Great Sass: Providence Family Ties Series

by Mary B. Moore

  “Next door on your right,” I shouted out, looking back at Parker, who was shaking his head as he watched her shove the door open and disappear inside. “The best friend data disclosure act?”

  “Never a dull moment, man. Never, ever a dull moment.”

  Dad chuckled, but the humor fled almost as quickly as it arrived. “Want to tell us what’s going on with your woman? Jackson’s filled us in on some of it, but I’m thinking we’re missing a lot of the facts.”

  So, with Ned helping me, we laid out all of the information about the fucker and her health. By the end, Mom and MeeMee had made plans for Sadie and the baby, and the men had made some for her safety.

  No matter what, she was going to have everything she needed and then some.

  Sadie

  It felt like I’d just closed my eyes when I was blinking them open again, squinting at the amount of light in the room.

  Given how many people I’d had around me recently, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see someone in the room with me, but when I saw Ari watching me like a creeper, the squeak that came out of me proved it was still possible.

  “So, you’re having a baby?”

  Rolling onto my back, I dug around for the remote doohickey that raised the top of the bed, so I was sitting upright for this conversation.

  First things first, though. I needed to ask a question about something that’d worried me earlier.

  “How pale do I look right now?”

  Sound vain? Well, try having hair that was naturally white blonde and your eyebrows and eyelashes being the same color. Then try having skin so pale you made milk look tanned. Add all of that together, and normally it was a strange look. But when you’d been hoiking your guts up for days on end, it would’ve been even worse.

  Even being sick, I didn’t want to look like a freak, so I needed to know.

  “Your eyebrows and eyelashes still have some of the color on them,” she waved her hand in the air.

  She had beautiful dark eyelashes and eyebrows naturally, so she probably wouldn’t understand unless she shaved hers off or if she bleached them white. That said, it was a relief that you couldn’t vomit dye from your facial hair.

  “Awesome,” I sighed, shifting around to make myself comfortable. “And, yes, I’m pregnant.”

  Of all the things I expected from her, it wasn’t for her to jump up and throw her arms in the air, screaming, “Yes!”

  “You’re not surprised?”

  Sitting back down, she leaned forward with her elbows on the mattress beside me. “Honey, I’m surprised but ecstatic. That man in the waiting room isn’t the Elijah he’s been for the last two years almost. He’s the man we knew before he lost his best friend.” At my look, she nodded. “Yeah, we know. Jackson filled us in on what happened with Coop’s parents, and it all added up. I mean, losing Cooper wasn’t easy on him, but I know for a fact it was his parents who made Elijah withdraw from life and turn into someone who couldn’t find light in it.”

  I only knew some of what’d happened with them, but every time I thought about it, I wanted to smack them both silly. Grief twisted your mind, I knew that from personal experience with Mum, but to lash out like that, blaming someone who’d lost a brother? Fuck that. Making someone miserable didn’t cure grief, and blaming someone who was faultless didn’t make it better either. They would know that by now, so why hadn’t they apologized to him yet?

  “How far along are you?”

  Putting my hand over my stomach, still trying to figure out where inside the baby was inside of me, I said, “Fourteen plus three.”

  She frowned and tilted her head. “So, seventeen weeks? How is that possible?”

  “No, apparently that means fourteen weeks and three days.”

  “Wow.” She sat back, looking amazed. “When can you find out what you’re having? You’re going to find out, right?”

  “I didn’t ask,” I shrugged. “I was too shocked by the fact I was seeing a baby inside my stomach. Then it started doing this little rave type dance, and that was it.”

  “Shit, I missed it,” she pouted, sitting back. “You can get recordings of your scans now, so next time do that so I can see it if I’m not with you.”

  One of the first things that’d hit me after I’d found out about the baby was that I was alone in this pregnancy. Yes, I had family and Elijah, but I didn’t have my mum to hold my hand through it and answer all of the questions that would come to me over the next however many months I had left.

