Page 116 of Broken Warrior
The first thing we did though, was gut the fucker.
We got rid of all the furniture and ripped up the carpets. We cleaned out and totally stripped what once was my bedroom and my mother’s. Jackal and Pope knocked out the wall that divided my room from the living room, expanded the space and gave James somewhere to show off all of his Lego sets we put together. They even turned Nadine’s room into a sun room that backed up to the kitchen so Tate could see our boy playing out there while she was cooking. We didn’t go heavy with a remodel, just got rid of the unwanted reminders of the past, then I let Tate and Ember go wild with my credit card and buy all new everything for every goddamn room in the place.
They did a great job though.
My girl had noticed, most likely as I brought more and more shit to the apartment before I died a second time, that I have a thing for antiques as well as a kind of rustic but clean aesthetic. How she got all of that from books on neuroscience and dead languages, I will never know, but she did, and my dark angel turned that farmhouse into ahomefor the first time since my dad lived in it.
And I won’t fucking lie, putting James to bed in my former nursery—the one my mother used when I was first born since she wanted me as far away from them as possible—and giving it new life before crawling into bed right down the hall with the woman I plan to spend the rest of forever with is the icing on the fucking cake. It is perfection personified and I have no fucking clue why I fought it to begin with.
Do I want to stay there forever?
Not really. I did die and get brought back to life in the fucking downstairs bathtub after all, but it’s pretty fantastic for now, and we have a little slice of perfect before we get to the heaven our new house will be.
“Oh, you are so busted, buddy.”
My eyes snap open as I jump, my feet hitting the floor at record speed, and when I sit up in my chair and try to act like my girlfriend didn’t just walk in to find me with my feet on the desk after explicitly forbidding me to do that, I sigh. “Jesus, Tate. I didn’t even hear you come in.”
She gives me a soft smile as she closes my office door. “Looked a little like you were napping, so that might be why.”
“I was awake.”Barely. A few more minutes sitting like that, thinking about how fucking great my life is after moving a fifty ton desk around the room for an hour, and I would have been sawing logs for sure. “And thinking about you.”
“Oh?” A thin, dark brow lifts as Tate walks toward the desk, my dark angel looking like a dream with her hair down, her eyes dancing, and a decent amount of her body on display. “Good things?”
“Always.”
“I like your desk here,” she says as she turns in a circle slowly, taking in the final version of my office. For now. “But it wasn’t here when I left.”
Busted again.“How was Nadine?”
Tate frowns—theyou’re in troublefrown—comes around in front of me, and hops up on the desk between my knees. She shakes her head with a smile. “Fine. Asked for smokes and books, wanted to know where Mac was. The usual. Who helped you move the desk?”
No one but my dumbass.“Elias stopped in for a minute. The nurses say anything about other shit she needs?”
“No…” Tate plants her hands on either side of her hips and starts slowly swinging her legs. “Elias helped you move the desk?”
“He came up here.” And he did, too. He gave me the first set of bills under my name as well as the books Trent had given him as back up records a few years ago. Did Elias help me move the desk? Not exactly, but when he walked in I had it on the opposite side of the room and he said that wouldn’t work. So, that was helpful, right? “James got settled at Blondie’s ok?”
“He did. Ran right up to Miles’s room and woke him up from a nap.”
“Bet that baby didn’t fuss a bit, though, did he?” I grin as I start stroking Tate’s calves, as I scoot my chair closer, putting my face in prime position—right between her breasts and her pussy.
“Not one bit.”
“Probably even tried to smile at James, give his big cousin a little smirk.”
She giggles as I bury my face in the cleavage her sports bra shows off, her hands moving to my hair. “Probably. They both have charming as hell fathers, I’m sure the boys have already picked up a few tricks of their own and try them out on each other.”
I inhale sharply as I look up at her, my hands sliding up to Tate’s hips.
It was one thing to proclaim James my son, to claim him as my own repeatedly, but hearing my dark angel refer to me as his father or hell, when my boy calls meDaddy, that’s some amazing and heavy shit.
And it’s almost official.
That was the other big change we made as a family.
James and Tate asked me to officially,legally, become his dad, and instead of responding in any appropriate way, I loaded them both up in my truck and drove down to the courthouse to figure out how the fuck to do it. So now, James is well on his way to becoming a MacAllister, and in a few short weeks, I’m hoping to ask his mama to do the same.
Gotta get through my little buddy’s fifth birthday party first because I donotwant to steal his thunder.
