He started crawling up my body again, but I scrambled away, right off the bed, to a box I had hiding on the floor.
I bent down, picked it up, and handed it to him.
He frowned, his gaze intense. “What’s this?”
“Open it,” I suggested.
I placed both of my folded hands underneath my chin and waited for him to get the lid off.
When he did, he froze.
His gaze, so intense and ecstatic, came up to me. “Are you for real?”
A slow smile took root on my lips. “Yeah, for real, for real.”
He shook his head and pulled out the five-by-seven photo that I’d printed to go onto his desk at his finally finished office.
The photo was of a pregnancy test—because no way was I going to go to the doctor and seeing our future baby without my man—and I’d printed it off using a Polaroid Instant Camera.
“Baby,” he breathed. “Are you serious right now?”
“Deadly,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to tell you all week, but someone’s insanely busy at work.”
He reached for me, and his mouth was instantly on mine.
The clothes went, and our bodies found each other.
He was filling me up in seconds, making sweet, passionate love to me that he only gave me when we had all the time in the world.
“You’ll never have to experience a bad pregnancy again,” he promised. “I’ll be there, every step of the way.”
He punctuated his promise with a kiss.
“I’ll be there for every diaper change. Every feeding. Every sleepless night,” he continued, rocking slowly into me. “I’m so fucking happy I could cry right now, Baker Clayborne.”
I caught his face in my hands and whispered, “Not nearly as happy as me. You’ve shown me how a woman should be treated. You’ve put me and our son first. You’ve treated him better than the man that helped make him. For the rest of my life, I will never be able to make that up to you. But I’ll keep giving you everything I have to give to make sure you know how much you mean to me.”
His forehead dropped down onto mine, and he growled against my lips as he said, “You don’t have to give me a single thing more, and we’ll never be even. You may think that I saved you, honey, but in reality, you saved me. You brought me back to life when I didn’t think life was worth living. You’ve made me the happiest man on the planet, and the news you just shared only adds to the beauty you gift me with every day. I love you until I can’t breathe, Baker. The only thing that could make this life better you just literally gave me. I can’t wait until she’s here.”
“She?” I teased. “How do you know it’s a she?”
“I don’t.” His eyes glittered. “Do you seriously think that you can hide anything from me?”
My mouth fell open. “You knew?”
“I knew. And I was there when you refused the sonogram.” He laughed. “I’m not ever going to stop my stalkerish ways when it comes to you.”
I threw my arms around his neck and squeezed. “Hurry up. You have to be at the office in thirty minutes.”
He slammed home. “Fuck the office.”
I grinned against his lips. “I like how you think.”
Eight months later
Holt was asleep in one of Copper’s arms, and our new baby girl, Lilah, was asleep in the other.
I snapped the photo, the loud whirl of the Polaroid spitting out of the camera filled the room.
