Epilogue
BAILEY
It’s been a month since David’s trial.
I wake up sometimes with my chest tight, expecting to see David’s shadow at the end of the bed. For so many years, that fear was carved into me. The weight of him, the control, the bruises I hid. It doesn’t vanish overnight.
But then I roll over, and he isn’t there.
Instead, Huck is usually sprawled on his back, snoring like a freight train. Sean sleeps light, always the one who stirs if I so much as breathe wrong, his jaw tight even in rest. Wesley sometimes mutters in his sleep, numbers or fragments of code, his brain always busy even when he’s unconscious.
They’re here. And David will never be again.
The trial was brutal, but it was also simple. He tried to kill me. He nearly killed Huck. He could have killed Friedburg, a Hollywood institution. His hired bomber nearly blew my home sky-high. He planned to kidnap our children.
No amount of money, no family name, no high-priced lawyers could spin those facts. The jury barely deliberated. Life without parole.
His life is ruined. It means he doesn’t get out. It means he doesn’t get another chance. It means I don’t have to worry anymore that his shadow will crawl back under my skin.
It means I’m free.
The kids know now too. Not the whole story. They’re too young for all of it. But enough. Enough that Eli doesn’t wonder why Dad disappeared. Enough that Maeve doesn’t think she imagined what she saw.
They know he was a bad father. I know it now too.
That was the hardest truth for me to swallow. For so long I convinced myself otherwise, told myself he was good to them even if he was cruel to me. But Sean, Wesley, and Huck were right. A man who brutalizes the mother of his children is not a good father. He never was.
It broke me to admit it. But in that break, something new settled in. Because now my kids do have fathers. Father figures, anyway. And they have me too.
My career is alive again. Friedburg’s film is a critical darling, and last week the nominations came out. My name is on the list for Best Actress.
An Oscar nomination. It doesn’t feel real.
The kids don’t care about it. They care that the pool heater’s been fixed, that their swim coach shows up twice a week, that Jessica makes mac and cheese better than anyone else alive.
Right now I hear them in the backyard, their shrieks carrying through the open window, the slap of water echoing. Normal sounds. Happy sounds.
And upstairs, three men wait for me.
I pause at the bottom of the stairs and listen—Eli’s whoop, Maeve’s splash, Jessica’s calm voice counting off laps with the coach.
The kind of ordinary I used to think I’d never get again.
I close the slider, lock it, and turn the house to hush.
My pulse climbs the way it does before a scene, except this isn’t performance.
It’s relief. It’s desire that doesn’t have to hide.
Halfway up the steps I can already feel them.
Not physically—yet—but in the way my body recognizes their gravity.
Sean’s controlled heat. Wesley’s quicksilver focus.
Huck’s big, unruly tenderness. The hallway smells like laundry detergent and eucalyptus from the diffuser Sean insists helps him sleep, and beneath that, the trace of cologne and soap and us.
The bedroom door is ajar. I push it with my foot.
They’re waiting. Not fanned out like a tableau, not staged.
Just…here. Sean by the window, sleeves rolled, that coiled readiness he can’t turn off even now.
Wesley on the edge of the bed, a nervous energy in his knee he’s trying—failing—to still.
Huck propped against the headboard, bandage hidden under a soft black tee, his smile slow and shameless when he sees me.
“Hi,” I say, breathless for no good reason except that I want them.
Huck’s grin tips crooked. “Hi, yourself.”
Sean crosses to me first. He doesn’t ask if I’m sure. We’ve had that conversation a dozen different ways in a dozen quiet rooms. His fingertips find my wrist and press once, a question I know how to answer. “Color?”
“Green,” I breathe, the word loosening something low in me. The second word is for all of them. “Please.”
He nods. Wesley exhales, the tension in him unwinding in a visible ripple. Huck pats the mattress like he’s calling me over.
“Door,” Wesley says, already halfway there. He clicks the lock, pulls the curtains, sets his phone face down on the dresser like he’s putting his mind where his body is.
Sean takes my face in his hands and kisses me—slow at first. I open for him and everything goes hot. The stress of life evaporates under the press of his mouth. When he lifts his head, I’m dizzy. “Breathe.”
“Working on it,” I say, smiling, and hook my fingers in his shirt. “Don’t be gentle because you feel sorry for me. I’m not breakable.”
His eyes flick, proud and dark. “Never thought you were.”
Wesley comes up behind me, palms skimming the backs of my arms, featherlight. If Sean is heat, Wes is electricity, all attentive brightness that notices everything. He kisses the spot below my ear, and my knees remember what weakness is. “You’re sure,” he says, not a doubt—our ritual.
“I’m sure.” I turn my head and find his mouth. He tastes like mint and the stubborn sweet of a man who’s had too much coffee and refuses to admit it.
Huck clears his throat theatrically. “Gonna make me watch from over here, or am I allowed to kiss the lady who saved my life by threatening to end me if I ever scare her like that again?”
I ease away from Sean and Wes and climb up onto the bed.
Huck opens his arms and I fit into the space like I belong there, because I do.
He smells like clean cotton and the warm salt of skin.
When he kisses me, it’s all gratitude and hunger.
He’s careful of his chest—we all are. He’s still tender where the skin has healed.
But he’s not careful with the way he pours himself into my mouth.
My hands skate under his shirt. He catches my wrists gently and guides them higher.
He murmurs against my lips, “I’m yours tonight. ”
“Mine,” I echo, and the word burns in the best way.
