Pulling the ring from the box, he slipped it onto my finger and then stood, pulling me into his arms and kissing me with wild abandon as the kids clapped and whistled.
Grinning up at him with love in my eyes, I had to ask. “You think you can handle this? A wife and a baby?”
He returned the look, the intensity of his feelings for me piercing me straight down to my soul and he even had the nerve to wink at me. “Two for the price of one. Can’t complain about that.”
I groaned, my heart feeling like it was going to burst from my chest due to the amount of love I had for him. “My future husband…the romantic.”
“Yours always and forever, baby. No getting rid of me now.”
“Good, because I never will.”
Epilogue
Grayson
“I swear to God, if you put your penis in me again, I’ll kill you,” my wife screamed out from the passenger seat of her Camaro. The kids were following behind us in my truck with Christian behind the wheel since he seemed to have the clearest of heads. I’m not sure which one of the four of us was more anxious about Riley going into labour – the kids had really gotten behind the idea of younger siblings, better than I expected.
I had a mix of emotions racing though me… Excitement, happiness and sheer terror. I was going to be a father again. Fuck – all over again! It seemed so surreal, despite the fact it was happening in real time, right now. The terror wasn’t entirely because of her threat – I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t kill me. Like, 89% sure, at least not in the condition she was in currently. I could easily outrun her…
But it was because so much was happening so quickly. I planned on taking the next six months off work, but then she was on her own half of the year, pretty much. I was just grateful we had such wonderful kids. Chyna, Violet and Christian were an amazing help all throughout the pregnancy and had pledged their assistance when I couldn’t be there for her and the babies.
Yup, you heard right… babies plural.
“Seriously, kill you. Dead,” Riley groaned closing her eyes and panting as she flopped back against the seat, “I’m too old for this shit.”
“I think you might be a little too late for turning back now, dear.” I looked over at her as we stopped at a red light and flashed her a smile. Normally, she’d smile back, but when she re-opened her eyes, all I got was a dirty stare in return.
Okay, fair enough.
She scowled at me. “You’re pretty hilarious. Maybe you should take up stand-up.”
“I have been told that I should give it a shot. When I’m not being an asshole at work, I can be quite amusing.”
“Oh yes, I’ve got a joke for you. Boy meets girl and knocks her up. Flash forward nine and a half months and boom, she’s about ready to pop out his child – twins at that – and he’s cracking jokes.”
Green light. Pressing the accelerator, the car lunged forward.
“Follow-up joke, she’s forty-one and he’s forty-three. We should be grandparents and we’re popping out two fresh new humans.”
Okay, I couldn’t help but laugh. Who wouldn’t, even in a situation like this? Sure, I may be going to hell for laughing, but my wife had an amazing sense of humour. Even in pain she couldn’t help herself. Each day I’d think that there’s no way I could love her more and yet, somehow, I managed to.
After I proposed, she wanted to have a quick wedding before she gained weight and wouldn’t look good in pictures. So, three weeks later we eloped with the kids to Bermuda. It was a beautiful ceremony and the pictures had been just what she wanted with the breathtaking backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean.
Brooklyn never did show up into our lives again. Off to her next target perhaps? Hard to say, but it seemed knowing there was no chance in hell made me no longer a viable person to chase. Thank God for small miracles. I didn’t even need to delete and block her from my social media, she did that all for me. Again, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth – or in this case an off her rocker psychotherapist.
My mobile phone rang. Grabbing it, Riley answered it and put it on speaker.
Violet: Are you guys doing okay?
“Well, I’m about to push two things the size of watermelons out of my hoochie, Violet, so what do you think?”
There was snickering of the other two in the background coming from the phone.
Violet: You’ll do great Mom, you’ve already sprung two out, another two will be a breeze.
Two babies… I was still trying to process that. Two boys if the doctors were correct.
Gotta say, I’d been pretty floored the day I proposed, and she hit me with the information that she was pregnant instead of an immediate yes. No, scratch that, we were pregnant. While I stood before her on bended knee holding the ring case, the vision of the future I had in mind for us had disappeared to be reshaped with an entirely different future, one with diapers and up-all-night feedings and a series of events I never thought I’d experience at this age. It wasn’t bad – just different. It had taken a few minutes for the information to sink in.
Riley had later informed me that the couple of minutes that it took me to process the information had felt like an eternity to her and I didn’t doubt it. It had just been a very awkward time for her to spring that on me. But we’d got it all on video, a cringeworthy video, so there was that…
“Oh yes, Violet, it’ll be a breeze. No problem at all. Once I have the boys, I was thinking of having a few more. You know, get ourselves a little baseball team going.”
I chuckled as I looked over at Riley. She didn’t seem to be in as much pain at the moment, so thank goodness for small favors and even better yet, we were almost there. Which meant drugs for her. Just five more minutes.
