery will get you everywhere, Nichols," she teased in a sultry voice. She twined her arms around his neck, feeling languorous and wonderfully exhilarated. "I'm glad you still feel that way."

"I've definitely met my match."

Excitement and anticipation mingled. She shifted restlessly beneath him, wanting to hear those four words that would irrevocably change the direction of her life. "What did you want to ask me, Grey?"

He cleared his throat, hesitated, then, "Will you… I mean, I think we should… Aw, hell," he muttered in frustration.

Seeing how difficult it was for him to propose, she decided to make it easy on him. She placed her hand on his bristly cheek, certain the love she felt for him shone in her eyes. "Yes, Grey," she whispered. "I'll marry you."

He blanched and jerked away from her, a horrified expression transforming his handsome features. "Marry?" The one word choked out of him.

"Yes." She frowned. Had she misunderstood his intentions? More cautiously, she continued. "That is what you were trying to ask me, wasn't it?"

Shaking his head wildly, he moved off the bed faster than a thief escaping a potentially volatile situation. "No!"

Confused, she sat up, pulling the edges of the shirt around her bare breasts. "Then what were you going to ask me?"

He filched the sweatpants she'd taken from his dresser and yanked them on, pulling the drawstring tight around his waist. He paced the floor, his mouth stretched into a grim line.

Feeling foolish that she'd misdiagnosed all the signs pointing toward a marriage proposal, she wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees to hold herself together. "Grey?" Her voice was as tentative as she felt.

Abruptly he stopped a few feet away from her side of the bed. "I…I want you to move into my new house with me."

Her stomach took a dive off a very steep cliff, taking her heart with it. "Move in with you?" she echoed, praying she'd somehow heard him incorrectly.

He pushed his fingers through his thick, sable hair. "It's a practical arrangement, considering how we virtually live together as it is. Most of the time you stay here, but I'm tired of ping-ponging between both of our condos. And with you living with your sister, we rarely have any privacy at your place."

She stared at the man she loved, trying to claw her way out of the numbing shock of disillusionment fogging her mind. "You…you want to live together?"

He breathed a sigh of relief and smiled. "Yes."

She couldn't live with empty promises. Not again. No matter how much she loved him. "No."

He looked taken aback by her reply. "No?"

"No!" Her strength returned on a wave of determination. "I can't live with you, Grey."

"Why not? You know all my bad habits," he said, then added a shrug. "Not that I have many."

She lifted a brow at his arrogant assumption.

"Okay, I have a few habits that are less than desirable," he admitted, "but I'd hardly call squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube a crime. And I know you hate it when I leave my underwear on the floor, but I eventually pick it up."

If they were having this discussion under different circumstances she'd be laughing by now. But that was difficult to do when she felt like crying instead. "This isn't about toothpaste or your underwear, Grey. It's about commitment."

He jammed his hands on his hips, looking offended. "I'm committed to you."

She swallowed the knot in her throat and tasted the awful bitterness of despair. "Not in the way that matters."

"I haven't dated anyone since you." She recognized the tight clenching of his jaw. An involuntary action that happened whenever he was losing control of a situation. "Eight months is longer than I've ever lasted in a relationship. Doesn't any of that matter?"

She smoothed her hand over the cool sheets, unable to lie to him. "Yes, it matters." But she wanted, and needed, more.

He sat on the edge of the bed next to her, searching her gaze for answers. "If it matters, then why can't you move in with me?"

Her one experience living with a man had given her a clearer perspective of what she wanted. This time she wasn't going to settle for less than full measure. "Because the day I move in with someone is the day I'm wearing a wedding ring. That's the kind of commitment I'm talking about. A forever kind of commitment. A total commitment shared by two people in love."

He rubbed his forehead with his fingers, his expression reflecting his misery. "You knew I wasn't looking for marriage when we got involved, that I don't intend to get married. Ever."

"Yes, you did say that, but I kept hoping your feelings would change."

"My feelings have changed," he stated emphatically. "I care for you more than I've cared for anyone in my entire life."

"I'm touched. Truly I am," she said, aching deep inside for something she knew would never be. "But it's not enough. Not anymore."

"It was enough a month ago, a week ago, a day ago," he pointed out, his voice rising in frustration.

"I love you, Grey." It wasn't the first time she'd said those words to him, yet the sudden terror in his eyes was as fresh and raw as the first time she'd declared her emotions to him.

He blinked away the panic and forcibly regained his composure. Grasping her hand, he brought it to his lap and held it gently. "I know you do, sweetheart-"

"Do you love me?"

His face paled, and the fingers stroking her palm stilled. "I've never asked another woman to live with me."

She managed to laugh. "I guess I should consider it an honor, but that's not what I asked you."

Dropping her hand, he stood and prowled around the room, his body tense. She watched him, trying to understand the perimeters of their relationship. Grey had never been one to express his emotions verbally; she'd learned that over their months together. He'd never told her he loved her, but she knew what they had together was special-special enough to base a future on. And sometimes, when he looked at her a certain way, she was positive he loved her, whether he verbally expressed the emotion or not.

"I don't know if what I feel for you constitutes as 'love,'" he said, shooting major holes in her theory. "Hell, Mariah, I don't even believe in love."

She hadn't known that. The knowledge hurt and saddened her. All her life she'd been surrounded by people who loved her, family who openly expressed their feelings and emotions. She wondered how she could have been so blind to this cynical side to Grey, how she could have believed he just needed time to fall in love with her.

"People grow to care for one another, and I care for you deeply," he went on. "Love is an illusion, a pretty word for something that doesn't really exist."

"That's not true," she argued. "My parents are in love, and they've been happily married thirty-nine years."

He shot her a skeptical look. "Your parents are in the minority. My mother claims to have been in 'love' four, no five times, and has been divorced just as many times." He shook his head in disgust. "If that's what love and marriage is all about, I don't want any part of it."

Mariah digested that. She didn't have to scratch much deeper than the surface of that speech to realize he'd had a crummy childhood. He'd never told her much about his family, just that he'd been an only child, and that his father had died when he was thirteen. Every time she'd ask, he'd brushed off the subject and gone on to another. Now she knew why. She wanted to know more about his parents, his childhood. But she really didn't think now was the time to discuss family relations.