Sean’s knuckles brush my ankle as he lifts my foot to slide off a shoe.
Then the other. A small, precise service that makes my skin prickle.
Wesley’s fingers peel the strap from my shoulder and heat rolls across me like summer.
They’re not rushing. They never rush. They map me like I’m something worth learning, even though they already know the terrain by heart.
“Say what you want,” Sean reminds me, voice low, steady, a keel.
“Everything,” I say, because it’s the only word big enough.
“Greedy,” Wesley whispers, delighted, and his mouth traces the hollow of my throat. I arch. Huck’s hand cups the back of my neck and holds me there, anchored, while Sean’s palm slides slow over my thigh, a firm glide that coaxes my breath ragged.
The rope is on the nightstand. Not the rough kind that makes a mark for days. The soft braided silk that lives here now, coiled like a secret. Sean glances at me. I nod, heartbeat in my mouth. “Yes.”
He lifts my wrists and kisses the inner skin before he binds. Not tight—never tight. A comfortable embrace that says surrender isn’t losing. It calms me, lets me breathe.
Wesley’s palm flattens over my ribs, count-matching my breath until it evens. He always does that when I shake, and I always do, at least a little, when I hand this over. It’s okay to shake. It’s okay to need. I didn’t know that once. I do now.
“Look at me,” Huck says softly, and I do. Those pale eyes have gentled a thousand storms since the night he bled onto Friedburg’s rug and told me it was a flesh wound. He smiles and the last of my defenses unclasp like a necklace.
Sean ties off with a neat pull. “Still green?”
“Greener,” I say, and God, it’s true. I’m buzzing. Alive in every place they touch and every place they haven’t touched yet.
Wesley slips the silk sleep mask down from the bedpost. It’s not about blindness. It’s about choosing where my focus goes. “May I?”
“Please.”
Darkness blooms. The soft press across my eyes turns the room into sound. The rustle of sheets, the whisper of clothing, Huck’s exhale, Sean’s quiet curse when my hips shift, Wes’s little involuntary sound when I say his name. Their hands are a constellation, and I’m lucky enough to be sky.
I feel the cold kiss of a loop of leather at my ankle—Sean clipping me to the padded strap tucked beneath the mattress, limiting my chaos just enough to make me brave. “This okay?”
“Yes,” I say, and again, because saying yes feels like a magic I’ll never get tired of. “Yes.”
Then I feel it. Huck’s hungry tongue on me. That piercing, working magic through my clit until I see stars just before he can’t take it anymore and slides up my body to thrust home.
He fed on me, and now, I feed on Sean. His cock nestles into the back of my throat right as Wes pinches my nipples. I’m helpless and hot, their plaything. Huck’s cock digs up against my G-spot, like it’s a race.
Who can make me come the fastest? The hardest? The most?
They take turns. Wesley whispers in my ear, “He’s got you going again, doesn’t he? Just wait till I’m inside of you. I’ll make you scream my name.”
I whimper on Sean’s cock. But he pulls out. “Color?”
“Green,” I say, and then I laugh, breathless, because the laugh just…happens.
Huck kisses it out of my mouth, grounding me in the middle of the storm they’re making on my skin. The house could fall down around us and I wouldn’t notice. In here, I’m allowed to be greedy, to be worshiped, to be messy with want and clean with choice.
Sean unbinds me, and when he lies down on his back, they roll me onto him. The weight on the bed shifts a lot. I glide down his length and start to ride, but then Huck murmurs, “Open wide,” and I swallow him down.
That’s when Wes’s lubed cock breeches from behind. Two men in my pussy, slow at first. But I can’t take it slow. I need it all.
I let go. Not of myself—of the fear of needing.
Of the reflex to apologize for wanting. The dark behind the mask fills with stars, and every place they touch bursts into light.
Heat erupts in my core, and I’m coming so hard that Wes is right—I scream his name.
They hammer into me, each of them making it last longer than my orgasm has any right to, until they join me over that edge.
When the mask finally lifts, it’s because I ask to see them.
They’re flushed and wrecked and beautiful, three kinds of love within arm’s reach.
I’m shaking with spent adrenaline and something brighter.
Sean kisses my forehead. Wesley presses his smile to my wrist as he loosens the silk.
Huck tucks me into his side, careful of his healing chest, and hums some tuneless little bar of nothing like he’s calming a wild thing that trusted him enough to be still.
“Color?” Sean asks one last time, ritual-weary and fond.
“Gold,” I say, and they laugh, because of course I have to be dramatic.
“Just like that statue you’re gonna win,” Wesley says.
I don’t argue about jinxing it or luck. Not this time. I’m too spent.
Outside, a gull cries and the pool pump hums, and somewhere in the city a thousand red carpets are being steamed for a night that might put that statue in my hand.
But here, in this room that used to be haunted, the only thing that matters is that my body is mine and I chose them and they chose me back, over and over, until choosing feels like breathing.
“Again,” I whisper into Huck’s shoulder, drunk on them, on us.
“Greedy,” he says, and his mouth finds mine.
“Yeah. All three of you are mine.”
Sean laughs and kisses my shoulder. “Always.”
The End
My dearest reader, thank you for reading Single Mom’s Bodyguards!
If, like me, you couldn’t get enough of Bailey & her three Navy SEAL bodyguards, then click here to get your bonus epilogue.
P.S. If you enjoyed reading Single Mom’s Bodyguards, then I think you’ll enjoy reading Sold to the Silver Foxes too! Swipe to the next page for a quick sneak peek…