Chapter 21
I raise my brow at Shayla’s long list of groceries as she drops two packages of sweet rolls in the cart. “You know the guys would be fine with just pizza and beer.”
“I know, but I want to make a good first impression with your friends. And who doesn’t like sliders? Wait, none of them are vegetarian or vegan, right? Shoot, I should have thought of that. I can find something else if they are.” Shayla pulls out her phone to start googling alternatives one-handed after she switches Grayson to her shoulder.
I laugh as I take the phone from her, sliding it into the back pocket of her jeans, my hand lingering on her hip as she consults her list for the next item. I love how freely she’s allowing me to touch her now after last night, which was a literal dream come true. It’s been nearly impossible to keep my hands off her after waking up with my morning wood pressed against her naked ass.
Shit, down boy. The last thing I need is to get a hard-on in the middle of the grocery store, clueing everyone in on what a colossal creep I am. This is what she does to me.
I turn and pretend to study the numerous bread options while I discreetly adjust my erection in my jeans and yank my shirt lower to cover my bulge.
We’re nearly at the end of her list, adding a few extras she needs to the cart when we end up in the personal hygiene aisle. We both come to a halt at the same time, eyeing the shelf of condoms. I’ve bought condoms before, back when I was younger and first started dating, just in case. But that was years ago, and eventually, I had to throw them out when they expired.
I pull a box off the shelf and ask, “Should I…?”
Shayla’s cheeks blush the prettiest pink when our eyes connect. She bites her bottom lip and nods, and I drop them in the cart with a huge grin, doing a happy dance in my mind.
I’m not paying attention as I turn the corner at the end of the aisle, my mind conjuring up all the ways I’d like to use the condoms with her tonight, and I nearly collide with another shopper. Lainey startles from where she’s sitting, seatbelted on the child’s seat in the cart, and I stop to make sure she’s ok and kiss her forehead.
“Dude, watch where you’re going,” an angry male voice barks. I’m just about to apologize when the young guy screws up his face. “Shayla?”
“Tyler, hi,” she responds in a less-than-thrilled voice.
So this is Tyler, the asshole who has had his scummy, unworthy hands on my angel. I eye him in his football jersey and baggy jeans, instantly on the defense. I straighten to my full height and clench my fists to stop myself from following through on the impulse to deck him when his upper lip curls. I’ve never been in a fight before, but I’ve easily got six inches on him and something priceless to defend.
Shayla shuffles closer to my side, and I wrap an arm around her shoulders. His eyes shift between her, Grayson on her shoulder, and Lainey in the cart, and I want to rip his eyes out just for looking at them.
“That supposed to be my kid? Looks nothing like me,” he sneers, but I see the way he’s studying her face with curiosity. He’s lying through his teeth. He has blonde hair like both girls, though his is on the darker side, on the edge of turning light brown. Though Lainey is Shayla’s mini-me and unmistakably her daughter, she does have some of Tyler’s features—her nose, which is the tiniest bit wider than Shayla’s, and a rounder chin, but the rest is all Shayla.
Of course, with my black hair and blue eyes, she looks much more like him than she does me, but that doesn’t stop me from declaring loudly and with venom, “No, she’s mine.” I release her seatbelt and pull her up into my arms, hiding her face in my shoulder because I don’t like his narrowed eyes on her. Like I told Shayla last night, she might be his biologically, but she’s mine in every other way.
He snorts and snaps his attention back to me. “Whatever, dude. Not like I wanted her anyway.”
I press the side of Lainey’s head against my shoulder while I cover her other ear so she won’t hear me curse. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Giving up these two angels and being a giant piece of shit to the mother of your child?” He bristles and goes red in the face when I continue. “You know what? Your loss is my gain, asshole, and you’re going to live to regret it. Now back the fuck up and crawl back into whatever dank hole you crawled out of.”
Shayla whispers low under her breath, “It’s ok. Let’s just go home.”
