Thank you those who followed/favorited my story, and an extra big thanks to Jeanf, AnAmberPen, galwidanatitud, and Leah Pensotti for the reviews.

I love hearing what you guys think – what works, what doesn't work – and I appreciate it when someone takes the time to write.

I checked my stats earlier and it looks like absolutely nobody has read this story in over a week, so perhaps interest has waned and there is no point in me continuing?

I'll see how this chapter goes, and then make a decision on whether or not to carry on.

As ever, Merle and Daryl aren't mine, and everything else is entirely fictional.

It was a cold, wet and windy late September night when Shaun stood up in Aisling and Daryl's kitchen and held his beer bottle up to everyone gathered around the table.

Daryl groaned, but Aisling reached across and squeezed his hand, giggling a quiet "shhh!" at him.

"Aww hell, we don't gotta sit here listenin' to fuckin' speeches, do we?" Merle grumbled from across the table, but a broad smile spread across his face on seeing Daryl's discomfort as a slow blush spread up his cheeks when he realized what Shaun was probably going to say, and he settled back into his chair beside Heather, nodding at Shaun "'pologies, Shaun. Carry on. Wanna see how red my lil' brother's face can get."

Shaun laughed and rubbed his face with his hand. Unaccustomed as he was to doing this kind of thing, the beers he'd had over the evening and the changes he'd observed in his best friend over the last few months made him want to mark the occasion somehow.

Clearing his throat, he raised his beer again.

"Daryl an' Aisling, first of all I wanna thank y'all for a great night. My wife's a great cook" he nodded at Corinne, who blushed happily from her chair beside him, "but that feast y'all served up is gonna take some beatin'. We're all gonna be comin' round lots more, y'know that, right?"

Merle shouted out a "Damn right!", while Chuck joined in with a loud "Booyah!"

Aisling looked across at Daryl, and he nodded at her.

"That pie was one of the best damn things I ever ate" he said quietly, as he winked at her from beneath the hair which had fallen in his eyes.

Aisling smiled in thanks at everyone's compliments. Her grandmother's steak and Guinness pie had kept generations of O'Briens contented and well fed, and Aisling was glad to have been able to follow her Nana's recipe and share the comfort food she'd enjoyed growing up, with her new friends.

Shaun watched their quiet interaction for a moment, smiling, then carried on.

"Now, I think if anyone had told us back in June that Daryl here would be hookin' up with a hot tele-"

Corinne coughed, loudly, and smirked up at her husband, who laughed and nodded,

"… would be hookin' up with a talented television star, I think we'd all agree that that just didn't seem likely. But here we all are, an' not only did he hook up with her, he somehow managed to persuade her to move in with his redneck ass!"

Daryl huffed as everyone around the table laughed at Shaun's comments.

"'Laugh At Daryl Night', is it?" he grumbled, but his mouth twitched up at the corners, stifling a smile.

Every damn thing he's sayin' is true. Don't know how I fuckin' managed it, but I'm the luckiest man in Georgia.

"Brother, I'm real happy for ya," Shaun continued, pointing his raised bottle at Daryl, "an' Aisling… can't tell ya how happy I am to welcome ya, officially, to Goat Rock. To Daryl an' Aisling!"

"To Daryl and Aisling!"

As wine glasses clinked against beer bottles, Daryl reached over and laid his arm over Aisling's shoulders. Emboldened a little by beer, and the warmth he felt seeping through his body as he glanced around the table at the little scene playing out in the kitchen… in his and Aisling's kitchen... he gently pulled her closer and softly pressed his lips against hers, briefly, before he raised his own beer bottle to her glass and knocked them together.

"To us, sweetheart."

"Woah, woah, woah!" Merle exclaimed, pulling out his chair as he frowned and looked underneath the table. He patted his jeans pockets, then looked around the room with his forehead furrowed.

Heather looked at his confused expression and asked "What are you looking for, Merle?"

Merle rubbed the back of his head with his hand and bit his lip as he shook his head, "I was just wonderin' where my baby brother left his goddamn balls!"

