Page 194 of Secondhand Smoke

The minister had pronounced them hours ago, but it wouldn’t feel wholly real until…

He touched her, briefly, where she was sopping wet, and then his cock pressed inside, plunging deep, his hips meeting hers.

She loved watching: his strong, gleaming, tattooed frame thrusting between her thighs, every imperfect inch of him hers. But she closed her eyes and turned her face into his neck. Breathed the salt on his skin and dug her fingers into his back, memorizing every sensation, relishing the physical power of him.

After, they lay tangled on the cheap sheets, too hot, but refusing to separate by so much as an inch.

“Congratulations on your wedding,” she teased, skimming a fingertip down his nose. He had his father’s nose; a strong, masculine nose.

“Congrats to you, Mrs. Teague.” He tangled his fingers in her hair.

As their heartbeats slowed to more regular thumps, sounds from the motel intruded. A loud engine in the parking lot. Rattle of the Coke machine on the landing outside their room. Voices from below.

Tomorrow, they were headed into the mountains, to a secluded cabin Hound had offered them the use of for a few days. They couldn’t afford the beaches of Key West or Mexico, but Sam didn’t want them. A long weekend in the woods, by the firelight, would be heaven. And still…there was something about tonight, about this first joining as husband and wife in this crappy motel, that touched her deeply.

“Thank you,” she said. “This is wonderful.”

He snorted. “No it’s not.”

“Yes it is,” she insisted, snuggling even closer to him.

His arm tightened around her waist. “I’m sorry I couldn’t take you somewhere fancy.”

“Aidan, don’t…”

“I’m probably gonna have to say that a lot.”

She laid a hand alongside his cheek and turned his face so they were eye-to-eye. “Aidan,” she repeated, more firmly this time. “Stop doing that. Stop belittling yourself and the things you give me.”

His lips twitched. “No more ‘sorrys’?”

“Only if you do something really stupid.” She felt her own smile threaten.

“Okay, but fair warning, I’m gonna have to say ‘sorry’ a lot.”

She laughed. “Oh, you’re awful.”

“Sorry.”

She laughed harder and he cut her off with a kiss.

April

Forty-Four

His ass had long since gone numb in the hard plastic chair where they’d been sitting for what felt like hours now. Aidan jiggled his foot up and down, and his wallet chain rattled against the edge of the chair.

Sam put her hand on his knee and gave a gentle squeeze.It’s alright, her grip said.It’s going to be fine. She’d said so with words all throughout the last week. And tonight, before they’d left for the hospital. He didn’t believe her for a second, but her insistence was keeping him whole, when his mind wanted to scatter to bits.

On the other side of the waiting room, the Sinclair family attorney sat with arms and legs crossed, dark head resting back against the wall, bored. Aidan glanced away from him, toward the clock again. They’d arrived several hours into the birthing process, and had been here for two. How much longer would it take? Would things go smoothly? Would there be complications?

They’d seen little of Tonya in the months since the wedding, but Sam had opened up an email correspondence with her, and Tonya had shared updates, sonograms and 3D photos as the baby developed.

More often than he would have thought, Aidan found himself stealing glances of Sam’s flat stomach, wishing like hell that she was the one carrying his baby, nurturing and growing his little girl with her body. An impossible wish, but one that made him ache, left his teeth clenched at night, after Sam fell asleep, and he was the only one awake in their cramped bed.

“It doesn’t seem real,” he murmured, “that this is actually happening.”

Sam chuckled softly. “We have a whole apartment full of baby stuff. That doesn’t seem real?”

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