If I weren’t so focused on this walking, talking, human turd, I’d be over the moon that she called my house home.
Tyler swallows, visibly trying to remain unaffected, and ignores what I said in favor of sneering as he fixes his eyes on Grayson. He snorts again, an ugly sound to match his ugly personality. “Got knocked up again, huh?”
Shayla’s mouth drops open, and I’m half a second away from handing Lainey to her and clocking him in the mouth. But then Shayla asks with incredulity, “Are you really that dumb? He’s almost as big as Lainey and only four months younger.”
His face turns an even darker shade of red in embarrassment, and I’m sure he’s about to say something nasty again when a slightly younger brown-haired girl turns the corner and asks, “Ready to go, babe?” She strokes a hand down his back, and he shrugs her off. It doesn’t escape our notice that she’s heavily pregnant. Since she just called him babe, I assume her baby is his, too.
Shayla must think so as well because she asks him in disbelief, “Jesus, Tyler. You got a bad batch of condoms or some kind of breeding kink?”
I feel the tips of my ears go hot and red to match Tyler’s face as soon as the term breeding kink comes out of her mouth in her sweet voice. Snippets of last night flash through my mind, specifically when I told her we’d pretend I came inside her when what I really wanted to do was unload all of my cum deep inside her pussy and watch her belly swell with our child.
I snap back to the present when the girl asks, “What?” in a shrill tone. She’s clearly taken aback, and suddenly, her eyes sharpen on our babies. “Tyler? What’s she talking about? Who is this?” She gestures at Shayla, then palms her rounded baby bump that tents her sundress.
“No one. Just a—”
Shayla gives a half-hearted wave and says to the girl softly, “I’m Shayla. His first baby-mama, as far as I know. And this”—she points to Lainey—“is your baby’s older sister—the one he wants nothing to do with—if the one you’re carrying is Tyler’s.”
The girl slaps a hand over her mouth, and tears spring to her huge, brown eyes when she turns on him. “What does she mean by nothing to do with her?” she asks with an accusatory tone. “You…you’ve never even mentioned them to me. No photos or phone calls.” She wraps her arms around her belly, and her chin quivers.
“Eden, baby, listen—”
“No! Don’t you ‘baby’ me. If I had known…oh my god. Oh my god! Did you do this to me on purpose? You said it was an accident, that the condom broke,” she yells and backs away. She turns and half-runs, half-waddles away as fast as she can in her state.
Shayla’s expression turns stormy, and she takes a half-step forward, but I pull her back to my side when Tyler clenches his soft jaw, and a vein starts to pulse angrily in his forehead.
“That’s what you told me, too! And you still had the gall to pretend Lainey isn’t yours. Geez, you’re a bigger scumbag than I thought.”
Tyler hisses, “Fuck you, bitch,” as if it’s her fault he’s been exposed as the rancid juice at the bottom of a dumpster that he is. He finally abandons his cart to chase after the girl.
Shayla has to pull me back to her side this time when I try to hand Lainey to her so I can pummel his ass into the ground. We wait, silently fuming, until well after Tyler has disappeared while I try to calm my pounding heart. I have never felt this way before, and it takes a long time for the blood to stop rushing in my ears, my mind telling me to go after him. I pull Shayla into my chest, rubbing my hand up and down her back with our babies between us until we both relax.
I kiss her forehead and ask, “Are you ok?”
She surprises me by smiling, not a tear in sight like I expected. “Yeah. Just goes to show he’s a P-O-S.” She leans up on her tiptoes and kisses me. “And I’m glad to know he won’t give us any problems about you calling Lainey ‘yours’.”
“Because she is mine. I’m not just calling her that. I’m putting my claim on her. If Tyler ever does try to cause problems, I’ll find a way to F-U-C-K up his whole life until he disappears again. That’s a promise.”
“You’d do that for us?” She’s looking at me in that special way of hers as if I personally hung the moon in the sky for her. I press my lips to hers, deepening the kiss until our babies squirm between us, a complaint about us squishing them.