Everyone at the table, apart from Daryl, erupted into laughter.

Now that he wasn't drinking so much, and was clean, Merle was a different man. The group around the table knew that there was no malice behind his words – it was just Merle being Merle, dealing with the 'touchy feely shit' going on around him the only way he knew how – but as he caught his brother's stare directed at him he raised his hands in appeasement, chuckling as he did so.

"Aw hell, y'know I'm only havin' fun, lil' brother. To tell ya the truth, I'm happier than a tick on a fat dog seein' you both shacked up together. This Irish Colleen's the best thing that could'a ever happened to ya'."

Daryl's expression softened a little, and he bit at his lip as he nodded at Merle in quiet appreciation at his words. It wasn't often that his brother spoke from the heart, never mind in front of an audience, and it touched him more than he would be willing to admit.

As Corinne and Heather cleared the plates from the table, Aisling leaned in closer to Merle and whispered "That was lovely, thank you."

Merle scoffed, hiding his embarrassment behind a broad grin. "If Darlina ever finds them balls of his, ask him to have a look an' see if mine are rollin' round there too, would ya sugartits?"

*.*

The conversation bubbled in the warm sitting room as everyone gathered in front of the fire for another few beers or glasses of wine. Merle spoke animatedly about his new job, which led to engine-talk among the men.

Corinne, Heather and Aisling sat close together on one of the new couches that had been delivered last week, talking excitedly about a book which Aisling held in her hands.

"This is one of my favorite books, of all time. I'm so happy they're making it into a movie!" Corinne said as she stroked her fingers almost reverentially across the cover of the well-thumbed paperback, "And I'm so excited for you to be in it!"

Aisling would be leaving for New Orleans in a couple of weeks, to play a nice-but-dim stripper with a pet cockatoo in a long-awaited screen adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy Of Fools'. She didn't have the biggest role ever, but was thrilled to have been cast among big-name stage and screen actors, all eager to be associated with the hugely anticipated movie, which had been bubbling away, never quite getting anywhere, for decades.

"How long is the shoot?" Heather asked, thumbing through the book which she hadn't read, but was definitely going to now.

"Only two weeks for me," Aisling smiled, glad that she wouldn't be spending too long away from home, but would get to flex her acting muscles on a, hopefully, worthy role. "And Daryl's going to drive down and join me for the last couple of days, so we can spend the weekend there."

Heather and Corinne both caught Aisling's blissful, faraway stare, as she watched Daryl explain something to the other men, which involved wild hand gestures and a waggly head movement.

"Things are going well for you two then?" Heather asked, making Aisling snap her attention back to her friends, giggling self-consciously at having been caught doing her 'my boyfriend is so dreamy' face again.

She nodded, smiling "It's been amazing. He's amazing. I just… I can't believe I'm so lucky."

*.*

The three weeks since Aisling had come back to Goat Rock, and moved in with Daryl, were like nothing either of them had ever experienced before.

Daryl had never spent much time in any woman's company, never mind lived with one, so he had no gauge to go by. All he knew was that he was happier than he had ever been in his life, and that he never, ever wanted to be apart from the woman who had come into his life, turned it upside down, and made it worth living.

He fell in love with her a little more every day.

Honestly, he was still reeling from what had happened in the short time since that first day when he had seen Aisling talk to his brother in the Goat Tavern, and now.

She was the incredibly pretty actress that his brother had struck up conversation with… that they had spoken to in the diner…who had invited him to see a band in Atlanta, and he had invited to Sean's house for the July 4th celebrations.

In the time they had known each other they had had more ups and downs than he'd ever thought two people might have had.

But even still, she was here, with him, in their home. She would jump up to greet him with kisses from those soft, full lips when he came in, and he spent his nights with her her smooth, warm naked body curled around his in their bed at night.

The women he had fucked before… as ashamed as he was to admit it, even to himself, their couplings had been as intimate as his hand wrapped around his own penis. They were drunken fumblings, that may as well have been with a pillow, which he doubted lasted any longer than it would have taken for him to jerk himself off, and emotionally meant just as much to him.

