Epilogue #2
My parents are twenty feet away. My mother is laughing at something Lucas said.
My father holds a drink and looks comfortable in a way that would have seemed impossible a year ago.
Beside them are Poppy’s grandparents. Her grandmother has Poppy on her hip, swaying slowly.
Her grandfather watches Jake across the crowd with the expression I recognize, the same one my father had when he finally stopped looking for the catch.
The line between families is just gone.
Maggie follows my gaze across all of it, the children, the dancing, the brothers, the future filling every corner of this estate with noise and life and people who chose each other over and over again.
“Richard would’ve loved this,” she says quietly.
I think about a man I never met who wrote build for love, who understood from the beginning what his life’s work was actually for.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think he would have.”
Maggie doesn’t say anything else.
She doesn’t need to.
We leave before midnight.
Poppy is staying at Diamond Head with Maggie and both sets of grandparents, who spent twenty minutes negotiating over who got to do her bedtime routine. Last I saw, all five of them were headed upstairs together, and Poppy looked extremely pleased with herself.
Jake drives. The city falls away and the North Shore opens up, and neither of us talks much.
We don’t need to.
At the beach house, Jake is out of his jacket before the front door closes. He leaves his shoes somewhere by the entry and we walk straight to the bedroom.
Jake reaches for my zipper before I’ve even turned around. I kick my shoes off. He drops his shirt on the floor.
He walks me backward into the bathroom and reaches past me to turn on the shower.
The glass walls of the bathroom fog at the edges, tropical humidity pressing against the steam rising inside. Beyond the condensation, the Pacific stretches endlessly, dark and restless beneath the night sky.
Waves crash against the shoreline in a slow, steady rhythm. The rainfall shower pours warm water over my shoulders, and I watch it slide down my arms, washing away the last traces of our wedding day.
My hair clings damply to the back of my neck. I reach up and pull it away, letting the heat loosen muscles that have been tight for hours.
Jake’s hands find my waist. His palms are wide, fingers spreading across my hip bones with a possessiveness that makes my breath catch. The gold band on his left hand presses against my wet skin. I’m still getting used to that new sensation.
“Turn around,” he says, low and close to my ear. His voice carries that familiar edge of mischief, but there’s something else underneath it now, something reverent.
I turn slowly, letting the water run down my back as I face him.
His sun-streaked hair is darker when wet, slicked back from his forehead, and those ocean blue eyes hold mine without wavering. Water slides over his shoulders and down the hard planes of his chest.
My gaze drops lower.
Lower still.
His cock rests against his thigh, already half-hard, thick and heavy, and heat curls low in my stomach at the sight of it.
“Hi, wife.” The word rolls off his tongue like he’s tasting it, savoring each syllable.
“Hi, husband.” The word feels foreign on my lips, strange and thrilling all at once.
His thumb traces the curve of my hip, drawing lazy circles on my slick skin. “I’ve been thinking about this all day. Through the ceremony. Through the toasts. Through that endless first dance my mother insisted on.”
I remember the way he held me on the dancefloor, his hand pressed firmly against the small of my back while our families watched. The way his fingers dug in just slightly, a promise of what would come later. “You were thinking about the shower?”
“I was thinking about you. Wet. Under me. Making you come so hard you forget your own name.” He steps closer and his cock brushes against my stomach, fully hard now, hot even against the warm water. “The shower was just logistics.”
A laugh escapes me, breathy and unguarded. This is what he does. He strips away my composure with a single sentence, leaves me standing here with my defenses scattered like the clothes we left trailing from the bedroom.
His mouth finds mine, slow and deliberate, his tongue sliding against mine while the hot water runs between our bodies. I grip his shoulders and pull him closer, already dizzy from the feel of him against me.
His hand slides up my ribcage to cup my breast, thumb brushing my nipple until I gasp.
“Sensitive?” he murmurs.
“You know I am.”
A crooked smile flashes across his mouth before he dips his head, sucking my nipple hard enough to make my knees weaken.
“Jake—”
“I’ve got you.”
His hand moves lower, his fingers sliding between my thighs. He groans softly when he finds me wet.
“Fuck, Emilia.”
“It’s the shower.”
“It’s not the shower.” His thumb circles my clit slowly. “My wife is just that wet for me.”
Heat rushes through me.
“Please.”
He gives me more immediately, two fingers sliding inside me while his thumb works my clit with steady pressure. My orgasm hits fast, breaking through me hard enough that I have to grip his arms to stay upright.
He catches me easily.
Then he’s lifting me against the marble wall, my legs wrapping around his waist while he settles between my thighs.
“Look at me,” he says roughly. “I want to see your face when I make love to you as my wife.”
“I’ve been yours since the beginning.”
The sound he makes almost undoes me all over again.
He pushes inside me slowly, filling me completely, and we both groan at the same time.
“God, you feel incredible.”
He starts moving in deep, steady thrusts while the water streams over our bodies. One hand grips my thigh while the other braces against the wall beside my head, holding me exactly where he wants me.
“I love you,” he says against my mouth. “So fucking much.”
“I love you, too.”
His expression softens instantly, like hearing the words heals something in him.
His pace turns harder, more urgent, and the pressure builds again almost immediately. I come around him with his name on my lips, and he follows right after, burying himself deep with a groan while he holds me tight against him through every pulse of our release.
We stay like that, tangled together under the rainfall showerhead, the water washing over us as our breathing slowly returns to normal. His forehead rests against mine, and when he opens his eyes, I see everything I’ve ever wanted looking back at me.
“Mrs. Hale,” he murmurs, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“Mr. Hale,” I answer, and press my lips to his once more.
We fall into bed still damp, the ocean loud through the open windows, Jake’s arm pulling me against his chest before I’ve even found the pillow.
“You know Poppy’s going to call at six in the morning,” I say.
He smiles against my hair. “Worth it.”
I don’t remember falling asleep.
But I wake to sunlight.
The beach house is quiet except for the ocean.
Jake is already awake.
He’s on his side watching me.
I press my palm flat against his chest.
He covers my hand with his and doesn’t look away.
“Hi, wife,” he says again.
I laugh. “You’re going to say that every morning, aren’t you?”
“Every single one.”
Richard Hale built an empire across the Pacific and left one line at the end of everything he made.
Build for love. Everything else is just construction.
His sons spent years thinking that was about the work.
It was never about the work.
It was about this, a beach house full of morning light, a man who stopped waiting for people to leave and started building something worth staying for, a little girl back at Diamond Head who calls me Mom without thinking twice about it.
The Hale Dynasty was never the buildings they built.
It was the people who always found their way home to each other.
Just like we did.
THE END
Thanks for reading My Billionaire's Accidental Family.