Chapter 21

I want to be a nice person, but everyone is just so stupid!

-Coffee Cup

Baylor

I stood in a corner and watched as my brother, Reed, spoke with my wife across the room.

We were at the club once again, but this was our official reception dinner.

Lark had officially been my wife for sixty-three hours.

I grinned at the encounter, happy that my family got along with Lark and didn’t condemn me for knowing her for such a short period of time before I married her.

My brothers knew just as well as I did that life could change in a heartbeat. They knew that nothing in life was guaranteed. I just wished that Dante was there. Then it would be complete.

“I found him.”

I turned to find Tobias at my side.

When had he gotten there?

“Found who?”

There could be two ‘hims’ to speak of, but I knew that only one of them was on my brother’s mind at that moment.

He glared at me. “You know fucking who.”

I grinned. “Where is he?”

“He’s back at his house now.”

“The one here?”

Dante and his wife had multiple houses. One in town. One on the lake an hour’s ride north, and one in fucking Utah of all places.

“The lake.”

The lake had been their newest acquisition. They’d bought the lake house about a week before the accident that had taken everything from him.

“Did you go say anything? About the baby?”

He shook his head. “Tried to go up there the other day but then you got married. Haven’t had time to do it since. And I’m leaving tomorrow so that's gonna fall on y’all’s shoulders. I don’t have much leave built up yet with the department, and it’s not going to get any better anytime soon due to short staffing.”

My brother was a state highway patrol officer stationed in Mooresville, Alabama. Lord knew why he wanted to be a police officer and deal with more bullshit after getting out of the military, but what the fuck ever.

“Why would we bother?”

I grimaced.

Dante was closest with Tobias. Always had been. Which was weird since they were the youngest and the oldest.

It was odd seeing their roles reversed, though.

Normally it was Dante taking care of Tobias. Now it was Tobias trying—and I say trying sparingly—to take care of Dante. Dante wouldn’t let him, though. He’d holed himself up wherever he’d holed himself up, and we hadn’t seen him for a damn long time.

Going on a year.

At least for me, anyway.

He’d shown up when Travis had gotten shot, but I hadn’t been one of the fortunate ones who’d witnessed that miracle.

“I’ll go out there tomorrow.” I sighed. “Any new updates on the baby?”

I asked Tobias, but my eyes were still trained on my new wife. She was laughing at something Reed was showing her on his phone. She pointed, clapped her hands, and then threw her head back and giggled.

It made me hard instantly.

The smile that lit my face was nothing short of cheesy, but I had to admit, I was fucking happy.

That smile slipped when I watched my other brother, Finley, approach them from behind.

He wasn’t sneaking or anything, but the moment he let his presence be known by touching Lark on the back, she flinched and crouched like she was preparing for a blow that was never going to come. Definitely not by my brother’s hand, anyway.

My stomach sank.

“What the fuck?”

I started walking, ignoring my brother’s question, and hurried to where Lark was standing.

Tobias had missed the whole story and I hadn’t had a chance to fill him in completely yet. He’d know by the end of the night, though. He’d figure it out, and he’d try to fix it.

He was our fixer. The rest of us were the shit stirrers.

The closer I got, the more I realized that Finley and Reed were looking rather ill. Both of my brothers had backed away, and Finley looked like he was going to vomit at any moment.

“Lark.”

Lark’s eyes snapped open and she stared at me with relief in her eyes. I watched as her back straightened, and she came out of her protective stance. I’d never seen this reaction from her. The one that told me for sure that she had been abused.

But she never reacted like that. I’d never seen her freak out before. It was baffling.

Why now?

But, if I were a betting man, I would say that this had a lot to do with the fact that her ex now knew exactly where she was, and I wasn’t letting her run like she wanted.

She didn’t feel safe.

And again, that really pissed me off. I wanted her to always feel safe with me, and damn her ex for doing this to her.

She came to me, burying her face into my chest as she said, “I’m sorry.”

She had nothing to be sorry for. Nothing.

I made eye contact with Reed and Finley, and they both took off, leaving us alone in the corner.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated again.

I ran my palm down the length of her hair, stopping once I reached her back.

“Why don’t you flinch any time I touch you?”

Why had I just asked that?

She seemed to slump in my arms, and I felt even worse for blurting out my inner thoughts.

“Trust.”

“What?”

“Trust,” she repeated. “I knew I could trust you.”

“How?”

“The day that you repossessed my car, I’d seen you earlier. At the gas station.” She cleared her throat. “You were trying to feed a stray dog. He was so skittish, and you were so patient with him.”

“What about when I come up to you from behind?”

She shrugged. “I feel you.”

“You feel me?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I feel you. You’re like a reassuring heat at my back. I can always feel when your eyes are on me. Like a warm hand is running down the length of my arm, telling me it’ll be all right.” She blew out a shaky breath. “I was looking at Reed’s phone, laughing about a meme he showed me, and I wasn’t prepared for someone to come up behind me. I thought there was a wall at my back.”

