Fuel the Fire (Calloway Sisters 3)

I freeze at the much larger declaration than I anticipated hearing. I’d think someone spiked everyone’s drinks, but no one has taken a sip yet.

Ryke looks to Daisy, and tears crest her eyes. She whispers in his ear, and he nods.

They both stand together.

If someone asked me what makes me—a volcanic, fiery blaze of hell—shed tears and cry as though I’m a pathetic two-minute rainfall, I’d say my sisters growing up, my husband in his rare vulnerability, my baby at random immeasurable moments, and the title screen of Titanic.

Somewhere between all of those, this singular part of time exists, and it hits me hard. With glasses raised in the air, with all of us unified around a decorated table, cake in the center—I accept a powerful, unbending realization as a warm, heartfelt truth.

All of our children will be raised without hatred. Bad blood will be washed away and feuds finally put aside. They’ll have the sharpest, sturdiest tools to fight enemies that will not be in their own homes but miles and miles away.

Our children will have the best chance at life because we’re standing together. Because we all have the capacity to love, no matter what form or shape it may come in. Because in the end, we each remain unbroken, so their lives can begin.

I inhale powerfully, and Connor wraps his arm around my shoulder.

Loren raises his glass higher. “To Rose and Connor, for helping us realize the importance of family and the difference a good friend can make.” It’s not often that other people tell us this—that we’ve impacted them. I can’t help but smile.

“To Rose and Connor,” everyone says in unison.

Connor captures my gaze with his deep, glimmering blues, and together, we drink to us.

[ 63 ]

CONNOR COBALT

“It was just a little fall, my gremlin.” Rose squats in five-inch heels and blows on Jane’s reddened palms. She tries to console our daughter who cries in Claude Monet’s garden, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited in France. The lush, floral scenery is hardly tainted, in my mind, by Jane’s tears. I watch as Rose wipes our daughter’s rosy cheek, and Jane sniffs, realizing her stumble on the pavement didn’t hurt as much as she thought it did.

Jane reaches out for Rose to pick her up, but then she whips her head, not noticing me towering above her. “Daddy!” she starts to cry again.

Rose rolls her eyes. “Your daddy is six-feet-and-four-inches of superiority, and his head is lost in the clouds.”

I bend down next to Rose. “On the contrary, darling, my head is in the stars.” Our daughter relaxes as soon as she sees me again.

Rose’s yellow-green eyes bore straight through me, and my pulse pounds. “It’s daylight.”

“It’s a meta—”

She covers my mouth with her palm, and my burgeoning grin peeks through her fingers. I know what a metaphor is, Richard, I read her expression. She huffs, eyes blazed and flitting across my features, chest rising and falling. How someone can be so alive by words—it makes me come alive with her.

Jane mumbles a string of noises and we both break our gaze. I brush a tear-streak from Jane’s cheek, and she sniffs again.

Rose asks me, “Do you think we’ll make it the whole day?” She fixes Jane’s white sun hat that fell off during her stumble.

“Maybe fifteen more minutes, and then she’ll probably have enough.” We’ve been traveling around northern France most of the afternoon. It’s June 22nd, so we plan to spend the rest of our anniversary at our hotel with Jane.

Rose lets go of Jane’s fingers and asks her, “Who do you want to carry you?”

Our daughter stares between us before reaching out for her mom.

“Good choice,” I tell Jane.

Rose’s lips begin to rise as she collects Jane in her arms, and we both stand together. I hear the snap snap of cameras, but I do my best to tune them out.

People stare. People take photographs, and our security team stands twenty feet behind us. I don’t mind the constant, unwavering gaze from onlookers, as long as we can have a day like this—no fear of harassment or of being enclosed by paparazzi.

I rest a hand on Rose’s lower back, and we leisurely walk towards the wooden bridge that oversees a lily pond. Purple wisteria blossoms drape and hang, roots twisting around the railing, and rich green plants crawl and canopy the bridge. It’s like stepping into Monet’s painting, experiencing a piece of art up close.

As we stop in the middle of the bridge, I spin Rose towards me, facing each other, our daughter between us. It’s quiet here, the serenity filling my head with desires and clearing all doubts.

“Stop staring at me like that,” she says, but she reflexively draws closer to me. I can feel her heart in her chest, beating against mine.

“It frightens you—what I’m going to say?” I question. She can’t read my mind, but I must wear my wants across my face. And I want her and I want Jane. And I want many more children.

“What are you going to say?” she asks outright.

