4. Tate
CHAPTER 4
Tate
I shake my head, trying to clear the ringing sound in my ears. “I’m sorry, Piper. Can you repeat that? I could have sworn you just asked us to help you have a baby.”
The words sound fuzzy. I think I might be in shock.
Piper gulps down the rest of the wine. She pours herself a third glass, and I go to take the bottle from her because she’s never going to make it home at this rate.
I think that’s kind of the point, jackass.
My hand freezes, and I curl my fingers back in.
Vaguely, I’m aware that the food is getting cold. I’ve been a chef for so long, I can’t just turn that shit off. However, the awareness is very, very vague, because my mind keeps coming back to the sentence that hopped out of her beautiful lips.
I’ll help you with your business if you help me have a baby.
Piper flushes red. The blush is so goddamn pretty, it instantly goes straight to my cock, because now all I can think of is how else I can make her blush. And how far down her neck the flushed skin goes. And whether she would do it again for us if I whispered in her ear all the things I’d like to do to her….
Shut. The fuck. Up. Tate.
I shake myself.
Piper nods, her fingers twisting the wine glass. Even her goddamn fingertips look sexy, and I feel like I might choke on all of the things ricocheting through me.
I’ve kept my desire for Piper under wraps since we were kids. It’s changed over the years, of course, but I’ve always just been her friend. We all have.
What she’s asking for would change… everything.
“I think you all know that I really want a family,” Piper starts. “I’m just… I’m tired of dating. When I tried, it didn’t work out for me. I met all these guys, and none of them were… right,” she finishes.
I have so many fucking questions. Who? When? Where? Who the fuck hurt you? What does right mean? Are we right?
“And I’m worried that I won’t have time to like… actually find someone who loves me and wants to start a family.”
Brent shifts next to me. “Piper? Is something wrong?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not that I know of.”
But the words sound… hollow.
“Anyway. You guys are my family. And I like how we operate, but I also really, really want to have children,” Piper says.
Her cheeks are red, maybe from the wine, maybe from the request. Her eyes are looking down at the table, and the note of longing in her voice tugs straight at my chest.
Fuck. She does want this. I know that she’s always wanted to be a mom, and it’s something that I’ve wanted for her as well. And something that I’ve fantasized about.
My cock twitches at the image of Piper, pregnant with my baby, and I have to shift.
“I kind of figure that I don’t want to wait on a man to fall in love with. I want a baby. And I don’t want to ruin our friendship, but I kind of figure that it might be the start of like… a different phase of it,” she murmurs.
“Have you… wanted… that… with us for long?” Brent manages to grit out.
I shoot him a quick look, and I can see that he’s just as fucked up over this as I am. His jaw twitches, and his neck looks like the tendons in it are going to snap.
Dalton, apparently, is the only one of the three of us taking this in stride. He lounges back, his eyes glued to Piper, and his face is completely blank.
Fuck. Dalton’s probably thinking of his parents.
“No. I mean. I don’t know. That’s a complicated answer. But um. I think that I might just be feeling a little more urgent when it comes to having kids,” Piper breathes.
Brent gives a curt nod. “Look. Piper. I don’t want to…”
He trails off. As he should. Because I just stomped the hell out of his foot.
Piper looks at me, and I give her a smile. “Can we have some time to talk about it?”
Her eyes look like they’re about to spill over with tears. She rises. “Yeah. Um. Okay. I’ll just… see myself out.”
“You can still stay for dinner,” I offer weakly.
Piper gives me a smile. “I know. But I want you to discuss this privately.”
No. I don’t want her to leave. I can tell Dalton’s brain is doing the same thing, because he stands up and drifts for the door. Piper puts a hand on his chest.
“I’m fine. It’s totally okay if the answer is no. And I’ll help you with the marketing no matter what because you really have a good plan… and you are my best friends. I just thought…” Her voice trails off.
“You thought what?” I prompt.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d finally get that ‘one door closes, another one opens’ thing. I understand if you say no. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I know you don’t think of me like that.”
Brent makes a kind of strangled noise, and Dalton shoots him a look.
“Call me if you need me,” Piper whispers. Then, she’s gone, the slam of the screen door the only sign that she was here at all.
I look at my friends. It’s like a fucking bomb went off in here. All of us look totally dazed. Piper’s truck purrs to life, and it idles.
“What. The. Fuck,” I breathe.
Brent shakes his head. “No. We can’t.”
“Like hell we can’t,” Dalton growls.
I start to pace. “Shit. I just… I had no idea…”
“She’s always wanted to be a mom,” Brent says.
“Well, yeah. But she really just asked…”
“How much wine did she drink?” Dalton interrupts.
I freeze. Brent looks like he swallowed a lemon.
Dalton runs out the door before I respond.
The truck’s engine cuts off. But I don’t hear anyone on the porch.
I turn to Brent. “Yes. We have to.”
“We do not,” he snarls.
“Brent. Come on. This could be the way to finally…”
“To finally what, Tate? Make her ours?”
When he says it like that, it makes me feel like I’m being stupid.
Brent rises, pacing over to the window. He peeks out at her, then turns to me.
“This could fuck everything up,” he says darkly.
I shake my head. “Or it could be the best thing that’s ever happened to us. I say we do it.”
“I vote no.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re such a dick, Brent. Why not?”
“Because we could lose her,” he hisses.
I narrow my eyes at him. “She literally said she wants to raise the baby with us.”
Brent’s jaw looks so tight, I’m surprised his teeth are still intact. “No. Like. Things are good, right?”
“All the more reason we should do this. We’d be awesome parents.” I love my parents, and I know they’d be thrilled to be grandparents.
“No, I meant… things are good right now. With no changes,” he says.
