Chapter 37 #5
I’m in one of the old chairs with Raven tucked into the one beside mine and my arm draped over the back of it because I need some kind of physical point of contact with her after tonight or I’m gonna start acting like a psycho.
Lexi is sprawled asleep with Bunny in her lap across Emma and Kya’s legs along with Jason, who passed out mid-marshmallow and had to be rescued from face-planting into a paper plate.
Dom, because he lacks self-preservation, decides to start shit. “You were full of it earlier,” he says, lifting his beer toward me. “You could never take me.”
I don’t even look at him. “In a fight?”
He nods.
“Absolutely would.”
He snorts. “That confidence is embarrassing.”
“It’s not confidence if it’s fact.”
Blaze, already halfway drunk and therefore useless, points between us like he’s moderating a sporting event. “I’d pay real money for this.”
Kya cuts in without missing a beat. “I’d put money on Joker.”
Dom looks personally betrayed. “Wow.”
She shrugs. “You’re hot when you’re arrogant, but he’d still wreck you.”
That gets enough laughter around the fire that even Dom has to grin into his beer a little.
“I hate all of you,” he mutters.
“Mutual,” I tell him.
That’s about the point Logan clears his throat. Not loudly. Not theatrically.
Still enough to cut through the noise because when the president of an MC decides he’s speaking, people tend to shut up and listen unless they’re actively interested in getting hit with something.
Mac is sitting on the arm of his chair, one of his hands wrapped around her thigh in that unconscious, possessive way he gets whenever she’s close enough to touch.
He looks around the fire once, grin already tugging at his mouth. Then he says, “Since all you assholes are already here, figured I’d save us repeating this conversation six times.”
That gets everybody’s attention.
Mine included.
Logan lifts his beer slightly. “Mac’s pregnant.”
For one beat, the whole fire goes dead quiet.
Then Blaze lets out a yell loud enough to wake the dead.
Cain starts laughing.
Emma’s already grinning.
Brooke’s face lights up.
Kya throws her hands up and says, “I knew it.”
Mac flips half the circle off while smiling too hard for it to have any bite.
I glance at Raven instinctively and find her already looking at me, eyes bright and soft and way too aware of the fact that the thought hit both of us in the same second.
Kids. More kids. Future. The kind of life that keeps stretching forward instead of ending where the fear told us it had to.
Then I notice something else.
Carter’s gone still. So has Dom.
Not bad-still. Not violent-still.
Just…caught.
I shift slightly in my chair and look from one to the other. Then to Brooke. Then to Kya.
And the second I see Brooke’s face, the way she’s trying and failing not to smile too knowingly at Carter, it clicks.
I sit up straighter.
No way.
Kya sees me see it and immediately points her water bottle at me like that’s somehow gonna stop the obvious.
“Don’t,” she says.
I grin.
“Oh, no. Absolutely not.”
Dom mutters, “For fuck’s sake.”
That’s all the confirmation I need.
I look around the fire and start laughing. Real, helpless laughter this time. Because apparently the universe has decided the Deathstalkers MC deserves absolutely no peace.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” I say.
Nobody answers. Not one goddamn person.
Carter scrubs a hand over his face. Brooke’s smiling into her shoulder.
Dom glares into his beer. Kya looks like she’s debating homicide.
And then Raven, sitting warm and solid beside me, leans in just enough to whisper, “Oh my God.”
I laugh harder.
Three.
Three pregnant old ladies.
Three.
Logan sees the realization spread and points at us like we’re all slow. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s where we’re at.”
Cain throws his head back and laughs so hard he nearly sloshes beer down the front of his shirt.
Shadow just shakes his head toward the fire like he’s seeing the future and doesn’t much care for it.
Blaze looks delighted enough to be genuinely concerning. “We’re screwed,” he says with the kind of joy only a man not currently expecting a baby could manage.
“Correction,” I tell him. “You’re all screwed. I’m thriving.”
Raven elbows me in the ribs. “Are you?”
I look at her.
At the woman with my patch on her skin and my daughter, our daughter, apparently, if Lexi has anything to say about it, sleeping ten feet away surrounded by people who would kill for her.
At the life around us. At the fire. At the family.
At the future opening up wider than I ever let myself imagine before she stepped into it and made me greedy enough to want all of it.
Then I answer honestly. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “I really am.”
She smiles at me then. Slow. Warm. A little wrecked around the edges in the best way.
And sitting there by the fire with her hand in mine, my whole family spread out around me in various states of laughter and denial and impending fatherhood, I realize something simple and brutal and so good it almost hurts.
For the first time in my life, I’ve got everything I never thought I’d get to keep.
And I’m keeping every damn bit of it.
Turn the page for a sneak peek of Jimmy…