  Now, listening to Ari and how involved she wanted to be, I realized that I wasn’t alone. I still missed Mum and wished I could call her up to ask her things, but I had a lot of people who’d be there for me.

  “When I moved here, I didn’t think I’d find happiness. All I wanted to do was escape and survive, you know?” Seeing as how she’d been in that room in the cabin with me when I was shot, yeah, Ari got what I meant. “But even with what we went through, I think this is the most at peace I’ve felt since Mum died. I know I still have Orson to worry about, but I feel like I’ve found the place for me when I wasn’t even looking for it.”

  Grabbing my hand, she squeezed it gently. “I love that, and I’m relieved you feel that way. You’ve got a lot of us behind you, Dahl, so don’t you ever forget that.”

  She wasn’t kidding. I doubt any of them even knew how many members there were in her family, and once they found out about the baby… Oh, shitting shit.

  “Do the rest of the family know about the baby?”

  Throwing her head back, Ari burst out laughing. “I’m fairly certain my aunt was sending a text to all of them when I came in here to share the good news, so you’re going to be inundated with them soon enough. Hell, Gramps and Grams will probably come through that door in about an hour, absolutely beside themselves that they’re getting to keep you.”

  It was a scary thought, but it also made me feel warm inside. Initially, they’d been slightly intimidating, even though Hurst and Linda were the most loving couple I’d ever met, but it felt good to be wanted like that by them all.

  “Getting to keep me,” I snorted.

  “You laugh now, but you know as well as I do that if they got the chance, they’d probably kidnap you.”

  Eh, she wasn’t wrong there.

  Again, the thought made me feel good, but at the same time, I could feel tears starting to build, and I didn’t want to be one of those women—the ones who cried at the first thing.

  “Anyway, tell me what’s happening with you? I’m trying to remember how long it’s been since I saw you, but I don’t even know how long I’ve been in here.”

  “It’s been four days since I saw you. I wasn’t in on Monday. Tuesday, and Wednesday you were off sick, Thursday you were brought in here, and today’s Friday.” Well, that answered that. “And I’ve got news.”

  Noticing she was picking her thumbnail now, I squealed, “You’re pregnant, too!”

  Ari dropped back in her seat, holding her hands up in the air. “No, definitely not. That’s a whole lot of hell no.”

  “Well, that’s disappointing.”

  “My brothers found out about my surgeries,” she whispered, pulling me out of my disappointment.

  “Oh, shit. Wait, are you talking about your boobies and your nose?”

  Nodding, she pulled her legs up so that she could rest her chin on her knees. “Yeah, Parker told me I should tell them, so I had that awkward conversation with the four of them on Monday.”

  Ari had suffered as a teenager with issues with her appearance. She hadn’t developed breasts, and her nose was a problem for her, so after hitting rock bottom, she’d had therapy and undergone a nose job and breast implants.

  As someone who’d had the opposite problem, I could understand how it affected you in a negative way, except I wasn’t brave enough to have mine reduced. Some people might sneer at her for doing it, but until you struggle to look in the mirror and consider suicide as a way to get away from t
he problem, you’ll never understand how bad it can get.

  I hadn’t ever considered taking my life because of my breasts, which had hit double D cups when I was thirteen, but I’d gone as far as wrapping a bandage as tightly as I could around them to try and minimize them when I went to school. I’d also been the victim of a lot of random groping, nasty words, and attempted rape.

  People would hear Ari’s story and judge her for it, but equally, they’d look at my chest and judge me for the size of them, too. It was a horrible situation and position to be in, but I didn’t care what people thought anymore. I was born the way I was born, and I refused to feel ashamed because of it now.

  “How did they not know before?” How did you miss something like that?

  “Can you imagine your brother noticing something to do with your breasts?”

  “You’ve got a point.” Craig would rather eat his hand than even admit I had boobs or a vagina, so noticing a difference in their size? Yeah, it’d never happen.