“When I look deeply into your eyes, I see more than just three years of our marriage,” I profess. “I see ten, thirty, fifty, sixty years with you, and I see us returning to this place. I see us old and at the end of our lifelines, staring out at this water, on this bridge—as consumed by love as we’re tragically consumed now.”

Her hand grasps my bicep, half in threat, half to cover the fact that she’s breathless.

“I see our children,” I say. “Many more children, Rose.”

“There are rules,” she says pointedly. “We lost our game, and the media’s invasiveness…you said there are no alternate paths.” I haven’t been blind to her disappointment. I meet it daily when she thinks about growing our family together. I bottle my own in the face of hers, but the defeat intensifies, an untouched dream trembling to be held.

I’ve never broken a game.

I’ve found loopholes, but this has none.

It’s either we go against what we’ve planned or we live an unfulfilled life.

I’m not putting myself in any restraint. I’m tearing through every last one, even if it means taking a difficult plunge for both of us—one that has always felt like sliding down a mountainside with no traction and no way to climb back up. Even if it means that breaking the terms of what we set one time changes the way we play our games forever.

There has to be one exception. Always.

And this is it. “We can break our rules for our children,” I tell her. “We’ve been under the notion that having more children would be selfish, but look around us, Rose, look at her and tell me what part of this world is so unbearable that we shouldn’t give another child life?”

Rose watches Jane lean close to the purple wisteria, big blue eyes flooded with childlike wonder, and then our daughter points curiously at the fauna canopied above us. She babbles a string of noises that sounds like, what is this?

“It’s a dream taking flight, Jane,” I say the words to Rose, seizing her attention and gaze. She’s not convinced one-hundred percent that this is the best plan. “It’s selfish for us to live by a rule that affects another life.”

“The media though,” she says. “How has that changed at all?” The real test wasn’t our game that we constructed with the media. The real test was afterwards, how we handled the blowback with our daughter in arm, and in my eyes, we’ve succeeded.

I explain, “Our love trumps any cost the media can inflict. Maybe this whole time, Rose, it’s unconsciously been safe and it’s taken our belief—that we can provide love to a child, that we feel with all our hearts—to finally see it ourselves.”

She fights tears, and I pull her as close as she can go, my hand holding her jaw and my thumb stroking her cheek. Here I am, convincing Rose of love when she’s spent so much time opening my mind to its true meaning. I will remind her every single day how much resides inside both of us.

“There is no more doubt,” I say. “Whatever missteps our children take or mi

stakes we may make, their lives will be filled with love and passion—and our children, ours, will suck the marrow out of life and paint this gray fucking world with color.” I stare deeply into those fierce yellow-green eyes, my heart drumming in sync with hers. “Our children will be unforgettable like us. You wait and see.”

Rose’s hand rises up to my shoulder. “This is the place where we’ve both gone mad.” She turns her head just a fraction, to the lily pads idle in the water. “Who on Earth would want to procreate with you? Eight times?” She meets my burgeoning, conceited grin. “I must be insane.”

She’s saying a resounding, earth-shifting yes.

I slide my arm around her waist. Winning and losing has always just been a state of mind, and I sense ours becoming sound again.

I rest my hand on her lower stomach, expecting her to slap it away, but she lets me touch her here without complaint. Her lips try to pull upward, even when she hates to combat my grin with a smile.

Before Jane arrived, I loved seeing her pregnant, watching her body grow with our baby, a part of me and a part of her. Rose had numerous fears about motherhood, but she enjoyed the majority of carrying a child. If she hated it, she’d never consider another.

“We can’t just have more on a whim,” she reminds me. “I have to plan this out with Daisy in case she can’t have a baby.”

“I know.” I’m assuming this means Ryke will be in the discussion as well. For every hurdle he’s faced with Daisy, for every mountain they have figuratively and literally climbed, it’d be more likely they marry today than break up tomorrow.

Rose adjusts Jane, struggling to hold her weight for so long.

“I’ll take her,” I say.

Rose passes our daughter to me, and I easily hold her by the bottom, lifting her up towards my shoulder. Jane presses her cheek to my collar, her eyelids heavy.

I look to Rose. “How many more children do you want?” Eight has been my number. It’s one she’s grown accustomed to because I repeat it often, but it’s not set in stone.

Rose takes Jane’s crooked hat off and sets it in her Chanel diaper bag that looks more like a large purse. “I just want Jane to have a sister. We could have two kids and I’d be happy or we could have ten, as long as there are two girls somewhere.”