Chapter 26
Beep…beep…beep.
God, that sound was annoying.
I slowly opened my eyes and blinked through my blurry vision. I scanned the wood-paneled room, trying to find the source of that awful beeping sound, when I discovered a man at the side of my bed.
I hadn’t remembered getting in bed or being with a man, but the stranger held my right hand and rested his blonde head on top of it.
“Whoooo are you?” I asked, my tongue feeling like rubber in my mouth.
The man lifted his head and looked at me—wow, he was gorgeous.
“Oh, you’re handsome.” I giggled. “What are you doing in my bed?”
The man smirked. “Waiting for your anesthesia to wear off.”
Ana-what? Whatever, more important matters were at hand.
I tilted my head to the side. “Are you my boyfriend?”
He laughed—God, why was he so hot when he laughed?
“You told me you didn’t want a boyfriend,” he said. “In fact, you told me over and over that you wanted nothing to do with me.”
My chest shook and tears welled up in my eyes. “Why would I say that when you’re the most handsome man I’ve ever seen?”
Beep…beep…beep.
I turned my head. “And what is that noise?” I looked down, finding wires in my hands and arms. “And what are these? Oh God, am I a robot? Is that why I can’t love?”
I sobbed as hot tears rolled down my cheeks. The handsome man laughed at me.
“Hush, Olivia,” he said, an amused smile brightening his voice as he dried my tears with the edge of his sleeve. “You’re not a robot.”
He lifted my hand to show me the wire that now looked more like a tube embedded into my skin. “This is just to help the nurses give you medicine.” He glanced up to a screen behind me that I just noticed. “That monitors your heart rate—that’s the noise you’re hearing.”
I leaned forward, studying his strong jaw and the devastating cut of his cheekbones. “And why are you here?”
He looked at me with eyes that were blue enough to quench any thirst. “Because I care about you.”
He smelled so good, like opening presents under the tree at Grandma’s. His face was mere inches from mine, but I wanted him closer.
“Really?” I said, my eyelashes feeling heavy as I moved toward him. “I’m so lucky…”
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
His eyes flicked up to the monitor and his breath ghosted against my lips. “If you’re this excited now, I can’t wait to see what happens when you meet the babies.”
I froze, then my brows furrowed as I limply fell back. My pillow caught me and held me upright as I chewed on the handsome man’s words.
I took a deep breath—wait, I could breathe again. Why couldn’t I breathe before? My hand groped around my ribs, then my abdomen. My belly felt smaller and squishier than it should, like it was empty.
“Babies?” I whispered. “Babies…babies! Oh God, where are my babies?”
I turned as my chest started to shake. “Beau, where are the twins?”
Beau held my shoulders, keeping me steady. “There you are, sugar. The twins are in the nursery, snuggly and warm. They were just waiting for Mommy to wake up.”
The tears started again. “What—what happened?”
Beau held my hands as he explained everything. I sat, frozen in shock, as he told me that Annie had a partial placental abruption at Ashley and Tyson’s house that caused me to hemorrhage. I had lost nearly two liters of blood by the time I was wheeled in for the emergency c-section.
“Dr. Ornelas said you were very lucky to not need a transfusion after all that blood loss,” he said. “You were so tough, I told you that you were a badass.”
My lip trembled. “You…you saved my life. If we had gone to Parkland hospital or…or even driven to the city instead of taking your helicopter, I might not have made it.”
He shrugged. “Like I said before—if it’s for you, nothing is too much. I’d do it again any day of the week.”
He said it so casually, like he had merely picked up a coffee for me before work. Beau always had the financial resources to move mountains, but the sincerity of his devotion shook me to my bedrock.
Hearing that he loved me was nothing more than words, bits of breath lost to the wind.
Every touch and every kiss I had dismissed as pure physical voracity.
Even him caring for me during the pregnancy was a means to an end, and that end was currently waiting in a nursery somewhere else in the hospital.
And Beau was…here. I had awoken to him clutching my hand almost as if he were in prayer and he had stayed with me, patiently, like he always had.
A calm warmth, like a blanket fresh out of the dryer, wrapped around me. I had always thought that all-encompassing warmth, the kind that made my muscles feel woolen and each breath light as down feathers, was an unaffordable luxury, but the feeling was not completely unfamiliar.
