Page 78 of Written with You (The Regret Duet 2)
“Hey, Rosie Posie. I think Willow needs to cool off. The sun has gone straight to her head. Let’s get in the water.”
“Yay!” Rosalee squealed. “Let me get my floaties.” She trotted over to our chairs and riffled through Willow’s beach bag, throwing everything out in her furious search.
“Caven, put me down.”
“You got any more Ryan Reynolds jokes?”
“Not at the moment. But I reserve the right should one pop into my head at a future date.”
I chuckled and set her back on her feet, the water biting her ankles. She could make whatever jokes she wanted as long as she was making them with me.
“I love you, Willow. In this second and all the ones to come.”
I hooked her around the waist, dragging her into my chest, and kissed her hard and completely indecently.WILLOWFive years later…“Willow!” Rosalee called down the hall. “Keira’s diaper stinks.”
I looked at Caven, who was sitting beside me on the couch. He had his legs kicked up on the leather ottoman, mine draped across his, a football game playing in the background.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” I asked.
“Are you going to cheat and use the atomic bomb again?”
I popped one shoulder. “Probably.”
“Then no.”
I laughed and shoved at his shoulder. “Come on. I’m tired. I did the last one.”
“No, you didn’t. You took the girls out back and drew on the sidewalk for an hour, blew bubbles for another hour, painted their hands and feet then stamped them in their baby books for a half hour after that. Which, babe, I know I don’t have to remind you of this, but Rosalee is almost ten. You can probably stop the baby book before she becomes college-age. But then, after you did all that, you brought them back inside and asked me to change Keira’s diaper before you went up to take a shower. But what you failed to mention was that, before I removed that diaper, I was going to need a hazmat suit.”
I laughed again. This was all very, very true.
It had taken two years and watching Rosalee graduate kindergarten for me to catch the baby bug. For as many times as Caven had asked me if I’d changed my mind about kids, I think he’d caught it long before then—possibly even before our wedding.
We had given a lot of thought to how we wanted to finish our family. Caven was concerned his family history would prevent us from adopting, so we both agreed to give IVF and surrogacy a go. However, we had no idea the emotional rollercoaster we’d signed up for.
First, it took over six months to find a surrogate we both trusted. I liked several of the women the agency had matched us with. Caven wasn’t so sure. And when I say he wasn’t so sure, I mean he threw their folders into the trash and told me that they were all unacceptable. By the fifth perfect candidate, who he ruled out because she was a coffee drinker, I realized he was just scared.
After everything we’d been through, trust was not his strong suit. And trusting a stranger with his unborn child was more than he could handle.
Eventually, Beth volunteered to be our surrogate, and while Caven was ecstatic, Ian lost his mind. They weren’t together at the time. Or maybe they had been. Who the hell knew with those two. But when she showed up to break the news to Caven that she couldn’t do it, she was wearing an engagement ring the size of Rosalee’s head (slight exaggeration, but only slight.)
That night as we lay in bed, we talked a lot about how we’d met and how far we’d come. Caven was a firm believer that we’d been destined to be a family from the start. So, with that in mind, I told him that there was a surrogate out there who was already meant to carry our son or daughter. He just had to keep his eyes and his heart open long enough to see her.
I woke up the next morning to find the file of the dreaded coffee drinker on my nightstand. Her name was Hope.
After that, things only got harder. Holy shit, getting someone else pregnant was rough.
With only one damaged ovary, it took months of shots, medication, ultrasounds, and failure upon failure for my body to finally produce one mature egg. While our one little fighter successfully fertilized, the quality of the embryo was poor and every doctor who spoke with us begged us not to get our hopes up.
It was the impossible.
But we had been the impossible from the very start.
Keira Marie Hunt was born nine months later. When we’d found out she was a girl, we’d expected another redhead who looked just like Rosalee. But life once again proved it worked best with the element of surprise. At eighteen months, Keira looked just like her father—brown hair, blue eyes, and all.
