“We can’t go too far out of the city. The commute will be an absolute nightmare, and I refuse to spend any more of my life stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic,” Montana says, wrinkling her nose, and I chuckle.
It’s weird—nice, but weird—to have settled into a sort of normal routine. Things are calmer now, and even though nothing new has happened in weeks, I still find myself holding my breath and waiting for the next time Montana’s stalker decides to pop up and make a new move in this game we’ve been playing.
It’s too much to hope that we won’t ever hear from him again. Montana thinks we’re past it, that he lost interest and moved on, but I know better. That doesn’t mean I’m about to tell her and take away the lightness that’s slowly been creeping its way back into her eyes. Guys like him, well, they never get bored. They may step back to re-evaluate and develop a new strategy, but whether she’s his obsession or I am—or maybe both of us are—he’s not done with us yet.
“What do you think of this?” Montana asks, passing the tablet she’s been scrolling on across the table so I can look at the listing. “It’s got a decent yard and a huge tree for that tire swing you’re so dead set on.”
I look down at the house, trying to picture if I see us having a future there. An icy spike of fear stabs through me when I think about the long-term, but I’m getting better and better at ignoring it. I’m sure it’s helping that the psychopath has been quiet for more than a month. I’ve had some time to get used to opening myself up again, even if some days are still really fucking hard—like panic-attack inducing levels of difficult that make me want to run away.
The funny part is, when you’re afraid of losing someone you love, you want to hide from the possibility of heartbreak. Yet walking away—or running away—is only making it happen now when you might’ve had decades before you ever have to face the possibility of losing them.
Or at least that’s what the therapist I’ve started seeing says. I’m still not sure if it’s all bullshit or not, but when I committed to Montana, to the possibility of a baby, it was time to grow the fuck up and face the fact that I’m damaged. The shit with my sister scarred the fuck out of my soul, and now it’s time to purge it, to let it heal enough so I can be the partner she has a right to.
“I think it’s nice,” I say with a shrug. Montana has shown me no less than two hundred properties over the past few weeks, and I’m fully okay with leaving the decision up to her. I don’t really care where we live as long as I can set up security equipment to keep her safe.
She rolls her eyes and pushes up off the table, and slips onto my lap. “You’ve said that about the last dozen places I’ve shown you. It’s no fun when you don’t pick them all apart with me.”
“This kitchen looks like it’s from two thousand and five,” I say, raising my voice into a nasal pitch and sneering down at the screen in mock disgust.
She laughs and wraps her arm around my neck, leaning her head onto my shoulder to look down at the screen. “That’s more like it. Now, look. There’s carpet in the bathroom. Who the fuck puts carpet in a bathroom?”
I let her take the tablet out of my hands and wrap my arms around her waist. My body is humming like it always does when she’s close. It’s like she’s pure energy, and I’m lifeless until she’s touching me. My whole being comes alive, and I feel fucking sappy thinking it, but it’s true.
She sits up suddenly, her eyes bright as she lets the tablet drop to the tabletop. “You know what sounds amazing right now?”
A low chuckle works its way up my throat. Montana gets ridiculously excited about things like ice cream or what she’s going to have for breakfast. I’ve gotta say, letting my eyes trace the delectable curves of her body, I’m definitely into a girl who loves to eat. “What?”
Instead of answering, though, she jumps up off my lap and hurries deeper into the kitchen. My apartment isn’t all that big since originally it was just for me, so she doesn’t have to go far, mainly around the island, where she’s stuck her head into the fridge and is digging around. I haven’t seen Indy or Asher yet this morning, but since everything’s been quiet, we’ve gotten laxer in our schedules and shifts.
Montana starts humming one of the songs from Shadow Phoenix’s latest album as she pulls out a cutting board, knife, and bowl and starts slicing into an avocado and scooping the flesh into it.
“Baby, do you need some help?” I ask when I notice she’s getting more green stuff on her hands than in the bowl. The damn fruit is mangled, but maybe that’s what she’s going for.
“No, I’ve got this. I saw it on an episode of Nailed It,” she says, waving me off. Montana’s many things, but a chef, she’s not. Still, her beautiful face is set in determination. She pulls her kissable bottom lip between her teeth, and I get up and walk over to her, wrapping my arms around her waist and kissing the curve of her neck.
