by Kira Graham
“I love you,” he says softly, the words a whisper of sound as shouts go up around us and people talk a mile a minute, hugging and kissing and laughing as if they haven’t seen each other in months.
I let the words sink in, take in the way that he’s holding me up against him, and feel that last, tiny little piece of my heart melt and settle into place. See, this is the truth about love as I see it, and you don’t have to agree, and you can even puke in your mouth a little, because it’s pretty sappy and gross, but…it’s not always pretty or smart or perfect, and, as opposed to the opinion of Rosetta, who seems to be a magnet for trouble, it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster drama or an action film.
Sometimes, the best moments are the weirdest, and right now…
Uncle Jack is screaming like a woman as he rushes around kissing, hugging, and practically crawling all over us all. I hear Rosetta whine and tell him to screw off unless he wants to deliver her baby, which totally backfires, because of course he wants to! Jack has no boundaries when it comes to his little girls.
“I love you, too,” I say softly, smirking when Ares rolls his eyes and ducks behind the Cortez people to hide us from Uncle Jack.
“Good. Because I just beat the hell out of two guys, and I think I liked it.”
“Aw, shucks, baby. Didn’t you know that violence isn’t an option?” I quip, giggling when he growls and kisses my lips shut.
Ahhh, now that moment was worth the whole damn effort of getting my fat ass kidnapped. More than worth it.
Three weeks later
I smile, still groggy and very sore as Sin hops around like a kid in a candy store from one baby to another, her delight so infectious that even Heath can’t keep a smile off his face.
Paris, the saner of the two, just stands in front of the small bassinets and looks down at his kids with wet eyes and a smile so big that his lips tremble.
“I can’t decide which one to like the most! What about this one?” Sin asks, picking up a little bundle in pink and kissing her little face so enthusiastically that I hear a mewl and then a scream of fury. “Aw, hell. Here, take her—she’s a crier like you,” she tells Paris, dropping her daughter against his chest while we all chuckle and watch her antics.
After the “raid,” as the military jerks are calling it, things went…okay. Rosetta was indeed in labor, and she stayed that way for thirty-five hours, ten minutes, and thirty-nine seconds before her daughter, baby Hera, decided to put her out of her misery. To hear Zeus tell the story, he won’t ever watch his wife do that again, while Rosetta is so stoked that she tried to get on his dick until she remembered what was happening downstairs.
Carnage!
Cleo popped two days later, and she and Adonis had a little boy named Titan. Eye roll. Jesus. It’s like those two can’t even pretend to be normal anymore. Which reminds me, the wedding that shouldn’t have been a wedding happened a week later, after Adonis had Cleo’s dress refitted. I hate that bitch. She popped that baby out and walked out of the hospital with her original figure right in place. I think Mindy is right; she is a demon.
After that, well, Alex went, which is hilarious, because let’s just say that she broke her promise to Chilli, and I now have a brother-in-law who is still shell-shocked and mutters only gibberish when he remembers how and when Alex’s water broke.
Hilarious.
As for me? I got a honeymoon, of sorts, by which I mean that I spent a week having sex with my boyfriend while we stayed in bed, ate food—that Sin has to keep making for another month—and just…enjoyed getting to know each other. He’s not so bad, actually, and I have a whole new respect for him because, as it turns out, he was well ahead of Zeus, having used Luiz and his people to ferret out any helpful information about our whereabouts. They are the ones who discovered that the house we were being kept in was the foreclosed home of one of the security guys, Hector something, and Ares himself came barreling my way long before Zeus pinged Rose. So yeah, those dead bodies in the house were people he killed. Or beat up. Or watched Juan and Luiz murder. To get to me. We’re not telling the police that, of course, and according to Rosetta’s version to the cops, Hector, Timmons, and whoever else was helping them tripped and shot themselves. Case closed.
He says that he doesn’t regret it, and that the only regret he could have is not being able to kill Mindy before Zeus arrived and pulled him off her.
Speaking of Mindy, she’s gone. Well, not dead or anything, I don’t think, but while they were transferring her to some psych ward up in New York, she disappeared. Like some real live X-Files shit. I was a wreck at first, nearly hysterical at the thought of that maniac out there again, until Rosetta dropped me a text assuring me that sometimes, things just go missing. In Mindy’s case…I don’t know if she’ll ever turn back up.