Everything was different with Aisling.

The sex was fantastic.

More than fantastic, actually. It was mindblowing.

He'd never thought of sex as being anything more than scratching an itch, but with Aisling it was a million times more than that, and he knew now what all the fuss was about.

Yes, even the slightest raise of her eyebrow at him had him more turned on than he'd ever been in his life, but it went beyond the incredible pleasure of her mouth on him, and the way he felt when he slid inside her.

Sex was a connection. A meeting not only of skin, and bodies, but also of minds, and hearts.

When their bodies met Daryl's heart beat faster than it ever had before.

When her lips met his, his blood rushed through his body like water through a poorly-constructed dam.

Aisling was the only person who had ever made the inner workings of his body misbehave, and the only person who caused the rush of feelings that rushed through him and made him tell her that he loved her at every opportunity he could.

Daryl was getting better at dealing with feelings.

He had grown from the emotionally stunted man who had met Aisling back in the Summer. Whereas he had once struggled to ask her along to Shaun's July 4th celebrations, he now spent an inordinate amount of time wondering when it might be appropriate to ask Aisling to marry him.

He'd never thought he'd ever marry, never feeling the inclination, nor the need, to tie himself to somebody else. Daryl had managed thirty six years without wanting to spend longer than ten minutes with another person, and here he was wanting to spend his life with this woman who had come into his life just a few months ago and turned everything upside down.

They hadn't even been together six months, but she had moved across continents to be with him. That meant something, didn't it?

She loved him. He knew that.

And he loved her.

When he had first realized that he wanted to marry Aisling, back when she had been working on Wild Geese, part of him worried that it was perhaps some kind of cave man instinct, to piss up her leg and mark her as his territory. But the more he thought about it, the more he knew that what he felt wasn't a territorial thing.

Being with her made all the broken parts of his life disappear, so all he knew was the here and now, and the completeness that he felt with her.

Aisling made him complete.

When he looked at her he felt love, yes, but he also felt feelings of belonging, and an all encompassing urge to protect her and make her happy.

But was she ready for some asshole from Nutsack, Georgia to declare that he wanted to spend the rest of his poor, sweaty, good-for-nothin' days with her?

Would she palm him off with a "let's take it easy for now", all the while wondering how in the hell she might extricate herself from this horrible situation that she had considered barely little more than a fling? She was an actor, after all. It was part of her job to switch emotions on and off, and to create a fantasy where none existed.

Or would she freak out and run, aghast that he had pushed what they currently had towards something she wasn't comfortable with?

She was only twenty five. Shouldn't she be out there enjoying life, rather than settling for a life of interminable dullness in Goat Rock with some scarred – physically, and emotionally – redneck?

For the umpeenth time since she had returned, Daryl watched Aisling as she slept and the thoughts tumbled through his head. One minute he was ready to shake her awake and ask her to marry him right now, and the next he was swallowing the urge down and putting it off for another while.

He decided to wait until Christmas, and see how the situation was between then then.

She could have left him by December, waking up one morning and deciding that a life in Goat Rock, with a no-prospect mechanic, wasn't what she wanted for her life.

Or, she could still be here, happily belching along loudly with him as they drank beer on the couch in front of a movie, each seeing how far through the alphabet they could get before the belch ran out, or sneaking up on him when he least expected it, yanking his shirt up, and blowing raspberries on his back or his tummy.

As unlikely as it seemed to him at times, come Christmas Aisling could still occasionally wake him in the morning with her warm, wet mouth around his cock, and his sleepy, waking gaze would lock on her big green eyes looking up at him from between his thighs, her long dark hair tickling the skin on his thighs as her tongue teased and her head bobbed.

If he asked her now she might say yes, but as far as he was concerned she was more likely to say no. So, Daryl decided to wait, and bide his time.

As he had thought before they got together, in his mind it was better to wait without laying himself emotionally bare before her, than ask her now and not have those few weeks left together.