by Stacy Gail
“Damn straight,” Tina said and laid a smacking kiss on her husband’s cheek. “I love this poor deer in the headlights, epic burps and all.”
“So no one was surprised when Tina got hitched first,” Styx went on while the room laughed again. “But I was stunned as hell when one fine day, my little brother—”
“By fourteen minutes,” Trey cut in loudly. “Fourteen. Y’know, I hate that damn number.”
“My little brother,” Styx plowed on and turned to smile at Sydney as she dissolved in snorting laughter along with the rest of the room. “announced to the family that he’d met the woman of his dreams and he was going to marry her. Thing was, he said this the very first day they met, so all I could think was, has Trey lost his damn mind? I didn’t know who this Maeve person was, but I did know my brother. Not going into details, but it is safe to say that before Maeve, Trey enjoyed a very active social life. Very.”
“Move it along, Terrance,” Emily hissed while Trey looked like his tighty-whities were getting tighter by the second.
“So I worried.” Styx shot his brother a wicked smile. “How could my brother claim to be in love at first sight? How could he ever do right by a woman he just met, and be everything she needed him to be, when he didn’t even know yet what it was that she needed in life to make her happy? And how could Maeve make Trey happy? It didn’t make sense to me, and I was certain they were making the biggest mistake of their lives by rushing things along. And then I met my Syd,” he said, turning to look at her. The rest of the room did too, but he didn’t give a shit about that. All that mattered was her, his woman, and he had to grin at the flame of color flooding into her cheeks. “It’s a moment I’ll never forget. Did I ever tell you about that moment, Syd? About the immediate impact you had on me?”
“Uh, no.” With a glance around the room, she delicately cleared her throat. “You can tell me later in private, okay? This toast you’re making now is about Trey and Maeve, so if you could get back to talking about them—”
“Yeah, yeah, in a minute.” He reached down to grasp her hand in his and bent to caress her knuckles with his lips. God, she was so soft. Dainty. Perfect. “It was the most amazing moment. There you were, too distracted to even notice me, yet you turned those blue eyes my way and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. That was all it took. A mere glance from you, and I lost lung function. You did that to me.”
Her expression was torn between stunned amazement and delight. “Do you want me to apologize?”
“No, babe. I want you to do that to me for the rest of our lives.”
Sydney’s eyes went huge, and he heard his mother gasp.
“Oh my God. Arthur…”
“Yeah, hon, I heard,” his father said somewhere across the table. “It’s happening.”
“About damn time,” Tina offered. “Timing sucks, though. Still, I knew this was going to happen, like, right from the very beginning. Didn’t you know this was going to happen?”
“I was hoping,” Maeve answered, sounding thrilled. “I love Sydney, and I know she loves Styx. I want her to be happy.”
“I do, too, though how the hell she’s going to be happy with my idiot brother who can’t even get through a goddamn best man’s speech without veering off into fucking la-la-land is beyond me,” Trey offered, sounding pissy. “Can we just cut this so-called speech short so Maeve and I can get to our first dance already, Styx? I have some serious grab-assing to get to before she delivers our first child.”
“Sorry, brother. I’m only going to hang you up for another minute or so, because there’s something I’ve got to do first. And I’ve got to do it now, or I feel like I’m going to fucking die.” Eyes on Sydney, Styx went down on one knee in front of her and ignored the room’s collective gasp. All that mattered was Sydney, who was sitting stock-still, as if she’d turned into a statue, and the only thing moving were her eyes. As he watched, they filled with tears, and that had him more than a little freaked out. “Something happened to me the day we met, Syd. My life changed, yeah, but it goes even deeper than that. I changed. I didn’t know that could happen, but it did. Everything that I am changed to fit you into my life, to make you a part of me. The best part of me. I’m now at the point where I know, without any fucking doubt in my mind, that I can’t live without you. I don’t even want to try.”
“Styx.” Her free hand came up to press over her mouth even as the tears fell, and he couldn’t tell if this was a bad sign. “Baby.”
“Do you want to know why I kissed you in church today?” he went on, trying to find the right words to convince her that if she’d let him, he’d find a way to be everything she ever dreamed. “I saw you walking down that aisle toward me, and I swear to Christ I forgot you weren’t coming to me. That you weren’t making that walk to promise yourself to me forever. And you know what? That sucked, babe. In that moment, I’ve never wanted anything more than to have you as my bride. Throughout that entire ceremony, all I could think was that it should be you and me getting hitched so that by the time we went to bed tonight, we’d do it as husband and wife. The way we were meant to be.”
Her hitching breath was probably heard on the other side of the banquet hall. “I thought I was the only one who felt that way—that we were meant to be.”
“I told you before that you weren’t alone in this, but apparently I didn’t make myself clear. Let me do that now.” He took the hand he held and pressed it to his chest, so she could feel what the hell she was doing to him. “When I look at you, I see the rest of my forever. When you laugh, I wonder if our kids will have that same laugh, though you’re so damn small I’m scared to death that carrying a Hardwick baby would fucking kill you. You may have noticed, we’re not easy, and we tend to come along in pairs.”