  “Plus, I stuffed my bra from the age of about fourteen, so they wouldn’t have noticed. With my nose, I also contoured around it to make it look a different shape, but they said they’d assumed I’d just stopped wearing a lot of makeup.”

  “Well, hell. That makes sense.”

  “My brothers are men, they don’t think about shit like that unless it’s made obvious to them.”

  “How did they take it?” Ari’s brothers might be men, but they also loved their sister hugely.

  “They were angry and hurt, and when I explained why I hadn’t told them and what’d been said at school, they were livid. It sucked, but I explained how if I’d told them what was going on, they’d have gone to the school to beat this shit out of the guy who said he’d fuck me if the lights were off and I had a paper bag over my head. His saying it to his friends hurt, but they were a small group of kids. If he’d had the crap beaten out of him, people would’ve asked why, and the story about what he’d said would’ve spread to almost everyone. You can block a small group out, but you can’t block a whole school out, you know?” she explained quietly, not meeting my eyes. “I didn’t want to deal with that, and I don’t regret not telling them.”

  My heart broke for her.

  “They’ll get over it, Ari. They’re a protective lot, but anyone would understand it when they heard your reasons. It wasn’t an easy thing to go through, especially as a teenager when you’re already insecure about what’s going on and have hormones running riot through you. You dealt with it the only way you could.”

  “Oh, they’re over me keeping the surgeries from them, but they still want to go and beat the shit out of the guy who said it.”

  I didn’t feel one scrap of pity for the wanker.

  Just then, there was a knock on the door, and a woman I recognized as being Elijah’s mum from photos I’d see of her, Ronnie, poked her head in the room.

  “Sorry, am I interrupting anything?”

  Waving her in, Ari got up and hugged her aunt. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Feeling suddenly shy and worried, I watched as Ronnie turned and looked at my stomach. Then, she burst into tears and flung herself at me, almost strangling my neck with the force of the hug.

  “I want t-to thank y-you for so much,” she cried into my neck.

  Not knowing what to do, I looked at Ari, begging her to help me.

  “Aunt Ronnie, maybe sit back a bit, so you don’t crush Sadie.”

  Gasping, she shot back and put her hands on my stomach. And so it begins, I had about six months left of people randomly touching it. “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”

  Shaking my head, I looked down briefly where she was touching and wondered again if there really was a little baby in there. Fourteen weeks seemed like a long time, shouldn’t I be showing by now? I felt like a fraud.

  “I’m so excited and happy that you’re having my grandchild, honey,” she whispered, still crying openly. “Some of the best surprises are the ones that come out of the blue, and this is definitely one of them.”

  I blew out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, relieved that she was happy about the baby and not blaming me for trapping her son.

  “Has Elijah showed you the photos?” I asked shyly, then almost smacked my head with my hand. Of course he had, he was the one who had them.

  “Oh, I’ve seen them, and he’s absolute perfection.” He? I felt like it was a she, did that make me defective? Seeing my expression, Ronnie squeezed my hand. “Right now, it’s fifty-fifty on what the baby is, but so long as they’re healthy, who cares.”

  Smiling at her, I glanced at Ari to see that she was tearing up again. I thought I was meant to be the one who cried over everything?

  “I also want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing Elijah back to us. That boy—” I snorted internally at her calling him a boy “—hasn’t been the same since we lost Cooper. I know part of it was grief, but I also know that his parents blaming him for it and throwing it all back in his face was most of why he withdrew from us. They were like parents to him, too, so hearing something like that struck him hard.” Now it all started to make sense. “He wasn’t even allowed to go into the church initially for the funeral, but in the end, they agreed, so long as he sat at the back and left before it was time for them to walk past him.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I snapped. “For God’s sake, my mum was killed by a drunk driver, and him being treated like that at her funeral would be understandable. Them treating Elijah—who tried to save their son and ended up saving two other men with a fracture in his spine—like that is inconceivable. By all means, be angry and grieve, but…” I waved my arm in the air, struggling to find the words I was looking for.

