“Grizzley.”
“It takes two people Ivy.”
“You were strategic about it.” She cut her eyes at him. “Don’t sit there and act like you wasn’t.”
He reached over and grabbed her hand and laced his fingers through hers without responding because there was nothing to say to that. She wasn’t wrong. He had wanted this. Had wanted it since the moment he watched Deuce hold Tre for the first time and felt something shift in his chest that he hadn’t been able to ignore since. He had just never been the type to announce what he was working toward before it was already done.
Ivy squeezed his hand even while she was still fussing and that told him everything.
She wasn’t upset. She was happy and scared and trying to dress it up as attitude because that was how she processed things and he knew her well enough now to let her have it.
The past five months had built something between them that neither one of them had words for yet but both of them felt every single day. The house had become a home in the way that only happened when two people stopped acting, and just lived. Ivy had her touch on everything, flowers on the island, candles at night, Goldie rotating between three different beds in three different rooms because nobody had the heart to make her commit to one.
Her businesses were running cleaner than ever. She had expanded the tax company to a fourth location in Arlington and the bail bonds side was holding two of the highest volume numbers she had ever seen. She had built that. All of it. And Griz made sure everybody around them knew it.
She had found her people too. Malani had pulled her in fast and hard the way Malani did with women she decided were worth her loyalty and Ivy had matched that energy from the jump. Thetwo of them talked every day and had lunch twice a week and Griz would come home sometimes to find both of them in his kitchen with food going and a conversation running that had clearly been in progress for hours.
Tye and Shanni had folded her in just as easily. She had a circle now. Real ones. Women who had been through enough to know the difference between somebody who was genuine and somebody who was performing it.
Even Raja. After the PetSmart parking lot situation had settled and enough time had passed, Ivy had called her directly and apologized like a woman who meant it and Raja had respected that enough to let it go all the way. They weren’t best friends but they were solid and that was more than enough. Ivy understood the dynamic now, understood what Raja meant to Griz and what Dank had meant to all of them and she moved accordingly. That meant something.
Business was running the way it was supposed to run on the men’s end too. Griz and Deuce had expanded into four more states in the last quarter and the operation was cleaner and more profitable than it had ever been. They had built something that worked because they had built it right, with the right people in the right positions and enough trust between them that neither one had to micromanage the other. Deuce was fully in his position now, operating like the man he had always been capable of being, and Griz ran beside him the way a right hand was supposed to run.
Grim and Savage had stayed in their lane. Both of them. When word got to them about the baby, something shifted. Grim had called, which was not something Griz had been expecting, and kept it short the way both of them kept things short, but what he said was real. He was going to get himself together as a man.
He wanted to be in the baby life and be a good uncle. He understood that came with conditions and he was prepared to meet them. Savage had texted a paragraph that was the most words Griz had ever seen him put together voluntarily and somewhere in the middle of it said he was done with the life and meant it this time. He asked his brother to help him get back into school, or find a trade because he wanted to be more than what their parents trained them be.
Savage also had a baby on the way. His woman was pregnant too. They were going to figure it out together.
Griz hadn’t fully exhaled on either one of them yet. That wasn’t the kind of thing you did overnight. But he had opened a door and left it open and they hadn’t done anything to make him regret it yet.
He had gotten back close with Ivy’s brothers the way men got close when they respected each other’s code without having to explain it. They had childhood history and they respected him as the man who loved their sister.
Ivy’s grandmother’s bills got paid every month without discussion. Griz had set it up quietly and when Ivy found out she had looked at him for a long moment and not said anything and that silence was one of the best things she had ever given him.
He had taken Ivy to visit Miss Erma after the first month of them being official. She wanted to know where he was going, so he showed her. He hadn’t planned to initially but Ivy had been in the car one afternoon and he found himself turning toward the nursing home before he had fully decided to and it was too late to turn around.
Miss Erma had taken one look at Ivy and grabbed her hand and told her she was beautiful and asked Griz why it had taken himso long to bring her. Ivy had laughed and looked at him sideways and he had looked back at Miss Erma and she had looked back at him with those clear sharp eyes that she got sometimes and he had understood without either of them saying a word that the secret was going to stay exactly where it was.
Ivy had no idea how that woman had become his grandmother.
He couldn’t tell her.
And Miss Erma wasn’t going to say anything. Well, maybe she wouldn’t. You never know with her.
Some things were just carried quietly and loved out loud and that was enough.
The gender reveal for Ivy was coming in three weeks and Griz had been coordinating with Malani on the details for the last two weeks without Ivy knowing. He had the ring. Had picked it out the same week she told him she thought she might be pregnant, before it was even confirmed, because he already knew what he was going to do and waiting on confirmation was just logistics. It was a statement piece. Not excessive, not showy, just exactly right the way everything he picked for her was exactly right because he paid attention in a way that most people didn’t know how to do.
He was going to get down on one knee in front of everybody they loved and ask her in front of all of it. He had told himself for the rest of his life he wasn’t getting on his knees for anything but he had also told himself a lot of things before Ivy walked back into his life. The truth was, he was willing and ready to do whatever it would take to keep her happy. This was his first love, hell his only love if we’re being honest.
He thought sometimes, in the quiet moments, about how close he had come to none of this. What if he had allowed Cherish to turn his heart cold? The warehouse. His brothers. Countless years of running from a house that had broken all three of them in different ways. He thought about what would have happened if he had let all of that stop him from walking into that bar on the right night.
If he had gone home instead.
He didn’t regret anything. Not one thing. Because every piece of it had been the path that had brought him here, to this car, to this woman, to this morning and this ultrasound photo on the center console. This life that was bigger and realer than anything he had ever felt, and he was beyond happy with it.
He was already calling the baby a boy. He had been saying that since the moment the test came back positive. Ivy told him he needed to prepare himself for a daughter and he told her a daughter was fine too as long as she looked like her mother. Ivy had rolled her eyes and laughed and he had filed that laugh somewhere permanent. He wanted to spend the rest of his life, making her happy. The feeling of love that he had for Ivy used to be too much for him, and he often tried to ignore it or push it away. Now he lived in it. He was loud about it.
