“True.” Abby kissed the top of her son’s head and surrendered the sleeping child to his dad, who settled him at the foot of Abby’s bed.
“Want me to rub your back?”
“Oh, would you?”
“Of course. Whatever my baby mama needs, I’m here for it.”
He helped her to turn onto her side, which was easier said than done, and got behind her to rub her lower back.
“That feels so good.” Her entire midsection felt tight with a rolling tension that seemed to be worsening by the minute, along with a pervasive pressure that could no longer be ignored. “Adam…”
“Yeah, hon?”
“Um, I think I might be in labor.”
Chapter 6
As things began to wind down at the Beachcomber and the crowd thinned to the usual suspects, Sierra was thinking about heading home but didn’t feel right about leaving Morgan there by himself. Duke and McKenzie had left to get Jax home to bed, and Jace was visiting with customers at the other end of the bar.
Morgan had been nursing a third beer for more than an hour and had eaten the chowder and burger Jace had brought him.
“On the house,” Jace had said again.
Sierra had noticed tears in Morgan’s eyes after Jace said that and at several times during the outpouring of support from everyone who’d come by to see him.
Her heart ached for him, which was weird since she barely knew the man. But she understood the pain of losing someone irreplaceable and how the hard part had only just begun.
“So, um, what’re you doing tomorrow?”
“Opening the gym and going through the stuff in Billy’s office. I swear he lived there more than he did in his place upstairs.”
“You’ve been staying there? At his place?”
“Yeah. I figured, why pay for something when that’s available?”
“Is it hard to be there?”
“It’s not terrible. I’d only been there a couple of times, so it’s not full of memories.”
“Oh, well, that’s good, I guess.”
“I feel him more at the gym than I do there. The gym was his real home.”
“Definitely. He was in his element.”
“I enjoyed watching him do his thing there. He was like the mayor of Gansett, greeting everyone with an inside joke or a comment that made them laugh.”
“He used to call me Touchy because I’m a massage therapist. At first, I thought he meant that I was prickly, which I can be at times, but he just laughed and made a massaging motion with his hands to let me know that’s where the name came from.”
“That sounds like him. Our grandfather had nicknames for everyone. Billy got that from him.”
“What did he call you guys?”
“Billy Bluster and Morgan the Menace.”
“Menace, huh?”
“I was always getting into stuff when I was really little, so he gave me that name, and it stuck. Billy called me Menace, and I called him Bluster. It’s weird to think how those names kind of end with me. No one else in the world knows about them now.”