She shivers, and I brush some of the stray strands of deep red hair off of her shoulder so I can press my lips along the sensitive skin there. Her hunger this morning must be intense because she doesn’t stop what she’s working on like she normally does when I focus my attention on this particular spot on her body. No, she keeps right on chopping and mixing until I look over her shoulder and see something resembling guacamole in the bowl she’s been working on.
“You know Nailed It isn’t a show that’s supposed to teach you how to cook, right?” I laugh.
“Whatever, the point is I know what I’m doing.”
“So, you’re going to eat guacamole for breakfast? Did you convince Indy to come cook you huevos rancheros again?” Whenever she liked to play with Indy, she’d make a bet she knew she’d win either way and her prize was always something for him to cook her. Living so close together, they’ve developed a sort of sibling bond that makes me crack up every time she calls him on his shit. I consider it payback for the way he backed me into a corner about all things Montana.
It didn’t matter that things were good between her and me at the moment, only that what he put me through was unpleasant as fuck, and watching him squirm is one of the things that currently brings me joy.
“Nope,” she says, wiggling out of my arms, and I reluctantly let her go as she moves back to the fridge and pulls out a container of strawberries, taking them to the sink to rinse them off.
I raise my eyebrow when she finishes and then immediately drags one of the berries through her guacamole mixture, popping it between her plush lips and tilting her head back on a moan. It takes next to nothing to get me hard where Montana’s concerned, and watching her eat really does it for me. When she wraps her lips around the red fruit, well… the urge to bend her over the counter becomes nearly overwhelming.
When she repeats the process with another berry, I get suspicious. “What the hell are you doing? That’s disgusting.”
She stops mid-chew and narrows her eyes, swallowing before she answers. “Have you ever tried it?”
Montana moves toward me, brandishing a berry smeared with chunky guac, and I grimace, backing up a step for every one she takes forward. At the prospect of that revolting combination, my dick has deflated to fully limp. When my back hits the wall, there’s nowhere else for me to escape to.
A wicked laugh tumbles out of Montana’s lips as she dangles the fruit in front of my mouth, pressing it closer, so the guacamole spreads across my lips. When I open up to protest, she shoves the entire thing in my mouth, and the combination of garlic, onion, and strawberry makes me gag. My eyes water as I spit the bite out in my hand. “Jesus. How the fuck can you eat that?”
Then it hits me like a goddamn wrecking ball, and she must notice the change in my expression because the smile slides off her face, and a crease forms between her eyebrows. “What? What’s wrong?” Her whole body has tensed up like she’s preparing for a threat or bad news, but then a slow smile works its way across my face.
“Is this the first weird thing you’ve wanted to eat lately?” I ask her innocently, and her eyebrows furrow like she’s wondering where the hell I’m going with this. She hasn’t caught on yet.
“Well, there was the gummy worm queso incident yesterday.” This faraway look shadows her eyes for a minute like she’s thinking back. Indy told me about that because he thought it was funny as fuck, but I didn’t put two and two together then.
“But I think that’s it.”
I nod, stepping forward, so her soft curves are lined up with my hard ridges. I run my fingers down her cheek and across her jaw and watch as goosebumps pop up in the wake of my touch. “C’mon, Spitfire. There’s something we need to do.”
Her fingers automatically lace with mine when I reach for her, and she follows me to the bathroom attached to my bedroom. Lifting her up by her waist, I sit her on the counter while I dig through one of the drawers. “I figured whatever it was you wanted to do would be out there,” she laughs, pointing to the bedroom.
“Make no mistake about it; there will be plenty happening in there just as soon as we’re done here.” My voice has gone deeper and rougher as I find what I’m looking for. Montana’s watching me while she sits on the counter, the nightgown she wears pushed to her upper thighs, and I know she’s wearing nothing underneath it after I woke her up between her legs this morning. At this point, my tongue is her official alarm clock.
At this moment, as I pass her the box, I go still, checking in with myself on how I’m feeling. Surprisingly, I’m strangely calm. I figured if this day ever came, I’d be freaking the fuck out, irrational as shit, and probably in denial. The strange thing is, now that it’s here, I’m excited.
“You should’ve seen Asher’s face when I sent him to buy it. If the guy could’ve murdered me with a look, I’d be a pile of blood and bones on the floor right now,” I tell her, laughing, but she’s staring down at the pregnancy test with her lips parted, looking like she’s doing some mental math.
I don’t need to count the days. No, Montana has been off for a while now, but it’s never been something I could point to and say, “Hey, you’re being really fucking unreasonable right now,” and know what was going on. At least not until the bizarre food shit.