It was hard to believe that a year ago I was wondering what I was going to do with all the free space that I had in the house I owned, and in the blink of an eye, the house was full. It was four bedrooms, which left us one bedroom short, so we decided to let Riley’s twins live there for free as a graduation gift – for now. We could figure out the rest at a later date. They were heading for college in the fall and it would be good for them to have their own space, free from adults, but we made sure they were clear that both houses were their homes and would always will be.
“Ohmygod! I think I’m going to die!” Riley groaned as another contraction hit her hard.
I cringed as she winced and then heaved a sigh of relief when I saw the hospital on the horizon come into view.
Reaching over to her, I placed a hand on her leg and gave it a gentle squeeze. “It’s going to be all right. We’re almost there.”
~*~ TT ~*~
Riley
What an ordeal. I hadn’t remembered labour and childbirth to be so painful or tiring – even with the epidural. It had been ten times worse with the first set of twins, but at forty-one I wasn’t quite as resilient as I had been way back then.
“Where’s your father?” I asked Chyna when she entered the private hospital room without her father or step-siblings in tow.
“He’s on his way and so are they.” She came over to the bedside and smiled down at me and the two babies who we decided to name – Adam and Alex. Yes, we went with the tacky trend to name twins with the same first letter of their first name. In our defense, it wasn’t on purpose, those were just the names that we could agree on.
“Great. Would you like to hold one of them?”
Her grin widened as she took Alex from my arms and cradled him in her arms and sitting down on the chair next to the bed. After a few minutes of fussing with the sleeping Alex, she looked up at me. “Are you up to talk for a minute?”
I nodded, curious as to what was up. “Sure. What’s going on?”
“Well,” she grimaced. “I just want to apologize.”
“For what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been. And I can be a little hard to handle.”
I laughed. “Hardly, you haven’t
been hard to handle, Chyna. That being said, you’re a teenager, all teenagers are hard to handle.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t been as open to you as Christian and Violet has been of my dad and I realize that wasn’t cool. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Dad having a brand-new family, especially with the new babies. But I see now I wasn’t losing my dad but gaining a whole second family.”
That warmed my heart to hear. I wouldn’t have said she was hard to handle, but she’d been slightly standoffish. I was thrilled to hear she wanted to try and be more active in the unit. “I think this is going to be an amazing new beginning for all of us.”
“I agree.” She looked up from the baby to me. “It’s been kind of lonely being an only child honestly. I always wanted siblings and now I have four in less than a year.”
There was the sound of excited chitter-chatter coming from the hallway moments before Grayson, with the twins in tow, came bursting through the hospital room door. He was holding a large white teddy bear in each arm, while the twins had flowers and foil helium balloons that said congratulations. His gaze immediately went to Chyna sitting next to the bed with Alex cradled in her arms. A look of pride and love swept over his expression before he turned to look at me and we shared a look.
It was all coming together.
“I still have a baby available for cuddles,” I offered with a smile nodding to the sleeping Adam.
Placing the teddy bears on the end of my bed, he came over to me, leaned down and kissed me gently on the lips.
“I love you,” he whispered sending my heart aflutter.
“Love you too.” Extending the baby to him, he accepted our child, holding the baby with so much care it left me teary-eyed. As he took a step back, my gaze swept over my newly formed family and I realized something; I finally got the happily ever after the characters in my books always ended with, but I had lost hope I would never have.
The End
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Excerpt
Excerpt From
Billionaire Playboy
By
Terry Towers
Available Now
1
Abigail
This is fucking stupid! Who does he think he is anyhow? I shook my head as I walked into the master bedroom of real estate mogul, Devon Townstead. What is it with rich people? Just because they have money they think they can live like pigs and us little people come behind them and clean up their messes for a pittance?
Of course, in my situation I was being paid half-decently well to clean up after him, and I had agreed to the terms thinking it would be awesome to clean a billionaire’s mansion. Then again, I didn’t expect this. And I did need money for school and to support my five-year-old, Isabella. College wasn’t cheap, and neither was trying to make a go as a single mom while attending school. I was taking this semester off to raise money. But this was my life, at least for now. Three more years and I’ll have graduated with a degree in social work and the next stage of our lives would begin.
I sighed as I put on a new pair of plastic gloves and pulled back the blankets, so I could start making the bed, which was left in a disarray – as usual.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I groaned out in exasperation, looking down at the black lacy thong and giving my head a shake. Did the tramp he brought home last even realize she’d left without her underwear? And why was it always thongs I found in or around the bed. Hell, once I found a bra in the kitchen! I hated thongs - who wanted to spend the day picking a fabric string out of their ass? And for what? To impress some man, who may or may not bother calling you back the day after? Boy shorts for me, and if I were in a sexy mood then I’d go for a pair of Brazilian cut bikini underwear.
Grabbing the pillows, I pulled the cases off them. One had numerous long blonde hairs on it. The night before last, it was red hair. Last week, black curly. Guess I was going to have to be replacing the bedding completely since there was no doubt their sex juices were all over the bedding. All the washing was seriously killing the beautiful fine-quality sheets. Not that he cared; I was sure that he’d have no issues spending the money to replace them when the time came.