“Don’t worry about that, honey,” his mother said from her place at the table, openly crying into her linen napkin. “That only runs on the female side of things.”
“Good to know.” With one worry officially off his list, he looked back to Sydney. “So what do you say, Fun-Size? You came along and lit a fire in me that’s never going to end, that’s a promise, and I want everyone to see that promise I’m making to you by putting a ring on your finger. So let’s do this. Let’s belong to each other forever. Say you’ll marry me.”
“Vegas,” she whispered instead, while the tears continued to fall.
He blinked, while everything inside him hit pause. “What?”
“Las Vegas.” She spoke more strongly, then peeled her hand from her mouth to show him a smile so beautiful it filled up every part of his soul. “It’s not quite, uh… five-ish now, right?” she said, clearly looking around the room for a clock. “If we catch the next flight to Vegas, we can be married before we go to bed tonight. This is what I was thinking while I was walking down the aisle to you, because I don’t need a big wedding, as beautiful and joyous as they are. I don’t have any family to speak of who’d even care that I was getting married, so no worries on that end. Besides, all I need is you, so—”
“That’s a yes if I ever heard one.” He caught her by the nape and pulled her into a hard kiss while the room around them exploded into cheers, but they didn’t have time to bask in the moment.
They had a plane to catch.
Five years later…
“Deirdre, you are the most adorable little snowflake.” Emily Hardwick took the time to kiss her four-year-old granddaughter’s brightly rouged cheek. Like all the under-five-year-old ballet students in OMMniscience’s Yoga and Ballet Studio, Deirdre Hardwick was dressed in white tights and leotard, with a matching white tutu with crystals sprinkled throughout the tulle. Her father, Trey, had gone ridiculously gooey over seeing his firstborn all dressed up for her first ballet performance. He’d gotten so wrapped up in taking pictures of her and a smiling, pregnant Maeve, that ultimately he’d had to be dragged away by Arthur and his uncle, Andrew.
The Hardwick men had been conscripted months ago to create the sets for her studio’s ann
ual Christmas production of The Nutcracker, and they’d gone above and beyond, as always. Everywhere she looked there were members of that extended family, changing out much of the set pieces of the Christmas party scene, in order to prep for the Mouse King’s battle scene.
A dozen little “snowflakes” waited in the wings for their dance with the Snow Queen at the end of Act I, and to say they were all excited about their debut was putting it mildly. Keeping them quiet and in one place was like herding cats, Sydney thought, checking her clipboard to make sure she had the Mouse King ready to go out for her solo. But Emily and Maeve were doing a bang-up job of it, and she adored them all the more for their efforts.
“Syd.” She jumped at least a foot as her name was growled in her ear. “You promised me you’d monitor the show while sitting down. I’m looking at you right now, and guess what? You’re not fucking sitting down.”
“Styx. Lord, you startled me.” Deflecting as best she could—because he was right, she wasn’t anywhere near a chair—Sydney turned to make sure her student’s mouse ears were on straight. “Okay, Elli, that’s your cue. Go out there and be the greatest Mouse King the world has ever seen.”
“Yes, Madame Sydney.”
“Sydney, I’m serious.” As soon as the Nutcracker’s soldiers finished their dance and the Mouse King was launched onto the stage, Styx plucked the clipboard from her hands and shoved it at the nearest adult standing by. “Don’t make me regret not putting the kibosh on this production when we found out you’ve got two onboard this time around.”
Automatically Sydney’s hands went to her now-enormous baby bump. She was three weeks away from her due date—New Year’s day, to be specific—and as each day passed, she wondered more and more if she’d be able to make it into the New Year without actually exploding.
Putting the dance studio’s Christmas production in the rearview mirror would help take the pressure off, certainly. With a cast that had now swelled to sixty students, her studio had become well-known for producing some of Chicago’s finest dancers. She now employed three other instructors who loved dance just as much as she did, and together their dance team had won more trophies—both regionally and nationally—than any other privately-owned dance studio in the nation. One of her first students ever—a product of Chicago Arts and Technical Education high school—was now in New York with a dance company there, and another had gone abroad to become a principle dancer with the Royal Ballet in London.
Building up her studio while settling down to married life had been a wild ride, to say the least, but she’d loved every chaotic minute of it. A year later, when she’d become pregnant with their son, Jackson—or Jax, as everyone called him—her studio had earned its way into the spotlight on a national level for the first time. She’d thought she couldn’t get any happier, but when she’d become pregnant again, this time with twins, she’d discovered a new level of giddy joy.
Every day seemed to improve on the last, and she couldn’t wait to see what the next day would bring.
Styx, however, was a different story. When they’d learned that her unusually large baby bump was in fact two babies, he immediately lost his sanity, as far as Sydney could tell. At first, he’d blamed himself for what she happily viewed as their good fortune, as he thought that being a twin himself had stacked the decks for a multiple birth to happen. But finally Sydney did recall something about her mother’s grandmother being a twin. When she’d mentioned she would have gotten knocked up with twins no matter who the potential father might have been, he’d told her in no uncertain terms to shut the hell up and never mention “potential fathers” again.
