“Hey, Mommy. Do you want a drink or something?” a falsetto voice asked.
Rebecca cooed happily as the rest of her body appeared being flown about the door way by her father and horrible ventriloquist.
“Aren’t you missing some puppets?’ Lucy asked with a smile.
“Oh. God. You’re right. I don’t know what I’ve done with the rest of them.”
Lucy laughed as he walked into the room and sat down in a chair across from her, bouncing Rebecca on his knee. She wrinkled her brow and read Rebecca’s t-shirt with a puzzled face.
“Tiny feminist?”
“A gift from Mom. She dropped them off earlier but didn’t want to bother you because you were working.”
“Are the boy all wearing tiny feminist t-shirt too then?”
“Of course not. They are wearing t-shirts that say, “Keep your paws off my sister.”
“Lovely,” Lucy scoffed.
“I approve,” he said, moving Rebecca to one side to reveal his own shirt that said, “Sometimes, I wear fur.”
“You know you can’t wear that in public, right?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. People won’t understand the joke and they’ll spit on you or something.”
He laughed and stood up, flying a giggling Rebecca around like an airplane again. Just as quickly as she had started laughing, she stopped and puked all over his chest.
Without missing a beat, Lucy said, “See, I told you people would spit on you or something. Spit up, I guess.”
“Gross,” he grumbled.
Lucy laughed as he fled the room, holding a crying Rebecca out like she was toxic.
Finishing up the proposal she had been working on, she left her office and closed the door behind her, putting work aside to go help Ryan. She found him in the nursery, still covered in puke, but trying to settle Rebecca down before she woke the boys, who all seemed to be napping without their sister.
“Here, let me take care of Princess Pukearella here while you go clean yourself up,” she told him.
“I didn’t mean to disrupt you.”
“You are the best disruption I’ve ever met,” she told him, “now go get cleaned up. You stink.”
“Charming. Just charming,” he laughed.
It was hard to say when Lucy Jameson Wilson gave up all of her ideals to spend her life with an Alpha male and five tiny creatures that left her feeling frazzled and bewildered, but she knew that she wouldn’t trade this life she had accidentally found for anything that she thought she had wanted before Ryan had come along. In its own weird way, this was heaven.
“There, you’re all clean now my beautiful girl,” she said, reaching into the cabinet above the changing table and retrieving a clean t-shirt.
She grabbed the first one she saw in the section set aside for Rebecca and put it on her, smiling as she lifted her up. Ryan came in through the door behind her and laughed.
“That’s debatable after what she just did,” he said, looking at the pink “Daddy’s Girl” shirt.
“I’m going to lay her down. She’s half asleep already. Then we can go practice making another set of these,” Lucy told him.
“Okay, but just practice okay?” he said.
“Definitely just practice,” she laughed, settling Rebecca into her crib, and taking his hand to walk to the bedroom.
The doorbell rang just as they were about to go through the door.
“Ignore it. They’ll go away,”
“They’ll wake the kids.”
Ryan made his way to the door, Lucy somewhere behind him. The bell rang again and he pulled it open to find a rather sinister looking man with a scar down one cheek looking at him.
“I’m looking for Lucy Jameson.”
“I’m her husband. Who are you?”
“I’m just a messenger. I need to see her for a minute.”
Ryan looked him up and down uncertainly. Lucy shrank back, the past not so far back that she couldn’t remember what had happened to her before they were married. This guy looked like trouble and that was something they’d thought was in their past.
“Then you’ll have to tell me what it is you need first,” Ryan repeated.
The man was human. She was close enough to know he had no smell, but that endangered them more because he didn’t know what Ryan was, what they were. He was large and menacing and had no fear of them.
The man sighed and his tone softened a bit as he continued, “Listen, I’m not here to cause trouble or to hurt anyone. I have a package that I was instructed to give to no one but Lucy Jameson.”
“Who is it from?” Ryan persisted.
“If you’ll just get your wife, I’ll be happy to tell her that.”
It was a standoff. The man was not going to talk to Ryan and Ryan was not going to expose her to someone who didn’t exactly look like a boy scout. If this was going to end, she’d have to be the one to step in and do it.
“I’m Lucy Jameson. Well, I was. I’m married now.”