Page 65 of From the Embers
“As I’ll ever be.”
With an odd sense of calm washing over me, I dipped my head, staring at my lap, my girl’s face smiling on the backs of my lids. She was happy. She was healthy. She was just inside that house, waiting for her daddy to come home. Nothing else mattered.
“Eason!” Bree gasped.
I gave her hand a squeeze.
Here it comes. Just hold on, Eason. It’s almost over.
For a long second, she was eerily quiet. I couldn’t even be sure she was breathing. The only sound in that SUV was my heart pounding in my chest.
Deep breath in. It doesn’t matter. It changes nothing. Jagged exhale out.
“Oh my God!” she all but yelled, her voice echoing off the windows. And then Bree said the two words that somehow healed every wound I had and would ever experience. “She’s yours.”
My head snapped up so fast it was a wonder I didn’t break my neck. “What?”
She let out a loud laugh, the most beautiful tears of joy filling her eyes. “She’s yours. Luna’s yours. Look.” She shoved the phone in my face, and sure as hell, to a 99.999997 percent probability, I was Luna’s father.
In utter disbelief, I snatched the phone away and scrolled down, searching for her results in comparison to Madison. Maybe there had been a mistake. If I dropped my guard and let myself believe this even for a minute and it was wrong, I wouldn’t survive that crash back to reality.
The probability of Luna and Madison sharing parents was a heart-stopping, euphoric, big, fat, fucking gorgeous zero percent.
“Oh, fuck,” I rumbled, the relief so staggering my whole body trembled. “She’s my baby. She’s mine. It’s over and she’s mine.”
I flicked my gaze to Bree. She had a hand over her mouth, tears streaming from her eyes, but I didn’t need to see her lips to know her smile was epic.
And sure, I knew, whether or not she’d ever admit it, Bree had a lot of emotional turbulence riding on those results as well. But the all-consuming happiness radiating from her stunning face was for me, and if I hadn’t already been head-over-heels lost in that woman, that would have been the moment I knew there was no turning back.
Bree and I sat outside in the car for a while.
Laughing. Hugging. Kissing.
Just generally basking in an unfamiliar feeling of good news.
And when we were finally done, we got out and gave Rob and Jessica the biggest fuck-you we had to offer.
We walked inside to our family.
BREE
For the next six weeks, life was good. No. Strike that. Life was incredibly good.
With the IRS Audit in the rearview mirror, things slowed down at Prism. I hired a new support team to allow me more flexibility and blissfully went back to working nine-to-five as often as I could. Eason was still gigging a lot, but with summer coming to an end, his shows were almost completely limited to the weekends.
We’d finally taken the kids to the shelter to get a cat. Picking one out was easy. There was a little black-and-white kitten who adopted us the minute we walked through the door. He played with Asher, chasing him around like a dog, and then hung like a rag doll as Luna and Madison carted him around the shelter visiting room. And yeah, okay, fine, I didn’t necessarily want a cat, but as Eason filled out the paperwork, the kitten we’d not-so-cleverly named Oreo curled into my lap for a nap. It was love at first purr.
The following weekend, he’d disappeared to the tattoo studio. When he didn’t come home for five hours, I had a sneaking suspicion he was getting more done than just a touch-up on Luna’s moon. Sure enough, that night as we got ready for bed, he revealed a brightly colored orb covering his right pec. Asher and Madison’s names curled from the rays of the sun in brilliant red and orange hues. I may have cried. Laughing, but still crying. I couldn’t help myself, it was gorgeous—just like the man himself.
Being surrounded by so much happiness was a nice change of pace for us. Eason and I went back to family dinners, tag-teaming bedtime routines, and then quiet nights around the firepit. Though, this time, Eason wasn’t on the opposite end of the couch. Or if he was, my head was usually in his lap, his fingers tangled in my hair as he smiled down at me.
Being in love with Eason Maxwell was the easiest thing I’d ever done. I’d spent so many years trying to build the perfect life with the perfect husband, the perfect kids, and the perfect company. But mastering the perception of perfect isn’t the same as finding genuine happiness.
I’d thought I was happy with Rob. I’d thought I’d found my person, my soul mate, the one. What I’d found was a con man, a manipulator, and a liar. But even if you took all of that out of the equation, knowing what I now knew about how it felt to have a man truly support me—a man who always kept his family at the center of his thoughts and intentions, his dreams so big that they inspired everyone who met him—I’d still choose Eason. Every day of the week.
