“Tell me,” I whispered.
“If anything happens to me, and I don’t get to see them grow… get my baby the hell out of Babylon for me. Don’t letthem live a life like mine.”
Biting my lip, I forced the sob back in my throat. This baby—if he or she was in there—meant that I wouldn’t be able to follow him anywhere anymore. Not the way I’d always intended to anyway. There would be another life to think about. One more valuable than each of ours.
Closing my eyes for a second, I blew all the breath from my lungs out before opening them again and locking my gaze with his.
“I promise.” Even this, I would give him.
His shoulders relaxed, his body somehow moving closer as he scanned mine one more time and nodded softly. His thoughts had drifted, as though he was agreeing with something inside his own mind that only he could hear.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “And I’ll do my best to make sure I stick around.”
“You better.” I touched his bottom lip with my thumb and stroked gently. “I don’t want to do this without you.”
I didn’t mean just the baby or the pregnancy. I meant everything. Living. Breathing. Hurting. My life had really only started the day I met him.
A soft smile graced his lips. “You know what’s funny? I always thought I’d be okay with dying young. I expected it most of the time. In prison, I longed for it. I had nothing to keep me from sacrificing my life for the sake of the club… not until you. And now I have these crazy visions of us sitting out there on the porch, watching the world go by, our hair gray, our children old, all our mistakes behind us and our good times and memories outweighing the bad. I’ve never wanted to grow old like I do now,” he whispered, leaning closer until his lips were only an inch away from mine. “So, don’t you worry, darlin’. I’ll cling onto life with dirty, oil-filled fingers for you—you and all the lives we can create together.”
I closed the distance between us, my lips attacking his likethe kiss was the only thing that would keep me alive. It didn’t escape me that I was the only person who would ever hear anything close to words like this coming from this formidable man’s mouth, and I cherished every last syllable. If I weren’t pregnant, if for some reason my intuition was wrong and I’d lost my mind, I knew that it was what I wanted. I could see this future between us now, and I was craving that. Suddenly, Drew as a father was a huge turn on.
“I wanna grow old and gray with you, too.”
“Let’s make it happen. You and me.”