I’d bet that that poor freak is in some secret CIA prison somewhere, ripping her hair out in chunks and screaming her head off. Which is just penance for her sins, I’m thinking.
As for the rest, well, Brent and Sophia are looking all kinds of close, Beau has a hickey the size of Texas on the top of her right boob, while Heath is walking around grinning like an ass, and Grange keeps trying to cop a feel of Doc Payne’s butt.
Whatever. Here I am. I am the proud owner of absolutely zero babies, thanks to a C-section that left me twenty pounds lighter, give or take a few pounds that I don’t want to admit to still carrying, because Ares fed me a lot on that pseudo-honeymoon.
“How you doing, babe? You feeling okay?” Ares asks quietly, sending tingles through me with his soft smile and the kiss he lays on my head.
Am I okay? No, I’m better than that. I got to fulfill a dream for one of my own, our crazy lives are returning to normal, and I’m wearing a ring that made Rosetta so green with envy that I can still hear her screams of jealous rage. Mostly because Ares recorded them for me, the absolute angel.
“I’m awesome. But I’m telling you right off the bat, Hart, that I’m not doing that pregnancy crap ever again,” I whisper, loving that he’s more than on board with that.
See? Compromise. Something that I’ve never been known to do before, but that I will yield to, as long as it’s my guy doing the compromising. Wink.
“Baby, after the shit I saw with the other women, I’m not even willing to knock your sweet ass up. Speaking of, Sweet, you’re setting a damn date,” he growls, smiling at my giggles as I watch the family coo over the babies and dodge Sin’s proprietorial attitude.
“Hey! That’s mine!”
“How about in two months?” I ask, humming when he kisses me and murmurs a thank you. “That way, I can recover, have a wicked bachelorette with strippers, and fit into the dress of my dreams.”
“No strippers,” he growls against my lips, chuckling when I pull back and pout, using a look that’s worked on him so often already that the idiot should know not to give in.
“Christ! Fine. One stripper, and I get to choose who it is,” he snarls, smiling again when I frown but nod. “I must have been a saint in a previous life to have landed my ass stuck with you, woman.”
I laugh, kissing him deeply, and ignore the catcalls from all around us, along with Beau’s snickers, which are cut off when Heath falls all over her.
He must have been a saint, and the best part is…
He’s gonna die one, too, with what I have planned for us.
Epilogue
Five years later
Ares
“Annabelle Jackson Hart, don’t you dare do it!” I yell, my heart dropping into my ass when the little shit lets go of the tree branch and falls to the ground, performing a perfect flip and nailing her landing with a flourish that does nothing for my blood pressure.
“But daddy! I did it perfect,” she calls out, her eyes sparkling with glee when I face-palm and check the time, wondering when I’ll be off duty.
When Tee told me that she had no intentions of going through pregnancy again, I envisioned a life of freedom, sex, lazy weekends, and more s
ex with my wife. All over the house. What I got instead were seven fucking kids, all in a matter of three years, because when she said that she didn’t want to do pregnancy again, she didn’t necessarily mean that she didn’t want to adopt an entire orphanage.
“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m on her tail,” Branson sighs, the eleven-year-old hotfooting it up the tree after his sister.
These kids are animals. My animals, and I love them so much that I don’t even mind that baby Zoe is chewing on my ear and letting the drool run inside.
“Tell me again why you thought that she’d get home early?” Adonis laughs, watching his own son tearing by us after my youngest son, Joe, who also runs screaming by, as naked as the day that his little butt—now four years old—was born.
I groan, not bothering to answer, and fall onto a lounger as my brothers, Heath, Grange, Nate, and Brent sit down, too, all of them in some stage of “babysitting”—or, technically, parenting—themselves. Brent is holding his baby Kimberlynn against his chest, fast asleep, while his eldest daughter, Gracey, tries to herd all the kids who are jumping into the pool.
Nate, who has his own son strapped to his chest and loaded up with enough sunscreen and protective gear to banish the sun entirely, sighs and doesn’t even flinch when the two-month-old burps and spits up all the way down his shoulder and back.
“Jesus, man, that kid’s got zero table manners,” Grange grunts, smiling affectionately when Aiden snuffles and protests as Nate shifts him so that he can clean himself up.
