Page 88 of Sweet Temptation
“Have fun with that, handsome. Us girls are going to go set up a bubble bath.”
“It’s official. I don’t have the energy for kids.” I drop down on Callen and Caitlin’s couch two hours later, the floor completely covered in toys and absolutely no energy left to clean any of them up. Well, I find enough energy to look at my hot-as-hell boyfriend with a sleeping two-year-old on his bare chest and reconsider my statement.
Maybe a really good nanny would help.
Lucky doesn’t move a muscle. He stays frozen in place for fear the slightest movement will wake the sleeping, teething terrorist and the entire street will hear Joe’s screams. Anastasia looks just like Caitlin, but Joe is all Callen, just with darker hair.
He might just be the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen, and him lying on Lucky’s chest makes my ovaries wish it was easier to conceive.
“You look good with a baby on your chest, thirty-three.” I scoot closer to them and tug my knees up under myself so I’m sitting a little higher and can comfortably gawk at all the hotness before me.
And there’s a whole lot of hotness.
“I always look good,dolcezza.” Both dimples pop impossibly deep in his cheeks, and yup, there go the ovaries again. Lucky might not know it, but he’s getting the mother of all blowjobs tonight just for fun. “Have you ever thought about kids, Lex?”
“I have.” I gently run the tips of my fingers up and down Joe’s pale blue pajama-covered back. “But, no shock, having kids will be complicated for me. I probably can’t have them myself. And if someone was crazy enough to want kids with me, knowing that they’d eventually be a single parent, they’d have to get tested before we could even try, to see if they were a carrier of the CF gene.”
Hello, baggage dump.
Here I am, waiting to drop it all in your lap at once.
“There’s always adoption and surrogacy. I mean, they both turned out pretty damn well for your parents.” He tilts his handsome face to smile at me, and my heart speeds up in my chest, knowing what I’m about to say next will crush him, but having to say it anyway.
“And what about when I die, Lucky?”
“Lex—” He manages so much with those three letters.
I love you.
Don’t leave me.
I want a life with you.
But right now, none of them matter. Not if he wants to talk about a future. Sugarcoating any of this isn’t fair. Not to him or to me or to the hypothetical kids he wants to consider. It’s one of the few things I picked up from one of the therapists I saw as a kid.
“Nope. If you want to talk aboutthis, you have to think aboutthat.” I ignore the heartache and devastation that’s staring back at me and keep it clinical, because that’s the only way I know how to have conversations like this. “I will eventually leave my kids and their father.”
“But you could be eighty when that happens, Lexie.”
I softly take his face in my hands, careful not to touch Joe. “Or I could be thirty, Lucky.”
“I refuse to accept that. We haven’t been given this chance for it to end that soon. This isn’t any different from accepting that there’s a way for us to be happy, Lex. Every day. Every single day. We make them all count. One play at a time. One inch at a time. One game at a time.”
“Is that from a movie?” I ask and press a quick kiss to his lips.
“Worse. Your uncle. It’s one of Declan’s favorite things to say in his pregame speeches. But it doesn’t make it any less true. One day at a time, Lex. That’s all any of us can do. That’s all anyof us are promised. And even one day with you is better than a lifetime without you.”
This man... He’ll never know all the ways he’s healed my soul.
Lucky
“You couldn’t have gotten anyone else to go with you?”
“Shut the fuck up and come inside. Dad’s guy is waiting for me,” I groan as Rome and I walk into the jeweler Dad has used for years for all of Mom’s jewelry. “I needed someone who would be honest, and Maddox is still out of the damn country.”
“Then you better be happy Rome called me. I don’t know what in the world you were thinking, asking him to help you pick out an engagement ring,” Caitlin chastises me as I stare at Rome.
“What the fuck, asshole? I asked you to come because you can keep a fucking secret.” I’m ready to kill my brother.
