My pager went off, and I looked at it over on the table, then back to Nikki.
“Dammit!” She cried when I walked to it.
Wincing, I looked at the readout and sighed.
“I’m sure the rest of the ladies will be able to come help you. Just remember not to run the water in the main bathroom,” I ordered as I started walking to our bedroom.
Nikki followed me, moments later, with Clayton on her hip and a hardness to her eyes.
“What are we supposed to do when we need to wash our hands?” She asked.
I raised a brow at her.
“Wash them in the kitchen. Put a bottle of the eighteen million bottles of antibacterial shit you have lying around every surface of the house. I don’t fuckin’ know,” I said, shoving my foot into my boot.
She sighed.
“You better be here by eight or I’ll kick your ass,” she growled in mock anger.
I knew she wasn’t mad.
She knew what she was getting into when she married me.
She knew that the SWAT team was a huge part of my life.
And she accepted it…and me.
“I love you, baby,” I said, kissing her softly on the cheek.
She smiled. “I love you, too.”
With a final kiss on Clay’s head, I rushed out of the house, only to come to a stop when my father and mother pulled up with Carolina.
“Hey,” I called, veering around their car to my truck.
They all waved, and Carolina’s baby blue eyes followed me.
“Daddy, where are you going? I wanted to show you my new cat!” Carolina held up a stuffed cat with a huge, fluffy tail.
It was in a box that distinctly marked it as a Build-A-Bear.
I narrowed my eyes at my parents. “Nikki’s going to kill you.”
They grinned unrepentantly.
Rolling my eyes, I blew a kiss to my little girl and said, “Daddy has to go to work.”
She pouted, but blew me a kiss nonetheless.
Just like her momma, she knew when daddy had to leave to ‘go save lives.’
“Take care of my girls, pop,” I ordered my father.
He winked and helped my mother out of the car.
“Will do, son, see you tonight.”
I made it to the station twenty minutes later, and was just in time to see Luke and Bennett walking from their trucks.
I caught up to them at the door to the station.
“What do we have?” I asked them.
“A multi-city wide fuck up, that’s what.”
Wonderful.***Nikki
“Momma, I got a cat!” Caro called the minute she made it through the front door.
I smiled and handed Clay off to Elizabeth and caught Carolina just as she barreled into my legs.
I smiled and picked her up, looking at her new cat.
“Oh, yay,” I said, looking up into her crystal clear blue eyes. Every time I saw them up close my heart clutched.
We’d had Caro’s cataracts removed from her eyes when she was exactly one month of age, and it’d been the most terrifying experience of my life.
She’d gone through the surgery remarkably well, but the sheer horror of having to watch my baby be wheeled away from me was torture.
Now, though, she was healthy and happy.
And those eyes that looked exactly like Michael’s sure had a way of making my heart melt.
Each and every time.
“Yeah, Grammy and Poppop spent a hundred dollars on her. They said I better like her. And treat her well, because that was the last time they took me there,” Caro continued.
I smiled and winked at ‘Poppop.’
They were such suckers.
I’d known, of course, the minute they’d said that they were taking Caro to the Boardwalk, that they were in for a rude awakening.
Caro was my child.
She could shop until she dropped, and did so daily.
She could talk just about anyone into anything, which was why her room was filled with all kinds of toys, clothes, and shit she didn’t need.
“Hey! Let go of my kitty!” Caro screamed when Clay latched onto the kitty and wouldn’t let go.
“Caro,” I said sternly. “Clay is just a baby. You can’t yank stuff out of his hands like that. You could hurt him.”
Caro stuck out her tongue at her brother, who was all of eight months old so the effect was lost on him, and crossed her arms.
I smiled and looked down at my hands.
She looked so much like Michael when she did that that I could barely stand it.
“If y’all wouldn’t mind watching them, I have to go to Lowe’s…again…and get a coupling for the plumbing underneath the house. And pick up the cake,” I said, trying valiantly not to blush and failing miserably.
“Okay, dear. Don’t forget to pick up that prescription you made me call in,” Manuelo said.
The blood in my veins froze.
Motherfucker!
Shit!
Fuck!
“Okay,” I said shakily, walking to the front table and clutching my keys in a tight fist.
I was out to the car when I managed to quietly pull out my phone, open the door to my Tahoe, and slide inside.
When I started the truck and started to back out of the driveway, I hit the call button and immediately called Michael.
He didn’t answer, of course.
I didn’t expect him to.
But I wanted his voicemail anyway.
This is Michael, leave a message.
“Michael,” I said quietly. “If you managed to knock me up again today, I’m going to fucking kill you,” I growled, then slammed the phone button on my steering wheel.
Ineffective but it made me feel better, nonetheless.
I’d run out of birth control pills two weeks ago, and had completely forgotten until just yesterday that I’d not been taking them.
Michael and I lived busy lives.
We both had some really odd hours, so on the off chance that we had been able to find time to do the deed, in the past two weeks, I’d forced Michael to use a condom.
Something he absolutely loathed doing.
Today, though, I’d completely forgotten.
And I knew, like I’d known with Clayton, that he’d just knocked me up.
There was something about Michael and his damn bad intentions that made me lose my mind. Forget that I didn’t want to be pregnant.
But there Michael was with that ‘magic dick’ as my lovely friends liked to call it, and all my inhibitions flew out the window.