I wouldn’t fuck this up. Not when it was so important.
“Congratulations, daddy,” I whispered back, burying my face in his chest.
He rubbed my back, his hand circling like a metronome. Back and forth, back and forth. The gentle motion comforted me and excited me and made me itch to get out of these damn wedding clothes into something more comfortable.
Being naked sounded good, with the added weight of Thor’s long, naked body on top of me.
Then my gaze drifted over his beefy shoulder to the sink. “You’re going to throw those out, right?”
“What?”
“The tests.”
“Of course not. They’re our baby’s first hello.”
I snorted. “I peed on them. Not quite sure you’re getting that.”
“I’ll sterilize them later and put them away in a box for the baby.” He scratched his jaw. “Make that a box about the baby. He probably won’t want his mom’s pee sticks.”
“He?”
“Luna,” he reminded me as I took a few deep breaths at the fact now I was someone’s mom.
Me, the girl who’d never had one myself. I could be that for a baby
.
I glanced down at my flat belly and tentatively pressed my palm there. Lucky cupped his hand over mine as our eyes met. God, the timing was all wrong and it shouldn’t have been perfect but it just was.
Somehow everything was perfect.
Twenty-Four
“You know you don’t have to keep driving me places, right?”
“I know.” I chucked my phone on the dash as I turned onto her road. I knew it as well as my own at this point. Better, even. Since the wedding, we’d been back to the sleepovers and making plans for a baby.
Christ, it was still was insane to think that, let alone say it out loud.
“I can—”
“Ruby, I’m about to be in your driveway. Quit trying to do everything alone. I’ll see you in a minute.” I reached for the phone and hung up on her. I loved her to distraction, but her independent streak threatened to send me to the bottle some days.
We’d managed to get the whereabouts of Cohen from Rhett before he escaped Happy Acres. The Burns family was a protective lot, but he’d seemed to finally get that there was something more than grief going on.
And I wasn’t letting her go deal with that alone.
Road trip to her dad’s place to the rescue. God help me.
I glanced at the dog bed behind me. Butch knew we were close to her second favorite human. She scrabbled up and over the seat to my shoulder. Her tail was wagging madly, her little body vibrating with glee. She sniffed the top of the truck and batted at the half dozen lights I’d crisscrossed on the roof inside.
Our first Christmas wasn’t going to happen without some cheer, dammit. Even if I had to go face the reality of just how much pain Ruby had been dragging around with her for the last few years.
When I arrived, she was standing at the edge of the beach. Her red hair was in her typical ponytail, but this time, she’d shoved it through a gray hat with a makeshift hole for such things. She wore my favorite jeans and those stupid boots she loved. Instead of a jacket, she had on an oversized sweatshirt.
She turned with a mug between her gloved fingers.
Snow still covered every surface, but it had been plowed aside by the guys on my crew. The snowbanks were as tall as the dumpster shrouded in a tarp. We’d given the guys the rest of the week off for Christmas since there wasn’t any reason to rush anymore.