Then he’d made love to her for the rest of the night, just to make sure she understood that he was her one and only baby-maker.
Needless to say, she’d loved every minute of it.
As they got closer to her due date, Styx tried putting his foot down on just about everything in her life that was more strenuous than breathing. He hovered when she was in the kitchen making their meals. He wouldn’t let her walk from a parked car to a store, instead dropping her off at the store’s entrance so she could wait for him—preferably while sitting—as he went and parked the car. Midway through her pregnancy, he’d taken away all her dance shoes and replaced them with comfy, extra-cushiony sneakers. He’d made no secret about recruiting Zemi to openly spy on her during the workday.
Now that they were in the final stretch of her pregnancy, she didn’t know whether to hug him or slug him.
“Thank Christ this is your last day at work, because I can’t take this shit anymore.” Looking thoroughly harassed, he nevertheless used gentle hands to drag her away from the offstage wing toward the props corral. “Zemi’s working the music. Rick has the stage manager thing down. Tina’s with her son and Jax in the office, watching cartoons. Mom’s got the little squirts with Maeve—”
“At this point, I’d like to point out that Maeve’s pregnant too, and she’s doing fine.”
“Maeve’s knocked up with another singleton, she’s only four months along, and since she’s about half a foot taller than you, there’s more room for her little bun in the oven to grow. But most importantly, she’s not my fucking problem. You are.”
“So I’m a problem to you?” She gave him a bright smile to cover the sudden, sharp pain in her back that radiated around her belly.
Whoa.
Hello.
“Jesus.” He breathed the word while looking up at the ceiling. It was something he did a lot lately. “You’re my problem, my pain the ass, and my nightmare. You’re also my perfect solution, my absolute cure, and my hottest fantasy. And the only real nightmare I’ve ever had about you was of losing you, because I could never fucking survive that. That’s why I get pissed when you’re careless with yourself.”
“I remember a time when I felt the same about you and your careless actions.” She smiled into his eyes, hoping that would work some magic against his dark scowl. “Do you?”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t pregnant with twins at the time.”
“That would have been newsworthy.”
“Cut the crap, Syd. You know what I mean.”
She did, and as the seconds ticked by and the pressure in her back grew worse, she was increasingly inclined to agree with him. “You’re right. I should be sitting down right about now.”
He went so still it was like he’d been struck with a freeze ray. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean, what’s wrong? I’m agreeing with you.”
“You’d never agree to sit down during a production that you put together if there wasn’t something wrong.”
“Styx, nothing’s wrong. Exactly.” Maybe it was just gas. In a really weird place.
“What do you mean by exactly?”
“My lower back’s killing me, and it’s kind of starting to radiate around to the front. I seem to recall this same weird pain the day before I had Jax. So maybe I should—” Another pain hit, a spasm that took her breath away, and she leaned into him so she wouldn’t go crashing to the floor.
Hello!
“Sydney.” There was a thread of alarm in Styx’s voice as he caught her, then picked her up entirely to carry her to the nearest chair. “Baby, talk to me. Is it the babies?”
“More like the body that’s carrying the babies.” She began to pant, in part because that was what she’d been trained to do in her birthing classes, in part because she couldn’t do anything else. “I think my body’s decided it’s reached critical mass and can’t take any more, so it’s evicting its tenants.”
“Labor.” He said the word like it was all he could manage. “You’re in labor?”
“Yep.” Another wave hit, stronger than before, and she tried not to groan too loudly. The show had to go on, after all. The last thing she wanted to do was interrupt her students’ time in the spotlight.
“Don’t worry, Syd, I’ve got this covered. Can you stand?”
“In a second.” She fumbled around for t
he walkie-talkie she’d stuck in her jacket pocket, trying her best to keep things calm so he wouldn’t flip out. “I’ve got to let Zemi know… she’s now in charge. Jax—”
“Tina’s got him, so no worries there, yeah? Let me get my old man’s attention so he can help me get you out to the car.”
“The show—”
“Fuck the show, Syd. As of now my only thought is you, so do me a favor and shut the hell up until I can get you to the hospital. Then you can yell your damn head off at me, and I won’t say boo about it. But don’t you say another goddamn word about the show, or I swear I’m gonna lose it.”
So much for keeping him calm, she thought as he reached for his phone.
“Call one Nut, and the other one Cracker. It’s so obvious I can’t believe I’m the first one to think of it.”
“Feel free to shut up at any time.” Styx didn’t even glance his brother’s way as his family crowded around the Family Viewing Room’s window that overlooked the two bassinets that had been wheeled in for their debut. Since it was only two weeks until Christmas, both boys were wrapped in blankets with little snowmen all over them, and each had a little beanie on—one red, one green.
He had a feeling color-coding was going to be their best friend from here on in.
“Look at that, Jax.” Settling his three-year-old son on his hip, Styx pointed to the tiny little bundles wrapped in the season’s finest. “You now get to be the oldest brother, just like me. Those little babies are always going to be younger than you, so that means you are the leader of the pack. Isn’t that cool?”