“I’d do anything for you, angel. I—” I love you is what I want to say.
My feelings toward her have always been intense, obsessive even, but they’ve deepened beyond that each and every day I’ve spent in her presence. But I’m scared it’s too soon to tell her how much I love her when she’s only just given herself to me. What if she doesn’t feel the same way yet?
“Come on. Let’s check out and go home,” I say instead of spilling my guts out in the middle of the grocery store. After I pay for the groceries and we make our way to my car to load them in the trunk, we hear a soft, feminine voice behind us.
“Shayla?”
We turn, and the brown-haired girl steps forward. Her eyes and nose are red-rimmed. She sniffles and looks away briefly. I can tell Shayla wants to hug her, but she holds back and nods her head instead.
“I’m Eden,” she says, officially introducing herself. “I just wanted to say that I really didn’t know about you or your daughter, I promise. If I did, I never would have let him…” She wipes away a stray tear and wraps her arms around her baby bump. “My mom was right about him,” she whispers with obvious regret. “Um, I’ve been thinking about what you said about our babies being siblings. And I was wondering if it would be ok to ask for your number? For after my baby is born so they can meet? I mean, I don’t know if you want that. If you want to forget all about us, or if you hate me—”
With a soft voice, Shayla says, “I don’t hate you. I might hate Tyler, but I’d never hate you or your baby. That wouldn’t be fair to you or our kids either. And I want them to get to know each other, to have a relationship, if you still want that after your baby is born.”
An older woman driving a gray minivan pulls up beside us. She calls out for Eden, worry evident in her tone. Eden holds up a finger for her to wait, and the girls share a small smile while they pull out their phones. After they exchange phone numbers, Shayla leans in for a hug this time.
“It’s going to be ok. You can call me any time, and I’ll be there to help you with anything you need. Tyler might turn out to be a deadbeat for you, too, though I hope he treats you a lot better if he does stick around. Even then, call me, ok?”
“Thank you,” Eden whispers, her smile a little brighter now as her eyes flit to me and back to Shayla. “You’re lucky, you know? I can tell he cares about you and your daughter.”
I stroke my hand over Lainey’s hair, where she’s back to sitting in the cart. She smiles, all chubby cheeks and big gray eyes just like her mother. “I’m the lucky one,” I say with a smile.
The woman calls out Eden’s name again, a little louder this time, and Eden waves to us and climbs into the minivan. The woman takes her measure of us, her brows creased with concern, then slowly pulls away.
“You still ok?” I ask during the drive home, holding her hand on my lap and squeezing it intermittently.
“Yeah, I really am lucky, aren’t I? I have you, Grayson, and Lainey. And Lainey will have a sibling. That’s kind of exciting, even if I hate the way it all came about.”
“Siblings. Plural.”
“What?”
“Grayson and Lainey. I meant it when I said that they’re ours, both of them, which makes them siblings.”
Shayla’s silent through the rest of the drive, and I wonder if I’ve freaked her out or given her second thoughts about us by referring to Grayson and Lainey as siblings. I cross my fingers and toes that I haven’t because, to me, we’re a family. Grayson’s not just my nephew or ward—he’s my son. And Lainey isn’t just Shayla’s daughter—she’s mine too. We may have only known each other officially for a few months, but Shayla’s the one. She’s it for me. They’re all it for me.
I hope she feels the same way.
By the time I pull into the driveway and put the car in park, I’m on my way to having a breakdown over Shayla’s silence. But then she leans over the console between us and kisses me so sweetly, caressing my cheek. When she pulls away, her eyes are shiny with unshed tears.
“Siblings. Plural,” she says, repeating what I said before she went silent. Then she kisses me so sweetly again, dragging it out until I’m halfway to pulling her over the console and onto my lap. If it weren’t the middle of the day and the babies weren’t wide awake, I’d drag her into my bedroom and show her just how sweet I can be.