Did these women even know they were just the flavor of the night? Or maybe they just didn’t care. Perhaps they thought that they would be the one who tamed the playboy billionaire? Like they were the one with the golden cooch to make him go gaga over them. Placing the stripped down-filled king-sized pillows on the arm chair next to the bed I tugged at the corner of the fitted sheet and pulled it off.
Who cared that he was a sexy big-shot billionaire? He was also a dick. Okay, maybe I hadn’t met him, despite working for him for a few weeks now, so I was making an assumption. He’d hired the agency I worked for and they sent me. Though any man who went through the number of women he did would have to be a swell guy. Womanizers were always high-brow people.
Bundling up the linen in my arms and keeping it away from my face, I left the bedroom with the mountain of linen blocking my vision, but I didn’t need to see to know where I was going. Making my way down the hallway to the large walk-in linen closet, I dropped the linen in the dirty linen cart, tomorrow was laundry day. The linen closet was as big as the living room in my apartment, which wasn’t saying much. All the linen was organized by color and material type, fleece, cotton etc. Opening the closet, I grabbed a sheet set and made my way back into the bedroom.
I stopped halfway back to the bedroom as I jolt of pain shot through my mouth. Damned tooth. My tooth had been aching for weeks. Unfortunately, Anytime Maid Service didn’t offer very good dental coverage. But I’d managed to save enough to get the work done, it was just a matter of finishing off my prescription of antibiotics and then getting the root canal. The pain killers they’d given me were working pretty well, but if I wasn’t taking the pain killers religiously then the pain would come back with a vengeance – like now.
Pulling the bottle of pain killers from my apron pocket, I opened the bottle and shook a capsule from the bottle. Popping it into my mouth, I dry swallowed it and carried onto the bedroom.
Walking into the bedroom, I placed the linen on the chaise at the foot of the bed and grabbed the first pillow case. I was in the process of pulling the case onto the pillow when my ears perked up at the sound of movement behind and to the right of me – near the door.
My entire body froze up, my hand in mid-reach for the second king-sized pillow.
Another footstep.
Oh shit! Someone broke in! While I knew I should have turned and faced the intruder, I couldn’t. I was suddenly starting to get a better understanding of the whole deer in the headlights concept because I was frozen.
“You’re the maid, I assume.”
Crap. It was worse than an intruder: it was Mr. Townstead. I’d wondered about him and by God there were plenty of times I’d wanted to give him a solid piece of my mind. How can a man be so neat and organized in the entirety of his house, except for the bedroom? It was like he wanted me to find the underwear and condoms and assortment of sex toys. That was sick, truly.
Spinning around to face him, I straightened up, squaring my shoulders, lifting my chin, and eyed him. The few pictures he had on the walls of him and various high-profile people didn’t do him justice. They didn’t come close to conveying the amount of charisma and sex appeal that was emitting from him right now. His dark hair was brushed back, short on the sides and a little too long on top, yet it worked for him. His cheekbones were high and chiselled, accented by a strong dimpled chin. But God, his grey eyes were what really captivated me, boring right into my brain and turning it to jelly.
Okay, I was beginning to get why women flocked to him. Based on looks, he had the vast majority of men beat, hands down. Standing in front of me with his tie undone and his navy blue shirt u
nbuttoned displaying a smooth chest of muscle, he could easily grace the cover of GQ magazine.
Dang!
“Are you deaf or just not sure if you’re the maid?”
I could hear the amusement in his tone, but still the question pissed me off. “I turned when you spoke, so I suppose you could cross deaf off the list.” There was curtness in my tone and didn’t feel a damned bit sorry for it.
He smiled, not seeming to notice my annoyance. “Then I guess you’re confused on whether you’re the maid?”
“I’m about to change your bedding, so unless I’m a burglar that gets off on cleaning the place they’re robbing, who I am should be pretty apparent.” I gave him a smile, but it was forced. I refused to allow myself to be swayed by his sexy smile or those captivating grey eyes. Those eyes drew me in, making me want to lose myself in them.
“I see.” Removing his tie fully, he shrugged his shirt off his shoulders. “You seem a little agitated.”
My eyes shifted to the bra I’d placed on his night side table and the anger that I’d been feeling raced through me again. Planting my hands on my hips, I stared hard at Mr. Townstead, narrowing my eyes to show I meant business. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
“Oh.” He didn’t appear concerned that I was angry. More amused then anything.
“Yes.” He didn’t ask why I was upset, but he damned well was going to find out. There was a little voice in the back of my head that was screaming at me to shut my mouth, I needed this job, because rent wasn’t free. And I had a little girl to think about who needed food and clothing and… Ugh.
But, I couldn’t. For my own sanity, I needed to address this issue, and what better time than with the culprit standing before me.
Hold On To Me Page 13
