“Like a smokin’ hot daddy with a newborn baby sleeping on his back,” she sassed.
“Somebody needs to have her mouth kept busy, I think.”
She laughed at me. “I hope that’s a promise you’re going to keep later,” she said sexily.
“My cock heard that, baby,” I teased, expecting some kind of sarcastic rebuttal in return. But the thing with Brynne was that she was not terribly predictable. And really fuckin’ quick on the draw with comebacks. So, usually, when I thought I had the upper hand in a verbal sparring? She swooped in and trumped my hand. Did it all the time.
I heard her catch her breath, though. Made me wonder if she was thinking about my cock, and if it was making her consider other things. I sure thought about it, but the reasonable portion of my brain realized she was still healing from a major surgery. I’d just have to wait until she let me know she was ready.
“I am finished here,” she said, abruptly, setting her camera on the table. “And someone is ready for her crib while she sleeps it off.” The baby was lifted away, and then the clack of the door as she left the room told me I was alone.
I rolled over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about how changed my life was from a year ago. The man from last year was two months away from receiving Tom Bennett’s email. He was somebody I didn’t even recognize anymore. And thank Christ for that, because I had no desire to ever return to such an empty life.
The door opened again, and in Brynne walked, interrupting my reminiscent ramblings.
Understatement. Of. The. Year.
She stood over me with sexy eyes that looked rather green at the moment, and slowly reached for the hem of her shirt.
I felt the breath empty out of my lungs.
She lifted her shirt up and over her head, and dropped it on the floor. Then she shimmied out of her soft leggings and flung them over her shoulder. Left in nothing but some skimpy pink knickers and a bra, she looked nearly the same as she did before she’d become pregnant, with the exception of her scar and a magnificent set of tits that were even more spectacular now.
I put my hands behind my head and grinned up at her, unable to come up with anything particularly clever or witty to say, but mostly because my mouth went dry when she reached behind her back and unhooked her bra.
My beautiful girl let me know, and showed me, yet again, what a rarity I possessed in her love, as she had from the very first.
Rare.
Brynne’s love was something rare—a gift.
A precious gift I’d been given, by some divine twist of fate that had brought her into my world…and changed everything about me. About how I saw things, about what I dreamed for the future, about my capacity to move beyond the shadows of my past.
Brynne’s love changed absolutely everything.
Part Four
SPRING
Take me down, take me down by the water, water,
Pull me in until I see the light,
Let me drown, let me drown, in you honey, honey,
In your love I wanna be baptized.
Daughtry ~Baptized
CHAPTER 20
26th April
Somerset
IT was a simple wedding held in the garden, overlooking the sea. The bride and the groom looked very happy, as they should. I winked at Brynne, admiring how delicious she was in her periwinkle lace. The same dress she’d worn the night of the Mallerton Gala, and now getting double-duty as a bridesmaid. She shot me a wink back, along with one of her sexy half-smiles.
Hannah’s dress was rose coloured, and looking at her reminded me of photographs of my mother. I often wondered what that was like for my father to see in his daughter, the spitting image of his wife, as she would have looked when he lost her. He’d kept his thoughts on the matter private over the years, so I imagined whatever they were, would stay that way.