“I don’t want to wait to tell you, so maybe this is the year we take our power back and say fuck the bitch who ruined this day for us.”
“I’m all for that, if you are,” he agreed.
“Okay then.” I pulled his hands over to my belly and held them there. “I’m pregnant.”
Ridge’s eyes grew wide, and he sat there shocked with his jaw practically scraping his chest it had dropped so far. “You’re serious?”
I pulled the pregnancy test I took that morning out of my back pocket and showed it to him. “I wasn’t thinking about what day it was earlier when I checked. I saw the unused tampons in the cabinet and started to count back yesterday. I got the test while I was out, but they always say it’s best to do them with morning pee, especially if it’s early days still. So, I waited, and it just happened to be your birthday.”
“You’re rambling,” Ridge informed me as he leaned forward and kissed my lips. “Also, you peed on that, so I think it’s safe to say we can dispose of it now.” He tipped his chin down to the stick in my hand.
“I need to get it confirmed by a doctor, but I can already tell,” I said and ignored his nonchalance.
“Sweets,” my love said as he took the test from my hand, so I would stop nervously fidgeting with it. “I am happier than I can even express right now and trying to control myself because I know you’re nervous about what this announcement means coming on our former special day.” He set the test down on the coffee table and then pulled me into his lap. “Do you think we can discuss the next step, and work toward making us official again, or should we wait for tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, for sure. I think we just need to celebrate now.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he agreed.”
Ridge did not propose to me the following day as expected, nor when we got the pregnancy confirmation from Dr. Carson, who wasn’t surprised in the least to see us.
It was almost a month after my former husband’s birthday, on a random Tuesday in October when Ridge took a day off work to spend with me and Liam. We had a doctor’s appointment to go to, and when we were done, he took us out to dinner.
“What’s the special occasion?” I asked as we were seated.
“Well, Violet, there’s absolutely nothing special about today. It’s just another Tuesday in a long list of Tuesdays throughout the year. It holds absolutely no significance whatsoever,” Ridge paused for a moment and smiled as he continued, “except that it's the day I'm asking you to be my wife." The “again” was implied by the way he looked at me as he pulled a ring out of his pocket and took my hand in his. He placed it on my finger before I even agreed to marry him. “It’s a new ring for our new start. I still have the old ones, and when you’re ready, you can decide what you want to do with them.”
“Don’t you need to wait for my answer?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“And why not?”
“I love you and you love me. We have one son together and another baby on the way. The only thing we don’t have is the legal paperwork tying us together, and I don’t think you’ll say no to me on a random Tuesday.”
I giggled. “Ridge Westover, I agree to marry you,” I said anyway.
“I know, sweet flower. You have been mine since the day we met. We’re just going to let the world know all over again. Only this time, we’re going to do it better.”
“That sounds perfect.”
He shrugged and grinned down at my finger. “It’s just the beginning of the rest of our lives together.”
I knew what he was doing. Our seemingly perfect marriage had crumbled once before. That word, “perfect” was almost as taboo as the day of his birth had become. This time around, we were going to strive for something less and more all at once. We were going to live our lives as a long string of typical days where we worked toward happiness as often as possible. They would be nothing special and everything all at once.
Epilogue
Violet
Two Years Later
Ridge’s birthday had come around again. We had been married, the second time, for twenty-one months. December 14th was our new anniversary day. We hadn’t done anything last year to celebrate his birthday. It was a day like any other where we spent time being parents when Ridge wasn’t trying to run his multibillion-dollar empire. Even that had changed a bit. He had people in place to handle most of the day-to-day stuff. He still jumped in on pet projects, but for the most part, the company ran itself whether he was there or not. So, we had much more family time than we dared to dream about.
My brother was playing college ball in his sophomore year at a state school. He would never play in the pros thanks to that accident and the ongoing issues he had with his neck, but he seemed okay with it. The attention he got from women on campus apparently made up for everything.
My father was still in town despite divorcing my mother last year. The truth finally came out about why she and her sister had been estranged all those years. My mother had an affair with her sister’s fiancé. Aunt Janice found out and the only reason she didn’t tell Dad was because she didn’t want to hurt Drake and me. Since neither of us were in the house any longer and Mom stirred up a hornet’s nest by going to see her two years ago, the cat - as they say - was out of the bag.
Mom moved to Florida, and I only spoke to her on major holidays. She was still my mother and I loved her. Between the cheating and the advice she passed to Ridge while she insinuated they were my own words, I lost all respect for her. I wouldn’t invite her into our lives to disrupt things any longer.