  I was just so pissed off that all I could think about was hitting them both with my shoe.

  Lips twitching, Ronnie nodded in agreement. “Yeah, it was messed up, and it did a lot of damage to Elijah that I didn’t think he’d ever come back from. Now I see he has, and I need to thank you for giving us back our boy.”

  “And with the bonus of a grandchild,” Ari added.

  “You’ve made miracles happen for us, Sadie. Thank you.”

  And that’s when my badass self burst into tears and bawled my heart out on poor Elijah’s mum’s chest. I’d never made anything happen that I was aware of, and now this woman was saying I’d brought life back to Elijah after what he’d been through. And I was carrying a life inside me, too.

  “I’ve never been pregnant,” I wailed, not realizing that the shaking chest under me was because she was laughing at the randomness of those four words. “And I’ve never made a miracle happen.”

  “I’m thinking that isn’t true,” she whispered into the top of my hair. “I’ve met your family, and I reckon they’d call you a miracle regardless.”

  And, fuck me, that just made me cry even harder. When I realized my tears had no intentions of buggering off, I begged Ari to say something to piss me off. Anger always worked perfectly as a countermeasure for tears.

  Smiling with glee, she rubbed her hands together. “How much bigger do you think your boobies are going to get? They’re about the same size as a man’s head anyway. Do you think they’ll get double what they are now?”

  A mental image of me with boobs like that popped into my head, and I couldn’t hold back the gasp of horror. “You take that back.”

  “Can’t,” she shrugged. “And they’re definitely going to get bigger. Imagine what they’ll look like when the milk comes in.”

  If Ronnie hadn’t been there, I’d have tackled her to the floor and throttled her. “Take it back,” I hissed. “Or I’ll pop your tits like a balloon.”

  “Ah, Christ,” a deep voice groaned from the door, alerting us to the fact that we had company.

  All three of us glanced over and saw Elijah’s dad, Wyatt, standing next to him, with Jackson and his brothers behind him.

  “Oops,” I whispered, grinning wickedly at Ari no
w. “Pop, pop.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Elijah

  It took a while for the introductions to be completed because all my brothers had decided to join us after hearing the news from Jackson. They wouldn’t have missed celebrating the fact they were going to be uncles, even if it happened in a hospital.

  Parker had come back during it all to introduce us to an OB/GYN he trusted, Ross Parks. He’d confirmed the diagnosis for Sadie and advised us that admitting her to stabilize her glucose levels and make sure she could keep food down with the anti-nausea medication he was giving her was the best thing. I didn’t know when I was taking her to Sarasota Bay, but I knew it’d be happening, so Mom was going to do some research there, and we were making sure that everything was noted in her yellow file.

  If I’d been told I’d knocked someone up a year ago, I’d have been freaking the hell out. Now, though, I was reading through what’d been put in her file while looking stuff up online. I’d downloaded some pregnancy books onto my phone, but I was going to order paperback versions as well so that I could highlight essential parts and take notes.

  Maybe I should buy some index cards, too, so that I could test myself?

  Opening up my Amazon app, I added two packs to the cart that had the books and highlighters in it. I’d place the order once I knew where we were going to be staying when we left here.

  “You know, the information isn’t going to disappear if you put the folder down,” Sadie murmured, watching me from the bed.

  I’d taken a shower while my brothers were talking to her about what they all did, and because I’d still had my bags in the truck, I’d been able to change into clean clothes. I knew she wanted to have a shower, but she’d only just finished a light meal, so I wanted her stomach to have time to digest before she had one.

  This gave me time to have the chat with her that we needed to get out of the way.

  Standing up, I dropped the folder on the chair I’d just vacated and motioned for her to scoot over slightly. Staring at me like I’d grown two heads, she moved over and then watched as I lay down next to her on my side.