The way Cam saw it, his wife was an extraordinary being. She never complained—ever. No hurdle was too high, and obstacles were mere challenges, not barriers. Giving up wasn’t in her nature. Emotions that would take others down didn’t stick. Envy, regret, disappointment, uncertainty. She navigated through it all with a grace and innocent dignity that seared his soul.

Lacey Anne Morrow Cameron was a naughty Madonna in see-through panties. A lioness who loved fiercely and would protect her family unto death. The determined young girl he rescued ended up saving his life. He owed everything to her. Absolutely everything. She held his life in the palm of her hand.

He liked to watch her when she was with the ladies, and he had plenty of opportunities because Casa de Cameron had been ground zero for their little coffee and cakes club from day one. His Ponytail might be the youngest, but holy cow, she was also the Justice Ladies’ wise woman—they sought her opinion and guidance all the time.

She adored them all but was closest to Victoria. Lacey was the first Justice wife, and until Tori arrived on the scene, had been the only female under the age of fifty in the compound. The fierce and feisty nerd queen took to his wife right away, and they’d been bonded ever since.

Meghan, of course, wasn’t called Lady Mama without reason. Her role was the mother figure in their odd little group. Especially for Lacey. She regarded Lady Mama and Big Daddy as her surrogate parents.

The thought delivered a grimace and a sigh. Lacey and her birth parents were a tough subject with no viable path to any sort of peaceful closure. Frank, the odious fucker, and his second family didn’t even rise to the level of squashed bugs on the windshield. His wife had slammed shut that particular door with terminal force—there was no going back.

A couple of times in recent months as she struggled through the pregnancy, he had found her in the study by herself, staring at the portrait of her mother. His heart ached whenever he found her like that.

He’d been a whiny, self-absorbed wimp compared to her. Oh sure, his mother was a demon, and the foster care system he had managed to survive was a verified nightmare with hellish overtones. His wah-wah bullshit about being a castoff, unloved, whatever? Every narcissistic word paled next to the reality of Lacey’s younger days.

Without parental love as part of his narrative, he survived a shitshow—cue the applause. But she survived after losing the love of her parents. Her mother from death and her father to abandonment. Alone and cut off from her grandmother, she had the grit to carry on through unimaginable circumstances. Next to her, he was a crybaby weasel.

She asked him about her grandmother only once. It was after he’d hunted down Frank Morrow and pieced together the man’s sordid tale. His wife knew he’d track every clue he could including her grandmother. When asked, he admitted to tracking her down. And then he said nothing else.

She struggled with his silence while he maintained a fevered grip on his composure. When she quietly asked if the old woman was dead, he nodded once.

He thought she might cry, but that wasn’t Lacey’s way. It took her a minute, but she found what she needed inside to carry on. There was no request for details, and he certainly didn’t want her to know the old woman died less than eighteen months after Frank had spirited her away. But he thought she should know just one thing in case she’d waited and hoped as a kid that her gran would rescue her.

“She didn’t get a chance to save you, baby.” That was all he said. She understood, and that was the end of it.

Until the moment when he held Dylan in his hands for the first time, he hadn’t understood how powerful the love he had for his son would feel. That was when he first started to truly grasp what his wife had lost. To know that kind of all-encompassing love—even if only for a short while—only to lose it was an agony he couldn’t fathom before becoming a father.

Now that he got it, his heart ached all the more for his sweet, loving wife.

The sense of anxious fear, subtle as it was, that marked this pregnancy was changing them in ways he was beginning to make some sense of. She was his everything. He couldn’t breathe at the thought of being without her. The awesome power of her love—a love that sprang from her faith in him—took Cam from the depths of hell and gave him a life worth living.

Alex was right. Their priorities were changing.

He looked out from the second-floor window of the master bedroom in Calder’s rustic-modern cabin and found his pregnant wife and toddler son laughing happily as they made angels in the snow. Used to seeing his little family in the stark beauty of the Southwest, their winter weather gear struck him as awfully cute.

“Definitely a picture,’” he mumbled aloud. Holding his phone to the window, he took a couple of candid snow angel shots. Without any hesitation whatsoever, he added a jpeg to a group chat named Family Justice and typed a comment.

Colorado Angels—Cameron style

He smiled when the message sent and then grabbed a Justice hoodie off a chair and pulled the thing on. The sound of his booted feet hurriedly pounding down the stairs revealed his eagerness to join the fun. Spying the camera case by the front door, he pushed it into the door’s path with his foot before turning to the pile of hats, coats, gloves, and scarves they’d brought with them.

No doubt about it. The Colorado Mountains were damn cold in January. It snowed every day—even if it was just flurries—and mounded drifts of the cold stuff were everywhere.

As an afterthought, he marched around the kitchen to arrange their hot chocolate ritual. Dylan loved the treat, and his mama taught him how to relax and enjoy the diluted version she mixed for him. This was something he wanted to remember always. The time they spent at Calder’s mountain hideaway playing in the snow and hanging out by the fireplace with homemade hot chocolate.

Outside, he followed the sound of giggling until he rounded the corner of the house and ran into his son. Powering through the snow, Dylan darted away while his mother chased him with threats of a serious tickling. His son’s screeches of delight and the way he struggled against the unfamiliar snow became instant memory classics.

“Daddy,” Dylan hollered. “Look at Mommy!” Laughing, he wiggled through the snow and tried to elude her tickling ways.

“Here I come,” she hooted gleefully. “Mommy’s going to get you, Dyl!”

He giggled with delight and stomped through the white stuff as fast as he could.

Inside of five minutes, he’d probably taken two hundred pictures.

Once again, she’d been right. This was a thousand times better than a sun and sand babymoon.