Maybe I’ve really lost it, gone off the damn deep end, and am on the verge of drowning, but if so, I’ll happily stay under the surface with her. This right here… it feels right.
She finally looks up at me with wide eyes, and while I know this is something she’s wanted for a while, reality hits us all a little differently. “Do you want to stay in here while I pee on it?”
“Do you want me to stay?”
She looks down at the box again, and I see her hands trembling, and I can only guess at all the things that must be running through her head right now, how many things are about to change if the test comes back like I assume it will. “Yes, but don’t watch me pee. That’s just gross.”
Chuckling, I spin, facing the shower while she deals with the test. When she’s done, she tells me it’s safe to turn back around, and I pull out my phone, setting a timer.
I’d describe her look right now as shell-shocked, which is funny because I figured she’d be bouncing off the walls and whipping out a to-do list a mile long of things we need to get done in the next few months. It’s not that I don’t think she has all of that—and more—in store for me, and make no mistake, if Indy and Asher are still on her protection detail, I’m going to sucker them into helping.
I’m drawn to her, pulling her against me, and she rests her forehead against my chest. “Okay, baby. Time to unpack whatever’s stressing you out right now,” I say, speaking gently but firmly, so she hopefully doesn’t argue—though that’s unrealistic when it comes to Montana. “Out with it.”
“I don’t want to become my mother,” she mumbles against my chest as I rub soothing circles into her back, frowning. I’ve never met Montana’s mom, but I know after their weekly phone calls, she’s always in a terrible mood and locks herself in the bathroom for a bubble bath for at least an hour before she’ll talk to me. One thing I’ve realized about my woman—she uses baths to escape her issues in the real world, like inside that room where candles flicker and dance across the walls, and the scent of sweet flowers hangs in the air, she doesn’t have to deal with anything she doesn’t want to.
It’s not a bad coping strategy, really.
Better than hunting a kidnapper and murderer and letting the rest of your life blur into background noise.
“What’s so bad about your mother?”
Montana lifts her head, and her expression is stony. “Oh, nothing other than as soon as she married Damon’s father, I became practically invisible. The only way she ever paid attention to me was when I was winning awards at school, and even those only lasted as long as she could take credit somehow or brag to her friends. If I wanted her to love me, I had to work harder, climb higher, achieve more. Even with everything I’ve done, she barely acknowledges me on our calls, and her main focus is and has always been Damon. She makes me feel like if everything isn’t perfect, the scraps I do get from her will disappear, and I’ll be left with nothing.”
She shudders, and her eyes shimmer but the tears she’s holding back don’t fall. “I want to have more than one baby, Ro. What if it’s all good until the second or third one comes along, and suddenly I’m pitting my own children against each other in an attempt to force them to win my love. How fucked up of a mother would that make me?”
A flush stains her cheeks, and her eyes are wild. She looks on the brink of losing it, so I try to soothe her and ignore her comment about more kids. Now is not the time for me to join her in this freakout. “Okay, well, how about we start with the one kid and see where that takes us?”
Those emerald orbs are wide and piercing as she looks up at me, but I can see her soften a tiny bit. “I’ve seen how you care about your friends, and you’ve never once made them win your attention or love, so why would you think you’d do it to our kids?” A thrill runs through me at the way that sounds—our kids.
“If anything,” I continue, “You know how it feels to be pitted against your sibling and unfairly judged, so you’re less likely to do that to someone else, especially someone important to you. There’s no way you’re going to be a fucked up mother, baby. I’d never let you.”
Her body sags against mine, and I hope it’s in relief and not defeat. “Thanks, Ro,” she mumbles back against my chest as my phone buzzes on the counter.
“It’s time. Do you want to look, or do you want me to look?”
She grips my forearm and stares at the white plastic stick on the bathroom counter as if it’s about to jump up and attack her. “I don’t think I can look.”
Her fingers dig into my arm as I move away from her to grab the test and flip it over.
Pregnant.
The reality of that word—of what it means—slams into me, and instead of the crippling anxiety I expected, I’m shocked when a lightness settles in my chest.
“Oh my god, I can’t take it. What’s it say?” Montana’s practically vibrating where she leans against me like I’m the only thing holding her up.
“It says we’re having a baby,” I murmur near her ear, my lips brushing the shell while I hand her the test. She goes still, her movements frozen as she takes in my words, confirmed by the test she holds in her hands.
