Beck hadn’t thought that sterilizing would become such a large part of his everyday life. But here he was, again, in the kitchen, going through the motions. There was so much to do, so much to remember. Fatherhood was a learning curve every day.

“We’re ok, guys, aren’t we?” he called to his boys who were in the living room in their individual bouncy chairs angled in the direction of the kitchen with their backs to the TV so he could keep an eye on them.

They were happier today, he was sure they were. It couldn’t just be him who felt lighter after spending the night with their mommy. Ok, so maybe the night had been PG-13, and not as R rated as he’d have liked, but… Well, she was naked for most of the night, was there nudity in PG-13 movies? It had been a while since he’d seen any kind of movie, though he’d bet they were going to feature in his life more now that he had the twins who’d need to be entertained.

With his hands on the counter, he scrutinized his boys. Would they be a movie family? How did he feel about the idea of trips to see the latest animation, buying popcorn…

Popcorn. Jaycee liked popcorn. Spinning around, he checked the cupboard and made a mental note to buy more the next time they were in the store. He didn’t want to run out if she was going to be around more often.

“If Momma’s happy, we’re happy, right, boys?” he shouted over to the twins.

Jaycee. Hmm, yeah, he had to get into the habit of thinking about her as Jaycee and not as mommy if he didn’t want to scare her off.

The front door on the far left wall opened and when he turned to see who was coming in, Beck found himself hoping it was his muse. When he saw Pine followed by Pete and Snick, he tried not to show his disappointment.

“The whole gang’s here,” Beck said.

Almost the whole gang. The most important member had said she would come back to him today, so he’d bide his time. She’d never let him down before.

Pine put an arm around him and pushed him toward the stool at the head of the island before taking a stool himself. Pete and Snick followed with a sense of determination as they huddled around him.

Beck’s amusement at their sense of purpose faded when he read their serious expressions. “What is it?” Beck asked, rising from the stool. “Is it Jayc?”

He should never have let her leave here last night. What an idiot! He’d thought she would be ok because it was like five-thirty in the morning; people should’ve been getting up for work. The prowlers who were out to attack unsuspecting women should’ve been long gone by then, or so he thought.

It was his responsibility to protect his muse; he wasn’t supposed to let her go wandering around in the dark on her own. And she’d just been through a trauma too! Apparently almost losing her once wasn’t enough for him, he hadn’t learned his lesson. He was a damn jerk, and Jaycee had paid the price for his selfishness again.

Cursing himself, he realized he should’ve driven her home. The boys had car seats, they were sleeping, they wouldn’t have cared; they liked the car. No, actually, he should’ve demanded that she stay here. The stupid woman. There were two bedrooms downstairs in addition to the boys’ room and the den, and there was a bed in the studio upstairs, somewhere she was more than comfortable, and it had its own private bathroom. He wouldn’t have forced himself into her bed. If she’d stayed, she’d have been safe and—

“No,” Pete said. “We’re calling a meeting.”

“We already had a meeting,” Snick said. “Now we’re here to report to you.”

Thank God for that. Ok, so Jaycee was fine, at least as far as they knew. But he’d have to check in on her. Just as soon as the guys were done with whatever this was, he’d call her. “Ok, report,” Beck said, sinking into his stool and feeling his heart rate return to normal. He looked at each of his friends again. “Good thing I’ve got my lawyer present… or do I need a new one of those?”

Pine looked so keyed up that Beck wondered if he was about to get dumped or find out someone was terminal. “No,” Pine said. “This is no meeting; it’s an intervention.”

Good, he needed a laugh. Folding his arms, Beck leaned back in his stool. There was no way he had any intention of giving up the only addiction he had coursing through his system any time soon. “Oh, an intervention,” he said. “Am I hooked on something?”

“No, you’re in denial,” Pete said.

Maybe this was about Jaycee after all, though Beck wasn’t in denial when it came to his muse, he was definitely addicted to her. He just hadn’t clued his friends in on his feelings. “Denial?”

“Yep,” Snick said. “And we’ve decided…”

The longer they all looked at each other, the more intrigued he got. “Decided what?”

“We’re going to help,” Pine said. “With the kids, we’re going to do more; we should’ve been doing more.”