“Dude, your daughter projectile-vomited into your mouth last week,” I laugh, watching the big guy shudder and then stare adoringly at baby Uma.
“It didn’t taste that bad,” Grange grunts, turning my stomach. “And it was my fault, anyway. I shouldn’t have been jiggling her so much. Bunny warned me.”
The poor asshole finally got himself married to the doc, after she made him jump through a bunch of hoops, and he knocked her ass up the moment he could swing it. I’ll never forget when she gave birth, and a girl popped out, and I won’t ever, ever forget the way that he cried like a baby when he first held Uma. To say that the big, unsmiling, stoic man was enchanted is an understatement. In fact, I think that he may be obsessed with both his wife and his daughter—so much so that he frequently sniffles when they aren’t around. Freaking sap.
The rest of my brothers are all just as sappy, and it’s safe to say that we no longer own our own balls, our credit cards, or any control over our lives. Basically, our wives are all ruthless terrors who decided that today, of all days, they needed a spa day. And a break from the million kids that they’ve brought to the table.
“Amelia! Do not bite your brother! Jesus. That kid may not have Tee’s DNA, but they’re spirit matches or some shit!” I grumble as I watch Branson remove his sister’s teeth from their brother’s arm.
Poor Lionus—I didn’t fucking name the kid, so don’t look at me for this shit; that’s all on Tee—doesn’t make a sound. He just stands up slowly, reaches out, and pats Amelia’s cheek. Lovingly.
That’s my boy. He doesn’t ever, ever hit back, and he’s as serene as a freaking guru. I give him, oh, about twenty years and meeting a good woman, and then I think that we’ll see some pure terror emerge from that boy. I should know; I had the same experience with Tee, and with every new child that we’ve been blessed with. The more I love, the more willing I am to kill any son of a bitch who so much as looks at my family, and with my boys at my back, I’m more than ready to take on life on those terms.
As things stand, we’re all bury buddies. That shit started about a year ago, when Brent called us in a panic because he’d “accidently” killed Gracey’s dog…though I’m calling bullshit on that, especially after seeing the bite mark that that dog put on Gracey, and the venom in Brent’s eyes as Sophia was crying and fretting all over their daughter.
“At least she only bites. I woke up last night, and Hera was standing beside the bed, just staring at me, the same way that Rosetta does when she’s mad. It scared the shit outta me,” Zeus complains, balancing three-year-old Percy on his lap while the child bounces and demands a ride.
“I feel nothing for you, man. Nothing. Seth and Axel loosened all the bolts on the bar stools the other day. I almost broke my ass, and Alex laughed so hard that she peed herself,” Chilli grumbles, falling off his chair without warning, because yeah, Alex put the voodoo on him and threatened to kill him if she tripped over one more nonexistent obstacle.
I don’t want to believe it, but I think that Chilli literally took his clumsiness back, in order to save his own life.
“Ahhhh, this is the life,” Heath sighs, leaning back and humming to his own little princess Dorothy.
Beau has a thing for The Wizard of Oz, according to the poor bastard, and I fully expect their next child to be named Toto. In fact, I put ten grand on that name when Adonis started the betting pool after Heath announced that he’d knocked up his wife again.
“It sure is,” I murmur as I watch all the kids of various ages running around, tumbling into the pool, or, in Annabelle’s case, giving Branson conniptions as she climbs the tree again.
It’s so peaceful, as much chaos as there may be, and I find myself grinning as I think back to five years ago, before the kids. Just me, Tee, and her screams of rage because the stripper I hired for her bachelorette was a three-hundred-pound guy who works the fetish scene.
Now, there is so much more. So much more mayhem and screaming and…life.
I’m about to go into one of my frequent reflective moods and start romanticizing just how great life is when I hear a chorus of shrieks and screams, and then turn to see Jack and the other Sweet men walking into the backyard through the side gate. Accompanied by clowns, animals, and what looks to be an entire circus troupe.
Jesus.
“Pop-Pop’s here! Who wants some money?”
And that, as they say, is all I can focus on as a smile breaks over my face when my wife and her sisters arrive and join the kids, screaming like five-year-olds themselves and immediately joining in on the fun.
Life isn’t good. It’s Sweet chaos, and thank God for that.
