King Maker (King Maker 3)

My hormonal wife, who’d given birth to my two beautiful bairns, sobbed, “I love you.”

I kissed away her tears. “And I you, mo ghràdh. You give me reasons to draw breath. You, Gabe, Corrine, and Jeremy give me reasons to live. And the four of you give me hope for the future.”

“Mo ghràdh?” she questioned, actually doing a good job with the pronunciation even through the hitch in her voice.

“It means my love,” I said. “There’s no reason to cry.”

“As if…” she said while I wiped away her tears.

“I tell you these things so you will know, for as long as I live there won’t ever be another woman. I’ll never stray. I’m yours.”

She began to cry in earnest. With the pads of my thumbs, I tried my best to dry them. After kissing them and her mouth, I said, “And one more thing.”

That caught her attention. I didn’t wait. I hoped she was still in a favorable mood. She hated my money and didn’t like to spend it. She complained that she wanted our kids not to be spoiled and think that they could have anything without working for it.

“I thought maybe we could buy a house outside the city.” I saw her stubborn chin begin to jut up. “We could stay in the city during the week and spend the weekends at a place where the kids could run and play outside. I could teach them football.”

She frowned. “What do you know about football?”

I kissed her forehead because there wasn’t a way I couldn’t touch her. “I’m not talking about American football.” She knew I was referring to soccer. I loved to tease her about the absurdity of the American name for their game of football.

“Okay.” She gave in, waving off the discussion of football. “On the house,” she clarified. “Only if—”

“Anything,” I offered.

“That we buy a house in Scotland too.”

My grin couldn’t have gotten any broader. This woman got me, had me. She held my heart and could utterly destroy me. Still, I trusted her unreservedly.

The scales were balanced. Or as was said in her accounting world, “Our balance sheet was perfect.” We had far more assets than we would ever have liabilities. The difference of the two was our unshakable partnership based on rock-solid equity that would last until the end of our time.

“There will only ever be one Mrs. Brinner-King.”

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