“This is about the boys?” Beck asked, his lips quirking.

“I want you back at AD,” Pete said. “Soon as possible.”

“Snick and I will stay here with the boys,” Pine said. “We’ll… I don’t know, we’ll figure it out.”

“Just like a couple of hours at first, you know,” Snick said.

Yeah, his friends were shitting themselves about the idea of being alone with two tiny babies. Though he couldn’t laugh at them for that. The first time the door had shut behind his friends after he’d brought the boys home from the hospital, he felt like puking and the urge hadn’t left him for the rest of that day.

“Not right away,” Pine said. “You’ll have to show us, you know, what to do and stuff. But yeah, they sleep at night, right?”

“Last night was the best yet,” Beck said. “Gogh slept six hours straight through, he’s never done that before.”

“Six?” Pine said and his whole expression lit. “That’s fucking amazing.”

“Van’s the bad sleeper though,” Pete said. “That’s what you said, right?”

“Yeah, but he managed four hours; that’s another first.”

“See, that’s cool,” Pine said, nodding at Snick. “We can do that.”

“If you want me to leave you alone with them for more than ten minutes, you’ll need to do more than pray they sleep,” Beck said.

“We’re gonna practice,” Snick said. “We’ll learn.”

It meant something to him that his friends were offering to step up. Really something. “Guys, this is… wow.” He didn’t mind hanging with his twins and he was in no rush to get back to AD, though if he did, he’d get to see more of Jaycee. Bonus.

“Yeah, you need to get back into the world,” Pete said. “You’ll go nuts if you’re stuck here all the time, that’s why you needed AD in the first place, right? So, a shift or two a week for a couple of hours is better than nothing, right? And you can build up over time as the kids grow up.”

“We think it’s a good idea for you to consider bringing a nanny inside,” Pine said. “We’ll vet some people, figure them out, find someone who’ll stick around. Someone we can trust to know everything.”

He didn’t like that idea. Beck didn’t mind leaving the boys with people he considered family, but he didn’t want any strangers poking around in his life, in his home or with his kids.

“One step at a time, guys,” Beck said and tried to get up. Pete put a hand on one of his shoulders and Pine grabbed the other, both pushed him back into the stool. “Not done?”

“Not done,” Pete said.

“We… uh… we think you should get laid,” Pine said.

This time Beck had to try harder to hide his smile. “I should get laid?”

“Yeah, we know the boys are still young, and you don’t want a wife, blah, blah,” Pine said. “We get all that. We’re not saying you should go out and find yourself a woman—just a fuck.”

“What should I fuck if I’m not fucking a woman?”

His friends didn’t appreciate him poking fun at them, but seriously, what the hell? “A relationship,” Pete sneered. “You shouldn’t go looking for a relationship.”

“Though if it happens, you know,” Snick said. “Go with it.”

“Go with it,” Beck said with a single nod to the guy none of them had ever seen with a woman.

“Sure,” Pine said. “It’s like riding a bike, you’re out of practice, but it’ll come back to you.”

“Out of practice?” Beck said, forgetting for a minute that the guys didn’t know he’d been fucking Jaycee several times a day up until six weeks ago.

“Yeah, Jaycee’s been in your life for more than a year, and you hadn’t been hooking up with anyone regularly for months before that,” Pine said. “Not since you got the idea of having kids in your head.”

“It’s gotta be a long time since you’ve had a sniff of pussy in your bed,” Pete said.

Were they trying to draw him into an admission about his relationship with Jaycee or were they just being good guys trying to look out for him? Maybe he was being paranoid; he did have Jaycee on the brain.

“He doesn’t invite women back here,” Snick said.

Pete and Pine both groaned at the innocent correction. “Well it’s been a while since he’s sniffed pussy in a random woman’s bed,” Pete said.

He’d had sex with Jaycee in every bed in this house because she’d asked him to, but Beck would say the bed upstairs counted as Jaycee’s bed. Technically, they’d never been able to have sex at her place because she hadn’t had one before she moved in with him.

But he hadn’t invited her back here, so did that count as him going to a woman’s bed or could he agree with his friend’s assertion with a clear-conscience that he wasn’t lying?