“There was,” I confirmed, continuing to run my hand down her hair. “He came out from the partition. There’s a hidden wall there that leads up to my office.”

She blew out a breath. “Of course, there is.”

I grinned. “Gotta have some secrets, darlin’.”

She pinched my side and pushed away from me. I let her go, but not far.

The moment she was standing up straight, I wrapped my arm around her and led her back to where Finley and Reed were talking with Tobias now.

“I’m sorry,” Lark said immediately. “I didn’t mean to react that way.”

Finley shrugged. “My ex-wife used to do that…before me,” he hastily added.

Lark just shook her head. “I’ve seen you with Leida. I know that you’re not like that.”

And he wasn’t. Finley was about as against it as one could get.

He’d given it a good go with his ex. Though she’d had a lot to overcome when it came to their relationship, she had so many ghosts in her past that their relationship was doomed from the start.

Finley got a good deal out of it in the end…his daughter.

A daughter who was currently leader of the pack as she squealed and played on the dance floor with the other kids.

“When are y’all going to start popping out some babies?”

That had come from Evander, who came up behind us.

I winced when his hand came down hard on my shoulder, making not just me, but Lark jolt, too.

“Sorry.” Evander looked regretful. “I didn’t see you there. He hides you well.”

Lark giggled. “He does, doesn’t he?”

I hadn’t realized I’d even done it, but the moment we’d walked up to my brothers, I’d maneuvered her so that she was in the shadows of the club, and my entire body was covering hers.

“And to answer your question, asshole,” I said to Evander. “I’m going to have babies…just not right now.”

The idea of having babies right now literally gave me hives.

“You don’t want babies now?”

“Uh-oh,” Finley said. “I can see that I came at the wrong time.”

Evander snorted and walked away just as fast as he’d come, leaving me alone with my brothers, who didn’t look the least bit willing to walk away like my friend did.

“I want babies,” I confirmed. “But thinking about having them right now makes me want to vomit.”

She stared at me. “If you didn’t want babies, why are we doing things…you know…like we’re doing them? That’s kind of inevitable.”

Tobias snorted, taking a sip of his beer, and clearly enjoying the show.

“No condoms?” Finley asked. “Have you forgotten everything I taught you?”

I flipped him off.

Finley had a pregnancy scare when he was young with his girlfriend at the time. Kind of. She’d been his almost girlfriend.

Later, as he’d matured, he’d told everyone that they needed to learn from his mistakes.

“You’re on birth control,” I felt the need to point out.

“Yes, but that fails.”

The thought of her birth control failing was something that sent me into a cold sweat.

“You really don’t want kids right now, do you?”

I shrugged.

“Why not?”

I thought about how awful all of my brothers’ kids were…and they were awful. The thought of having to share Lark with anyone else right now literally sounded appalling.

“Because I don’t want to share you yet.”

I wanted to have copious amounts of sex. I wanted to go places without having to worry about someone watching my kid. I wanted to fuck her when and where I wanted. And if we had kids—which we would eventually—then that would take away from any spontaneity that we might have in the future.

Her face softened.

“But you do want kids?”

I nodded. “Maybe in a couple years.”

She smiled. “I can handle that.”

Relief washed through me.

That wasn’t something I’d thought about—having kids. At least not in too much detail.

It’d been something we hadn’t discussed, and maybe we should have before our reception dinner after we were already married.

My brothers were all wearing a matching smirk.

“Fuck off.”

All three of them burst out laughing.

“This isn’t funny,” I told them.

“It kind of is,” Finley drawled. “Really.”

I rolled my eyes, and the sweetest sounding giggle sounded from the woman at my side.

“It is,” she agreed. “You should’ve seen the green tint to your face at the thought of having kids right now.”

“It’s Travis’s fault,” I felt the need to add. “His kids are awful.”

“My kids aren’t awful,” Travis said.

“Yes, they are,” I told him, not missing a beat. “Just last night you told me you got maybe an hour of sleep. That sounds like it’s going to suck.”

“I can’t wait for you to have kids. It’ll literally make my day to point out how wrong you are about having them.”

“I want them…I just need time to forget how awful yours are before I do.”

Travis snorted.

“You damn well know they’re not awful.”

Just then, Travis’s child projectile vomited on the floor.

It landed halfway across the dance floor.

Everything went silent for a few moments after that, and then Travis started to chuckle. “Maybe he’s bad…but the first one wasn’t too bad. She was an angel baby. Well, as an infant anyway.”

That was true. But at the time I hadn’t been with anyone that I even considered knocking up. Now I was, and I just knew that I wasn’t at the stage yet.

“Who’s cleaning that up?” Finley wondered.

And that was around the time that the girls made their round around the dance floor where they’d been running.

Leida managed to jump over the puke. The others, however, were not so lucky.