Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 109843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
He considered this for a moment before standing to get his phone from his pocket, tapping the screen, and putting it to his ear.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
He held his finger up to shush me.
I leaned back in my chair, eyebrows raised. “Did you just fucking shush me?”
Kip smirked at me. “Rowan, brother, need to get a team out to my place tomorrow. We’ve got company coming, and we need a guest addition on the cottage.”
A pause.
“Yep, sounds good.”
He put the phone back in his pocket.
I gaped at Kip. “What was that?”
“We’re getting a guest room,” he said by way of explanation.
I stared at him. He was not joking. “We’re building an addition onto the house because my mother is coming?” I clarified.
“Well, my mother is going to be coming, too, and although she’s happy staying with Calliope for now, we can’t be sure Calliope will be here much longer. So, it’s best to have somewhere for them to stay when they’re here. And you love this place, you don’t want to leave anytime soon. Neither do I. So, we need to expand.”
I blinked.
Kip knew I loved this place. Knew I wouldn’t want to leave. So he was building a guest room. And he wasn’t saying he was going to do it and fucking around for a year. No, the second he realized we needed it, he set things in motion.
“I love you,” I blurted.
He grinned. “I know.”
I waited.
He didn’t say anything else.
“You know?” I repeated. “You fucking know?” I was yelling now. “That’s all you’re going to say to me telling you I love you?”
Kip chuckled in the face of my fury.
Chuckled.
Then he pulled me up from the chair and into his arms.
“No, that’s not all I’m going to say,” he murmured, holding me close. Or as close as he could with the belly. “But I wanted to get you a little riled up before I show you how much those words mean to me.”
I opened my mouth to yell at him some more. Maybe.
But he kissed me instead.
Then he took me into our bedroom and showed me how much those words meant to him.
twenty-three
Emmet
kip
The second the name flashed on my phone, my heart dropped to my fucking boots. Gus Fender was an old Army buddy who was a badass in his day and now was an even bigger badass. I didn’t know a whole lot about what he did, but I did know he had some high security clearance, high enough to get me information on Fiona’s husband in Australia with barely any information.
Before I called him looking for that information, we hadn’t spoken in five years. He’d called when he found out about Gabbie and Evelyn, expressed his condolences, but we weren’t fucking chicks, so we didn’t ‘check in’ over the years. Plus, checking in with a guy who lost his entire family in one fell swoop wasn’t exactly going to be enlightening through the years. Chances were, he was probably still doing shit.
And I couldn’t exactly ask Gus a whole bunch of questions since the fucker’s entire life was redacted.
So yeah, I called when I needed strings pulled, and him calling back would only mean one thing.
Bad news.
“Guessing you’re not calling to chat,” I said, already walking to my truck.
“You asked me to pull some strings and get an alert if we had anyone by the name Emmet Landon entering the borders from Australia,” he said by way of greeting.
I walked faster.
Fiona was no longer working at the bakery, much to her disdain. We’d had many arguments about her working these past few weeks. She’d won them up until a few days ago.
Then Nora and Tina had joined in the fray.
They were a little harder to fight off than me.
That and she was getting tired. She was also getting sore and uncomfortable, and even though she was stubborn as all fuck, she knew it was time for her to take off.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t at the bakery almost every day. But it did mean she wasn’t there quite so early, and she wasn’t on her feet all fucking day running around after other people.
She was also doing something I think they called ‘nesting.’ Which I figured out just meant a bunch of packages arriving at the house and me putting the various items together. Then she would spend an hour deciding where to put things only to change her mind ten minutes later.
The nursery was done. In my eyes, at least. There was a crib, a changing table, a rocking chair by the window. Rugs, clothes neatly put away in the closet. Never mind that the baby would be sleeping in the bassinet in our room for the first months of her life anyway. But you couldn’t tell Fiona that.
Her Green Card had come and made it clear what I’d known for fucking months—this marriage had nothing to do with a visa and everything to do with the fact that I couldn’t live without her. That she was my wife in every single way, and she would be my wife until the day I fucking died. And I would be fucking dying first.