The door opened again and as startled as the guys were, his gut clenched. Hell, yes! There was only one other person on the planet who could waltz into this house.

“Jaycee,” Pete said.

She came in and dumped her purse and a bag on the end of the kitchen island.

Rising to her tiptoes, Jaycee pulled Snick down to kiss his cheek. Then she grinned at Pete and kissed his cheek too. “Hello, boys. What are you talking about?”

“Sniffing pussy,” Beck said, tipping his cheek to accept her kiss. Not quite as intimate as he’d like, but he’d take it.

She frowned in confusion but went around to kiss Pine’s cheek. His lawyer remained frozen in his shock while Jaycee took her jacket off and hung it on the back of a dining chair.

It was then she came back to kiss his other cheek. Good. Beck was getting special treatment, as he should in his opinion. But she didn’t stop there. She cupped his face, bringing his attention to hers, though his arms were still folded as he leaned back in his stool.

“Maestro,” she whispered and brushed her nose back and forth on his.

“Miss me, Muse?”

“More than you know,” she said and exhaled a sigh filled with longing. Except, Beck knew exactly how she was feeling, how desperate she had been to be back at his side, because it was the same way he’d been feeling all day. If his friends weren’t here, he might have explored her softness and adoration further. “But I have to be honest with you.”

“Go for it.”

“I’ve been preoccupied with thoughts of two other males all morning. I just can’t get their handsome faces out of my head.”

Beck had to grin, she was really trying to embed herself in his heart. The thing she hadn’t figured out was that she was already there. It was impossible for her to get deeper. “My heart is broken, Muse,” he said, failing to hide his smile.

She squeezed him and turned around to tiptoe across the room. “And there they are,” she said and scurried over to drop down between their chairs.

She laid a hand on each of their cheeks and kissed one, then the other. She tickled them, kissed them again, and didn’t stop talking to them for one second.

“Uh, what the fuck is Jaycee doing here?” Pine asked. “When did this happen?”

“Last night,” Beck said, transfixed by the sight of the woman pulling his boys closer, pointing at each to include both in the private conversation.

“I thought she didn’t want to meet the twins,” Snick said.

“Muses can be fickle, Snick,” he said, forcing himself to get up to restart the sterilizing he hadn’t finished before he was interrupted.

“You’re ok with this?” Pine asked.

“Jaycee’s been one of my best friends for a year,” Beck said, listening to the sound of her singing voice carrying across the room. Man, he’d missed that sound. It had filled the house every day for weeks and then to be without it, it felt like something vital was missing from the very air filling the place. “We talked. We figured it out.”

“She’s going to be their mother?” Pete asked.

“She’s Jaycee,” he said, “just Jaycee.”

Though she’d never be “just” anything as far as he was concerned.

“Beck!”

Turning to the sound of her voice, he saw Jaycee was on her knees with Gogh in her arms. “Muse?”

“There’s milk in that bag,” she said, nodding at the bag beside her purse on the island. “I got a pump this morning and read up all about it, I think I did it right, but you have to put it in the fridge.”

“I’m on it,” he said, going over to retrieve the food that would sustain his fussy son.

It would make Beck’s life so much easier if there was something in the house his youngest boy could actually drink. Gogh had to start putting on more weight or the doctors had talked about readmitting him.

“He’s rooting,” she said, bouncing the baby. “Is he due a feed?”

Beck stopped to make eye contact with her. “You want to…” When she smiled, he was almost overwhelmed. “Go for it, girl.”

If she knew about rooting, she’d been doing a lot of reading since he saw her last night. Jaycee grabbed a cushion from the couch and leaped over into the armchair. With her knees drawn up, she tucked the pillow on her lap and managed to use Gogh to conceal her breast as she took it out for their son to feed.

His friends all turned to look in his direction. Beck was sure they were gaping at him, but he was fascinated by her. Reaching for the drawer at his side, he managed to open it and pull out the pad he’d been sketching on that morning and fumbled for a pencil too. Backing against the counter on the wall, he opened it and began to commit the vision in front of him to paper.

“Wait, are you… Are you working?”

“Hmm?” he asked, but didn’t take his eyes away from the woman cooing at their son.

“You’re working!” Pine said.

