“Being happy.”
My throat tightened and I felt my eyes fill with tears. “Don’t you dare make me cry,” my voice was hoarse.
“We deserve it, V.”
I gave him a short nod and squeezed his hand back. “We’ve found our family now,” I whispered. When we were little, we used to whisper late at night about how we would find our family, ourrealfamily. One that loved us and looked after us. One that cared if we were happy. Heath’s eyes filled with tears at that as he nodded too.
“One we made for ourselves,” he whispered back.
* * *
Harryand I sank into the soft leather side by side then turned to each other with huge smiles on our faces. The silence of the library was beautiful after the hectic noise of the rest of the day. He kissed me softly, one hand in mine, the other resting on my stomach. I was huge. I practically had my own postcode. My midwife had looked me up and down last week and said, “Gosh you are retaining a lot of water, aren’t you dear? We’d better dip your urine today and check for pre-eclampsia.”
The fact that my likeness to a beached whale counted as a clinical sign was not encouraging when I had to wear a wedding dress in the imminent future. The urine dip was negative, but I remained puffy and huge. Harry didn’t care. He told me I was the most beautiful pregnant woman on the face of the earth, and punched Heath in the arm at the rehearsal when he called me “Big V” and asked me to “waddle up the aisle with him”.
“My shoes are killing me,” I whined, toeing the offending items off. Much to Harry’s annoyance I had refused to wear flats for the ceremony. He’d reluctantly agreed but made me promise to hold onto his arm at all times, other than when Heath was walking me down the aisle.
“I told you,” he grumbled, frowning at the white spike heels now lying on the floor. When he looked at my feet and ankles a slightly alarmed expression crossed his face. “Er… darling, maybe you should put your feet up on the sofa.” He shuffled us around so that he was sitting at the far end, and I was lying on my side with my feet up across the leather, snuggled into his side.
“My ankles are huge, aren’t they?” I said in despair. “They’re like a pair of tree trunks.”
He cleared his throat. “No, I didn’t meanthat.Your ankles look perfect, love. But… er, maybe we should check your urine again.”
I punched him in the ribs, and he held both his hands up in surrender with a smile on his face. “Sorry! Sorry, I just think a bit of a check-up is a good idea. You can’t be too careful and…”
“I donotneed any more check-ups, Harry!” Ever since Harry had heard the wordshigh-risk pregnancyandgeriatric mother(I was forty for God’s sake!) he had gone a little overboard with my antenatal care. Even today he’d managed to wrangle an obstetric consultant to come along to the wedding, which was absolutely ridiculous. He’d claimed the chap was an “old university mate”, which was a complete lie as confirmed by Toby and Naomi, neither of whom had ever laid eyes on him before.
Unfortunately, Harry had Heath’s support in this particular battle, seeing as Yaz was also heavily pregnant and nearing her due date. The difference was that Yaz seemed to be sailing through pregnancy with very little outward change in appearance, as if someone had just stuffed a football up her surf t-shirt. Much to Heath’s horror she’d continued most of her water sports teaching until a few weeks ago. He was almost as overprotective as Harry. If those two had their way, we would be transported back to the 1950s where the little women stayed safely at home whilst the menfolk went out into the big, bad world. Neither Yaz nor I had any intention of staying at home.
Harry had even stormed onto a building site last week after he found out that I was spending the day there to sort out the next stage of construction and decide how it would fit in with the plans Max and I had made. We’d won another big landmark building in London, and I couldn’t trust Max to negotiate with the site manager – he wasn’t to be trusted since the ‘complete bellend’incident, which had left us without any construction team on site in our last project for over a month. “Don’t irritate me, hedgehog. This is the most relaxed I’ve been all day.”
Harry chuckled and pulled me closer into his side, his hand going to rest on my oversize stomach. “They can all be a bit much, can’t they?” he said but I shook my head.
“No, no I’d never say that.”
“Verity, my mother stood over you whilst you ate last night like some sort of prison guard. I thought she was going to punch the waiter in the face when he couldn’t fully reassure you that all the cheese was made with pasteurised milk.”
I smiled against Harry’s chest. “She just wants to make sure I’m okay.”
“She’s a nightmare! And that nutcase sister-in-law of yours. As if anyone needs emergency reiki on the morning of their wedding.”
I chuckled. “Oh, so you heard about that?”
“Well, I quite wanted to know why they couldn’t manage to get my bride to the church on time. I was sweating up at the altar for a good fifteen minutes.”
“Yaz just wanted to make sure I was centred before the ceremony.”
“And the Hardcastles putting their two pennies in as well. Between Fern, Aubrey, Max, Mia, Teddy and my family I didn’t think I’d ever get you to myself.”
I smiled. The truth was that being fussed over by our families was never going to annoy me as much as it annoyed Harry. He’d never known the alternative. They cared about me. Cared enough to shout at waiters over blue cheese, to rub my feet as a matter of urgency, to make sure I ate. To me it was all wonderful.
“Well, you’ve got me to yourself now.” I leaned back to look up at his face. His hand came up to my jaw and he tilted my mouth to meet his in a soft kiss.
“I love you,” he whispered against my mouth.
“I love you too,” I whispered back.
“I belonged to you before, but it feels good to make it official.”