“Fuck,” she whispers, but it doesn’t sound like she’s upset. If anything, she sounds awed or maybe overwhelmed. Spinning in my arms, her eyes meet mine, and the tears she held back earlier are now free-falling down her cheeks. I’m feeling pretty damn choked up myself, staring down into the eyes of the woman who’s about to make me a father.
A fucking father.
It doesn’t feel real.
Her stunning green eyes move back and forth between mine, and it’s like time stands still. We get lost in each other, lost in the gravity of the moment, until she leans up to kiss me with everything she’s got. I catch her in my arms, pulling her tight against my body, and she still holds the damn test clutched in her right hand.
She lets out a whimper as I kiss her as if she’s everything—the oxygen in my lungs and the stars in the sky. It’s a deep, claiming kiss, and it goes on and on until my head starts to spin. I lean my forehead against hers and breathe her in while I catch my breath. “I love you,” I whisper because the moment feels too fragile to speak any louder. Like if I raise my voice at all, the wonder and magic will shatter and reveal itself to only be an illusion.
I can’t have that, now that I know how this feels. As much as I resisted, I don’t want to give it up, and a new feeling sprouts inside me—one filled with possessiveness on a whole new level and a need to protect that is sweeping and robust inside me.
“I love you, too,” she finally whispers back like she feels it, too, like the world is holding its breath and waiting to see what happens.
A gurgling sound destroys the moment, shattering it like it never existed, and my head whips around as the noise gets louder. Something is rushing behind the walls, almost like a waterfall. We only get that brief warning before water is cascading into the bathroom. It’s bubbling up from the toilet and raining down the walls, spilling across the tile floor, and flooding the room at an alarming rate.
“Christ.” I gently push Montana toward the bedroom. “Go grab Indy or Asher, whoever you find first, and tell them to grab as many towels as they can find.” She hurries off, but the errand is only meant to get her away from the mess. No way are towels going to fix this disaster.
The water is rising quickly and seeping into the carpet in my bedroom. It’s not showing any signs of stopping as it rushes out of every pipe. I swipe my phone off the counter before it gets destroyed and call the building’s maintenance line, but it’s busy, and I can’t get through. It takes me all of ten seconds to run through all the possibilities for how to stop the water. None of them will work because this appears to be coming from the building itself or the apartment above mine.
If it’s a widespread issue, the best I can hope for is to pack up and get the hell out of here while I let my renter’s insurance and landlord deal with the bullshit.
The timing of this is suspect as hell, too, and I’ve learned to never look past something that seems like a coincidence. What would flooding my apartment accomplish in the grand scheme of things?
Indy steps up to the bathroom door with narrowed eyes, his footsteps squishing through the ruined carpet and his arms full of towels. “No offense, but these towels aren’t gonna do shit,” he tells me, and I snort.
“No, shit.”
He tosses them onto the ground and steps over them into the room. “What’s the plan?” His eyes flick to the counter, where Montana set the pregnancy test down before she bolted to go find him, and then back up to me with a question in his eyes. Shit, I didn’t know if we were telling people yet, but this was Indy. The bastard was invested.
My bare feet are freezing in the ankle-deep water, and the hem of my joggers has started absorbing liquid. Getting the hell out of here is my top priority at the moment, but when he steps aside to let me pass out of the room, I give him a smug as fuck smile. “Not a goddamn word to anyone, but it was positive.”
Indy laughs and slaps me on the back. “Fuck, yes. When she ate that shit yesterday, I called it. Asher, the prick, wouldn’t bet me.”
“Looks like that was a good call.” Pulling a bag down out of my closet, I start shoving shit in it because we can’t stay here until the damage is fixed.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Indy asks, full of insolence. I’m not his boss, but I think right now he’s willing to defer to me considering the whole Montana carrying my baby thing.
“It’s been six weeks, man. I don’t think he’s given up, but maybe he’s moved on for now. There hasn’t been so much as a hint of the guy, and Montana’s even been out without us. I think until this place is fixed, it’s safe to go stay at hers. He hasn’t touched it or been there since we left, and Sebastian’s been monitoring it constantly. He even roped Ryan into going over the footage for him most days. We’ll go back to her place until she picks a house, or we can come back here.”
Despite everything that happened, I know Montana will be relieved to be back in her house, surrounded by her stuff.
It’s still early in the day, and it already feels like a week has passed since we were looking at house listings this morning. I can only hope this isn’t the start of shit ramping up again because if it is, if he decides to come at us again, I’ll make sure when I do catch him, his last moments stretch into an excruciating eternity.