“What? No,” Beck said and angled the page higher. “This is just… I’m doodling.”

“Yeah, doodles from you can fetch thousands,” Pine said. “Let me see.”

But when the men tried to close around him, Beck pulled the pad to his chest. “Back off, you bastards. This is for me and my muse.”

“Your muse is right over there,” Pete said.

An odd kind of relief came with that knowledge and it made him feel so much lighter. Yes, she damn well was. His muse was right there. With him, right where she belonged.

Jaycee kept talking to Gogh as she curled her toe under the front of Van’s chair and pulled him over to her. Resting her toes on his stomach, she tickled the boy in the chair and got a smile. A smile! From Van! She was a pro.

How could she ever have thought she wouldn’t be able to love them or that she wouldn’t be good at this? She was a natural and had picked up how to care for the boys quicker than he had. Beck felt like he was chasing his tail most every day, but there she was sitting in the chair feeding one baby and bouncing the other with her foot, talking to them both.

No, oh, singing, she was singing again.

Damn, it would be all kinds of wrong if she gave him a hard-on from the other side of the room. Not that she’d never done that before; she had. Although their kids were in the room, they were too young to care about his reaction to their mother. His friends on the other hand, might have a few questions, so he had to contain himself.

“Maestro, you need to put the milk in the fridge,” she said.

How the hell… She hadn’t even looked up from what she was doing, but she knew he wasn’t doing as he’d been told. And she was worrying about the boy’s next meal when the first was still being given.

Right.

Milk.

Going to the bag, he took out the container of her milk and moved it to the fridge. The pump that was in there was a good one and it was clean, maybe even sterilized in its plastic box ready for the next use. If she’d invested in this, that meant she was planning to do this more than once, which meant she was planning to stick around.

He’d have to reimburse her for the pump. Whatever it cost, it was an expense for the boys, his responsibility, not hers.

“This is… unexpected,” Pine said. “She’s feeding the baby… she’s feeding him… herself.”

“He likes it,” Beck said.

“Who wouldn’t,” Snick said.

What a jerk, Snick was gazing at the woman who was admiring the babies and oblivious to this bastard drooling over her. “Eh, you keep your eyes off,” Beck said, shoving the youngest of their friends.

Yeah, Jaycee was hot, but she was his… Ok, so right now, she belonged to the twins. But he’d happily share her with them.

Stopping with his hand on the back of the stool he’d vacated before, Beck frowned. Share her with the boys, would he… did he want the boys to call her mommy? Did he want her in their lives full-time? Did he… Did he want a wife?

Damn, he didn’t have time to make that decision right now.

If Gogh was feeding, then Van would be getting ideas of eating too. Beck went about finishing the sterilizing so he could make up a bottle for the boy who’d been kind of violent about trying to feed from his mother. Beck got how Jaycee was delicious, really, he got it, but Van would have to learn to be gentler with ladies.

“You’ve got to think about this,” Pete said. His three friends closed in around him. “Do you think it’s smart to let the boys get attached to her?”

“You just said that I needed more help,” Beck said. “You said it and look what happened, the woman came in and took both boys off my schedule. You guys didn’t even say hello to them, she can’t keep her hands off them… Don’t you think they need a female influence in their lives? Do you think it will hurt them to have more people around to love them?”

“No,” Pete said. “Jaycee’s amazing; you know how we feel about her.”

Typically the voice of reason, his lawyer was reluctant to speak up now. “But if…”

“If what?” Beck asked, stopping while the milk was warming. “What, guys?”

“She’s always said she can’t love them,” Pete said. “Hasn’t she?”

Beck had no worries as far as that was concerned and when he looked past the guys, they all turned to see the woman fawning over a feeding Gogh as Van tugged on her wiggling toe. “Yeah, that doesn’t look like a woman in love at all,” Beck said and hit Pete’s chest. “We just don’t point it out to her yet, that’s all.”

He’d mentioned it last night, but he had no plans to hit her over the head with any truth she might not be ready to hear.

“Point it out to her?” Pine asked. “You think she doesn’t know?”

These guys couldn’t possibly understand Jaycee, not in the way he could. “I think when she’s your muse, then you get to make the decisions about what’s best for her,” Beck said, returning to his task.