* * *

“I’m starting to look like a cow,” says Lysa. She smirks up at me while clutching her pregnant belly. Her hair is shorter than it used to be, but it suits her. She wears it just above her shoulders in a way that makes her neck look so slender and beautiful. It also makes it easier to see she wears my collar from any angle. Two years since she took my collar and my ring, and I still haven’t gotten tired of seeing them on her, I still feel a fresh jolt of excitement and desire every time my eyes fall on them.

My wife. My pet. The mother of my child. I grin with satisfaction.

“That’s bad news,” I say, moving behind her to wrap my arms around her so I can caress her swollen belly and kiss her neck. “Because I think beastiality is illegal here.”

She pulls back, making a disgusted but amused face. “You’re supposed to tell me I don’t look like a cow. That I look like a… I don’t know… something less bloated and awkward.”

“You look like my wife,” I say, pulling her in again and kissing her nose. “And you look like the only woman in the world I would want to be carrying my second child.” I lean in closer, lowering my voice to a whisper. “You look like my pet who needs to be reminded how to behave.”

She bites her lip, then waggles her eyebrows. “Mr. Big Bad Scary Master is just going to have to wait until tonight to punish me.” She taps her watch tauntingly. “Because he’s not allowed out for another few hours.”

I glare at her, but not without a hefty dose of enjoyment. It has become one of our routines--a way of building suspense and excitement for the night to come, once we’ve put Zack to sleep for the night and we have no interruptions. She likes to make sure I have reasons to punish her when the time comes, and I’m not about to start complaining.

Zack’s voice suddenly blares over the baby monitor. “Yaaaaaah!” He yells. I glance at the screen on the monitor, where I can see him standing up in his crib, shaking the bars relentlessly. My little guy doesn’t like to be contained. I have no idea where he got that from.

“I can get him,” says Lysa’s mom, who pops up from the couch in the other room. We’re in one of my smallest properties, which is still large by any comparison, but Lysa felt the most at home here. She said it was being surrounded by trees and outside the city that made her fall in love with this place. There’s something about the rusticness of the house. I feel it now, too, if for no other reason that this has been the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place. We’ve built memories in this house. It was where we brought Zack home from the hospital and where Erica was conceived. It’s where we were when we got the call that Lysa’s mom was cancer-free after only six months with Dr. Fairchild.

It feels like the home I never had, like we’re building the foundation of something real and lasting. Something I can be proud of.

Rachel looks like a new woman since her recovery. She’s still just as surly and likely to lose her temper as ever, but I’ve come to see a sort of kindness behind her personality. She may have a strange way of showing it, but she cares about Lysa, and I think she’s even starting to care about me. Maybe.

“I can get him,” I say.

“No shit you can get him,” snaps Rachel. “But I said I’m going to, so unless you want to scrap, maybe you should let me go pick up that cute little baby.”

I give Lysa a sideways glance. She’s holding back a smile. To be honest, I knew Rachel would react with something along those lines, but I enjoy getting her riled up. So I wait with Lysa while Rachel goes in to get Zack out of his crib. She sets him down once they’re back in the living room so he can walk to us. He just started walking a few weeks ago, so it’s like watching a little drunken man with no fear come waddling toward us.

“Dada!” he says with a big, two-toothed smile. It’s the first time he has said anything other than “ice” or “meow.” I take a second to lock the sound away in my memory--to put down the moment I heard my son call me dada for the first time.

I raise my eyebrows at Lysa, who claps and smiles at him. “Yay!” she shouts.

Apparently egged on by the encouragement, Zack claps his chubby hands and says it again, but he gets so caught up in the excitement that he loses his balance and falls to his butt.

Lysa scoops him up and hugs him tight. “My little baby,” she coos. “I’m so proud of you.”

I feel a kind of happiness I never thought I would deserve as I watch them. As if I’ve not only found the purpose in my life, but I’ve also helped build something that is going to keep getting better and more special every day for as long as I live. We built a family. And if my brother, Jayce, ends up staying with his submissive much longer, I won’t be surprised if our extended family begins to grow, too.