“Maybe I should’ve been Bill Carter’s daughter and you should’ve been Ryder Stone’s son. How do you think that would’ve worked out?”
“Zach is a good man. Maybe it would’ve been okay.”
“Zach is a good man because of your family. He practically lived at your house when he was a kid.”
“Yeah.” I pursed my lips. “I also think, if your father had more than one boy, those boys would’ve grown up hating one another.”
“He would’ve tried to pit you against one another,” Ruby agreed. “He tried that with Pearl, Opal, and me. It didn’t work, though, because he wasn’t very good at it.”
“You guys had to figure stuff out on your own. Luckily, you were all smart about it because your mother wasn’t much of a help until recently.” I didn’t realize that what I’d said could’ve been taken as an attack on her mother until it was too late to haul back the words.
“I see my mother in a different light now,” Ruby hedged. She didn’t sound angry as much as tired. “There were times I hated her when I was a kid.” She almost looked embarrassed to admit it. “I thought she was disinterested in us and nothing more than a flying monkey flitting around my father’s Wicked Witch of the West.”
“That’s a fun visual.” I kept rubbing her back, grinning down when I felt something move inside her stomach, which was pressed against my stomach. “Rexanne liked it too.”
Ruby rolled her eyes at my use of the name. “I just mean that she never really fought with him. Now I realize that shedidfight with him. She was careful not to do it in front of us, though. She wanted to give us the safest upbringing possible. Her mistake was believing that keeping our family together was the way to do it.”
“Do you think things would’ve been easier for you if she’d divorced your father when you were a kid?”
“Oh, without a doubt. We still would’ve been entitled idiots, but not the same entitled idiots we turned into as teenagers.”
“I don’t remember you being so bad.”
“We weren’t great.” Ruby shrugged. “It is what it is. I think we all managed to grow out of it—thankfully—but we all had rough patches. When I look back at that time, I wish I could change a lot of things.”
“Like … have sixteen-year-old Ruby realize that fourteen-year-old Rex was a catch?” I waggled my eyebrows.
“You are such an idiot,” she said on a laugh. Then, to my simultaneous surprise and delight, she leaned in and pressed her head to my chest.
Everything inside of me went warm and happy. She belonged here, in my arms and heart. I didn’t want her to ever leave this cozy cocoon we’d built. Was it realistic? No. It was what I wanted, though. Just us—and eventually little Rexanne—in this warm cocoon, happy forever.
“Hey.” Ruby snapped her fingers in my face, jolting me out of my reverie. “Where did you just go?”
“Sorry. I was just thinking how good you feel in my arms.” There was no reason to lie, so I didn’t hold back. “It feels as if you should’ve always been here.”
Ruby’s cheeks flooded with color. “How can you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Say that without dying of embarrassment.”
“I’m not embarrassed. I mean it.”
“Yeah, but … what if I shoot you down? What if you allow yourself to be vulnerable and I break your heart?”
Was that what she was worried about? “I would rather take the risk and lose than not take it and always wonder. I know what I want, Ruby. It’s you. It’s this baby. It’s this life. I’m willing to be vulnerable to get it.”
She made a noise in her throat that almost sounded like a sob. Thankfully, she wasn’t crying. “I want this too.” She ran her tongue over her lips. “I’m afraid, though. You have to be patient with me because I’m going to make stupid moves.”
“I’ll be patient.”
“For how long?”
I already knew that answer. I didn’t need to think on it. “Forever.”
She threw up her hands, exasperation spurting out in a huff. “See! That right there!” She waved a finger in my face. “How can you know that you’re in this forever when we’ve only been dating for two weeks?”
“It’s not about dating.” I shook my head. “Stop getting hung up on an arbitrary dating number.”
