And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, the man that you take as yours will treat you right. Or I’ll haunt his ass from the afterlife.”
I snorted hard at the way that her father spoke.
I would never test that.
Not ever.
The day that you were born, my entire world stopped spinning. One second it was all about your mom, and then it was all about you and your mom. The constant struggle to allow you the freedom to breathe, but protect you from the nasty things in life that I hope you never have to experience.
I love you. Your mama loves you. I can’t wait to see you again.
But you live your life as long as you can, and we’ll be here when you’re ready.
Love you,
Daddy
Wyett was officially bawling.
That was the photo we hung up in our bedroom. Her face buried in my neck, her arms around my shoulders. Her breasts pillowed against my chest.
“Thank you so much, Hunt,” Wyett whispered. “You have no idea how much that means to me.”
I kind of did based on how hard she was hanging onto my neck.
“Love you, Wyett,” I told her quietly. “You mean the world to me.”
She pulled back so I could look into her watery eyes. “You are the world to me.”
EPILOGUE II
You can either be happy, or help your child with their math homework. You can’t do both.
-True facts of life
HUNT
Years later
“Shit,” I grumbled as I saw the state trooper walking toward the car’s back door. “Shit, motherfuckin’ shit, shit.”
I was going way too fast.
Why? Because I wasn’t paying attention.
My head was thinking about something else, and everybody knew how I got when I was thinking about something else.
Needless to say, I should’ve been focusing on my fucking speed. Not about whatever in the hell I’d been focusing on.
Shit, shit, shit.
I rolled the windows down and placed my hands on the steering wheel, my fingers reflexively squeezing and relaxing on the cool leather beneath my hands.
Shit, shit, shit.
I’d gotten a shit ton of tickets in my life, but this one was going to take the cake.
And let’s just say, Wyett was going to be pissed as hell, because I could see the food on the seat beside me cooling off second by second. Chick-Fil-A was only good hot.
And that meant that when I got there, she was going to lose her shit that it wasn’t.
That was what happened when you had an eight-month pregnant wife at home that was on bed rest and couldn’t leave the house for anything.
Luckily, I’d only been going ten over, and that meant that I wouldn’t be arrested or anything.
But he’d run my license, see the ‘felon’ stamped on my sheet, and automatically start acting like a prick.
There would be no getting out of this ticket.
No way, no how.
Groaning low under my breath, I rolled the back window down also, and placed my hands back on the steering wheel, and then waited for him to walk up.
After about five minutes of him likely running my plates and seeing the three speeding tickets I’d had in the last three years—sometimes I went a little fast on the bike because I damn well could. They were lucky I stopped at all since I could likely get away from them. He made his way up to my truck window.
He was at the tailgate, his eyes on mine in the side mirror, when I saw his hard eyes.
They weren’t covered in glasses like the last two, showing me how hard and unyielding he was.
Yeah, I wasn’t getting out of this ticket. Nope.
Just as the state trooper got close enough to the car that he could hear what was going on inside, my four-year-old, who was fucking smarter than me when it came to computers, started yelling.
“Oh, God. Daddy! It’s coming out of my ass!” he yelled. And when I say yelled, I mean screamed. “Why did you pull over, Daddy? It’s coming out!”
There was a moment of shocked and stunned silence as his words processed in my brain.
Then, I closed my eyes as horror washed over me.
Son of a bitch.
“Daddy!” Jester yelled. “Oh, God! It’s crawling up my back!”
“Uhhh,” the state trooper said. “Is everything okay here?”
Jester, my bright and shining star, said, “Does it sound like everything is okay here? I just had Mexican food and I’m literally unable to keep the squirts from catapulting out of me! The only thing saving my mom’s truck right now is the fact that I’m in a car seat!”
My other son, Bastian, squealed in toddler delight. “Squirts!”
The state trooper took one look at the back seat full of kids, looked at me, then said, “Head home, sir. I’m sorry.”
Then he walked back to the cruiser behind us. Laughing.
I waited until the trooper was in his car before slowly putting my truck into gear and starting off.