It feltnormal.
“Fucking unbelievable,” he said, touching my lips again. “I’ll be home for supper. Start ordering what we need from Amazon. I don’t have anything baby-proofed in this house, and if that lad falls or bonks his head, I’ll have hell to pay.”
I grinned. “You’ll never let him fall.”
Liam crossed himself. “Don’t jinx it now!”
I laughed, but then added more seriously, “I’ll place an order, but I don’t know what we need.”
“Well,” said Liam, opening the dining room door, “it’s a good thing there’s no limit on that credit card I gave you. Buy one of everything, and what we don’t end up using, we’ll keep in the packages and donate to a family in need.”
With that plan firmly in place, Liam went to the garage, and I was left standing there, pinching myself to see if it was real.
It was.
Chapter 49 – Liam
Amazon boxes covered the kitchen island.
I knew they delivered fast, but I was honestly surprised by the sheer number and volume of items my wife had purchased in the space of a few hours. A smile tugged at my lips as I walked across the kitchen.
This…this was what had been missing all these weeks married to Gabriella.
Her happiness.
Her reason to smile was here. Not that polished or polite grin, but a true smile. And I’d earned it.
Fucking finally.
Granted, there was a moment of pure, unadulterated fear in her eyes earlier today. That look was going to haunt me. She saw me as a threat, as the beast who would devour her happiness and keep her from her child. But the moment I proved that wasn’t true, when I suggested the boy come home, I reunited the mother with her son.
And my little wife looked at me like I’d hung the moon in the sky.
Bottles were washed and drying next to the sink. I plucked one up, looking at it, unable to help myself. In the space of just a few hours, I went from a married man to a stepfather. With all the shite I was dealing with today, I didn’t have time to process what that meant.
I’d never planned to live long enough to be a married man, and that meant no brain space had been taken up with thoughts of having my own offspring. Then when I married Gabriella, it had touched the back of my mind, especially since we’d never discussed birth control. But our relationship was tumultuous at best, and I wanted to fix and settle that before we brought any other complications into it.
This whole time, I’d been so wrong.
She was never cheating on me.
But that still didn’t explain how the little boy came to be. All I had to do was look at the pair of warm whiskey eyes in the wee lad’s face to see that he was his mother’s son.
Tossing the plastic bottle in the air, I placed it back down on the drying rack that looked like green grass and set out to prowl through the house.
My little wife owed me a story.
I didn’t have to go far to find her. She was in the library, of course.
But in addition to more boxes stacked about, taking up every available seat except the one she was sitting in, was a brand-new rocking chair.
Gabriella’s head snapped up as I stepped into the doorway. A soft, shy smile played on her lips.
Fucking beautiful.
If I had known that was what it was going to take to make you smile, I would have stolen him weeks ago.
But I didn’t tell her that.
