Natalie lay in the plush, comfortable bed in her suite at Caesars Palace, basking in the afterglow of her first lovemaking session with Ralph. It had been the perfect culmination to her exciting first day in Las Vegas. Ralph had been gentle, concerned with her comfort and pleasure, and an encounter which she'd feared would be awkward had turned out to have been an enjoyable interlude.
"Are you OK, Nat?" Natalie looked over to see that Ralph was also awake.
"I'm fine. Are you?"
"I'm great." He grinned and pulled her closer. "So are you enjoying our vacation so far?"
"I'm loving it!"
"Good." He looked thoughtful. "I've been doing a lot of thinking, Nat, and I now realize that you're the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with." He sat up and opened the top drawer of the dresser beside the bed, from which he retrieved a small box. Natalie gasped when he opened it. Inside was a beautiful diamond ring. "Will you marry me?"
Natalie was startled. She'd met this man less than six months ago, had been with him maybe a half dozen times or so at the most, not counting the trip to Las Vegas, and now he was actually proposing to her?
"But...but this is just so sudden!" she stammered.
"That doesn't matter, as long as it's the real thing, and I know that I love you, Nat. Don't you love me?"
"I'm certainly very fond of you, Ralph." Natalie couldn't stop looking at the ring. "But we live on opposite coasts. One of us would have to uproot our entire life to move to be with the other."
"So I'll relocate my dry cleaning business. That's no big deal. People in California have to have their clothing dry cleaned just like people in New York do."
"But that's such a big step! And what if it doesn't work out?"
"Of course it will work out! Why shouldn't it?"
"Well, there's no guarantee..."
"I'm willing to take that chance. To me, you're worth it." The look in his pale blue eyes melted Natalie's heart. "So what do you say, Nat?"
"Well..." Ralph seemed so different from all the other men she'd dated, so much more serious and mature. And if he moved to Los Angeles to be with her, it would be far away from his interfering mother and sisters. And she simply couldn't take her eyes off that beautiful ring. "All right!"
"I know the man who owns that bull," Doug told Jo. His arm was around her as she pushed Bethany in her stroller at the county fair. As they walked past the livestock exhibit, Jo had to wrinkle her nose as a gust of wind blew the pungent stench of manure in their direction, but it didn't seem to bother Doug at all.
"He raised it from a tiny calf," Doug continued. "I remember going to visit him and feeding it apples. Just look how big it is now!"
They arrived at the petting zoo. "Look at the baby lambs, Bethany!" Jo said to her daughter. "Aren't they cute?"
She took the little girl out of her stroller and stood her on the ground. Then she showed her how to pet the lamb. Bethany's face lit up, and she giggled. Doug put a coin in the food dispenser, then fed the lamb from his hand. "Want to feed the lamb?" he asked Bethany. He placed a couple of pellets in her hand, and the lamb ate them.
"Don't forget the hand sanitizer," Jo reminded them as they left for the next exhibit. They toured the Girl Scouts, 4H and art exhibits, then moved on to the Police Explorers exhibit, where both Jamie and Clay busily handed out leaflets and demonstrated how to take fingerprints.
"Jay Jay!" Bethany clapped her hands excitedly when she saw her older sister.
"Hi, Bethy!" said Jamie.
"How's it going?" Jo asked her daughter.
"Gosh, it's been so busy!" Jamie exclaimed.
"You think it's bad tonight, try doing this all day on a Saturday," Clay told her. Doug and Jo laughed.
"By the powers vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife," said the officiate at the chapel at Caesars Palace. "You may kiss the bride."
Natalie closed her eyes as Ralph kissed her lips, and then they left the chapel with their arms around one another. "Wow, we really did it!" Natalie exclaimed.
"Yep." Ralph grinned.
"So what happens next?"
"I find appropriate rental space in Los Angeles, then return to New York to take care of business at that end. As soon as everything's settled, I'll rejoin you in California permanently."
"And how long do you think that will take?"
"Not longer than two or three weeks at the most, I'd imagine."
"Wow, things are happening pretty quickly for us!"
"I know." He grinned. "But at my age, there's no time to lose!"
"No! You didn't!" Jo gasped over the telephone.
"I know it seems kind of sudden, and totally unlike me, but I know that what Ralph and I have is the real thing, so there wasn't any point in waiting any longer."
"Are you out of your friggin' mind?" Jo was practically screeching. "You met this guy in, like, June at the earliest? And here it is not even Christmas yet and you're already hitched?"
"I know it sounds crazy," Natalie confessed. "But now that I've finally found the right guy, I couldn't just let him slip away, could I?"
"I really think you should have given this a lot more thought," Jo told her friend. "I'm afraid you're gonna end up regretting it some day."
"I appreciate your concern," Natalie replied. "But you don't know Ralph like I do, and I really think everything's gonna be fine."
"So she married that fellow she met back in New York last summer?" Doug laughed.
"Yes, she did, and I don't think it's funny at all!" Jo snapped.
"Aw, c'mon, hon." Doug reached for his wife and pulled her onto the sofa beside him, and she snuggled into his arms, resting her head on his shoulder. The steady thump of his heartbeat soothed her. "It ain't like you and I knew each other terribly long before we tied the knot ourselves."
"That's true," Jo admitted. "But at least we lived in the same city, so we saw a lot of each other when we were first getting together."
"Oh, yeah, he's got some kind of dry cleanin' thing in New York, don't he? What's he doin' about that?"
"She says he's moving the business to Los Angeles."
"Ain't that gonna be kind of tough? I hope it works out for them."
"So do I," Jo replied.