Oh. Well. That makes more sense.
“Brent. Man. The only thing constant in life is change,” I breathe.
He looks at the window again. “We’re almost ready. Almost stable again. If she asked us in a year?—”
“She’s not asking in a year, man. She’s asking today.”
“And what if she does fall in love, and some guy marries her and takes her and our kid away from us?”
I roll my eyes. “It would still be our kid, so it’s not like we wouldn’t see them.”
“But we’d lose her,” he murmurs.
My heart aches at that thought. But I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t believe in worrying about the future when life is giving us something perfect right now.
I put a hand on Brent’s shoulder.
“Then this is our chance to show her that we can’t lose her. To show her that she’s meant for us, as more than friends. Hell, we’ve wanted this for… ever,” I say softly. “We’ve only held back because Piper kept us as friends.”
Under my hand, Brent tenses. “But she might fall in love with someone else. If she hasn’t fallen in love with us by now, we’re not it for her.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t shut us down before we’ve even started. Piper wants to have a baby with us. We can’t pass up the chance to show her that she has a family. And it’s us.”
Brent looks at me. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
I grin. “Hell yes I do.”
It’s true. I believe in life giving you both lemons and lemonade. There are good times and bad times, and it’s up to you to handle them. And in this case, a fucking lemon cake just dropped in our lap. We’d be stupid not to eat it.
“I’m in,” I whisper.
Brent looks outside. “Dalton’s the tying vote.”
“He’s in,” I assure him.
“We don’t know that.”
Dalton stomps into the house, the door creaking open behind him. He looks at the two of us, his eyebrows raised.
“Yes,” is all he says.
I give Brent a triumphant grin. “Fuck yeah.”
“What’s Piper doing?” Brent asks Dalton.
“Two seconds from crying,” Dalton mutters.
Shit. All of my glee disappears. “We have to get her in here. She doesn’t need to cry…”
“Fine. We’ll do it. But we need some rules,” Brent says.
Dalton rolls his eyes. “That’s stupid.”
“We’ll take things at Piper’s pace. She’s always set it before. Seems right for her to set it now.”
Brent looks at Dalton, who nods. Finally, he sighs.
“Get her out of the fucking truck,” he rasps.
Ten minutes later, a somewhat wobbly Piper is sitting at the kitchen table, eating the chicken that I painstakingly heated back up. We haven’t told her our decision yet, mostly because she absolutely got out of the truck more than a little drunk.
No one wants her to hear the decision unless she’s sober. So, we wait.
It’s definitely weird to have all three of us stare at her while she eats. But. On the other hand, she kind of moans when she gets to a spot that tastes good. Which is a lot of it, because I’m a goddamn great chef. And listening to her moan over my food is getting me really, really fucking hyped for this.
She’s ours. She’s finally fucking ours.
At last, Piper sits back and closes her eyes. “Tate. That was incredible.”
“I know.” I smile.
She cracks an eye open. “I love it when you’re humble.”
“No point, baby. I’m as good as it gets,” I tease.
The words bring a tiny smile out of her, which makes my chest relax just a little bit more.
Piper sighs and looks around the room. “Listen, I’ll just sleep on the couch until I’m sober enough to drive home?—”
“You’ll stay here,” Brent interrupts her.
I give him a look. “What this asshole is trying to say is that it’s not a big deal, Piper. You can stay here tonight if you need to.”
She wrinkles her nose, and the gesture is absolutely fucking adorable. “I don’t want to bother you, especially if you’re deciding on… what I said.”
I look at Brent and Dalton. Neither of them stops me, so I lean forward and take Piper’s hand. “Piper. I speak for all of us when I say that it would be fucking amazing to help you have a baby.”
Piper’s eyes go round. Her pretty pink lips part, and a whole new host of fantasies shoots through my mind.
“You… you will?”
“Of course. I’m honored that you’d ask me. That you’d ask us. ” I gesture to the guys. “Whatever you need. Whatever you want. We’ll do it.”
“Just because you want the help with marketing? Because I definitely would do that still if you didn’t want?—”
“We want to, Piper,” Brent says. The gravel in his voice makes her look up, and it sends a chill down my spine, too. Brent’s eyes darken. “Whatever you want. However you want to swing it. We’re more than happy to do whatever you need to have a baby.”
Piper gulps. “Oh. Yeah. I guess that I did kind of ask generally, didn’t I?”
“If you want one of us, babe, you’re gonna have all of us,” I say. I’m not even trying to hide the fact that it’s a pretty sexual statement.
I was dead serious when I told Brent that this was our future. This is the way to finally show Piper that we work as a unit. That we can be more than friends and be there for her.
We need to take this chance. We can’t fuck it up. It almost seems like a dream.
Piper sucks in a huge breath. “Um. Okay. I need to think. But it’s like… really nice that you said yes. I know that you think of me as just a friend. And if you’re not attracted to me like, um… like that… then we can work out a little more clinical way to?—”
“Fuck that,” Dalton growls. We all look at him. “Clinical? No.”
Jesus. The manners of these two. “What Dalton is saying, Piper, is that I don’t think any of us is, uh… interested in something clinical.”
She blinks at me. “What are you saying?”
Careful, Tate. Piper has the look of a startled deer, and I don’t think this is the time or place. Instead, I opt to wrap it up. I lean in and take her hand. It’s so soft in mine, and I shiver, thinking of all the ways that I want her soft skin on me. I lift her fingers to my lips and place a gentle kiss there before returning them to the table.
“Let’s talk logistics in the morning. For now, I think it’s probably best to just celebrate.”
“Celebrate?” Piper echoes.
My grin broadens. Piper loves a party, and I can’t wait to celebrate all the events with her. “Yup. And I baked the perfect cake to do it.”