I had felt it, pieces of it, at doctor’s appointments while staring at a flickering ultrasound monitor, in the cab of a truck while ordering at a drive-thru that was just about to close, and in the artificial twilight of the bedroom TV just before falling asleep next to my greatest friend.
Beau’s love was something I never thought I wanted, then nothing I ever thought I deserved, but regardless of how I felt about it, I had it—all of it.
And I never wanted to give it back.
A quick knock rapped on the door before it opened. I held my breath as the nurses wheeled in two bassinets, one with a pink placard and the other with blue, filled with precious swaddled bundles inside.
The nurses’ voices lifted with their smiles, but their words were a happy blur as they handed me first Annie, then Brady.
My head turned back and forth as I scanned each of their faces. I couldn’t match the squishy bundles in my hands to the blurry ultrasound photos that I had studied.
A horrible hollowness grew in the center of my chest. Between the slender cheeks and pointed chins, I couldn’t recognize any part of myself in them. There must have been a mistake.
I shook my head. “These…these aren’t my babies.”
The nurses tried to reassure me, but I ignored them as I instinctively looked up at Beau for help. He held a loose fist against his lips as he looked at the babies, his eyes glistening.
A faint itch of recognition tickled the back of my mind. I had seen the face of my twins before—not in an ultrasound, but on the wall of the second story landing back at Fontaine Manor.
My cheeks rose with a smile as I looked down at the twins, then back up at Beau. “These aren’t my babies, they’re your babies. They look exactly like—”
“I know,” Beau rasped, nodding his head slightly. “I…I see.”
He was stone still, as if he could freeze his incoming tears in place to keep them from falling.
I wiggled my toes, just to make sure I could move from the waist down, and then scooted over in the bed to make room.
“Well, come on,” I said with a pointed glance to the empty spot on the mattress. “Get in here and meet your children.”
Beau carefully sat in the bed, easing beside me so he wouldn’t startle the sleeping babies. His shoulder brushed against mine and his ribs mashed against my side. He was far too big for the hospital bed, but I still invited him to take up every remaining inch of space.
His face softened as he looked at the twins. He gently stroked Annie’s cheek and she gave him a tiny smile. Brady grunted in his sleep and his arm burst out of his swaddle, but Beau caught his little fist and held it.
“Our perfect babies,” he whispered as his thumb lightly traced Brady’s fist.
With a silent sigh, I rested my head on Beau’s shoulder. I had all of Beau’s love before, but that soothing warmth grew before my eyes, encompassing not just two, but four hearts.
And it felt wonderful.
The nurses helped us unwrap the babies from their swaddles and I breathed a sigh of relief when both twins latched for their first tandem feed.
We braved through their first diaper changes.
I discovered a small cleft on Brady’s chin that my mother also had.
Annie’s slender fingers, just like her father’s, wrapped around my thumb and I nearly burst into tears.
All the while, Beau snapped picture after picture, his phone constantly vibrating as his mother responded to every image of the twins he sent her.
Sunlight bled through the hospital window and faded into a cool night, but time had become an abstract concept as we cared for the twins. When one baby settled down, the other would instantly start crying. We fed and burped and bounced the babies until we could scarcely keep our eyes open.
On top of meeting the twins’ every need, I was occasionally reminded that I was also recovering from major surgery.
Nurses came in and out of the room at all hours.
I was poked and pressed and given more pills than I could keep track of, but Beau stayed with me through it all—never complaining once.
On the second day of our hospital stay, a nurse came in with a stack of paperwork and a pen—the official government forms for the twins’ legal names.
I sat in the bed with the papers in my lap, my eyes scanning the blank forms, but then I looked up at Beau.
He sat in the gray leather chair beside me with his eyes closed, holding the twins as they rested on his bare chest. Even though Beau was surviving on his third cup of drip coffee from the nurse’s station, his breathing wasn’t in his usual sleeping pattern.
The twins, Annie under her lavender blanket and Brady under his sage one, had their cheeks smushed against their father’s chest as they slept peacefully in his arms.
A faint smile lifted my cheeks and I turned to my bedside table, where my mother’s ashes sat beside my breast pump and my hospital water jug.
Mom always told me I could do hard things, and she was right. I had braved through a tough pregnancy, swallowed my pride and accepted help, and survived a life-threatening delivery. Though victory after victory, one achievement was always out of reach—happiness.
I had always thought happiness was a temporary sunbeam that flashed in the gilt of triumph. I created my own happiness with an expensive pair of shoes, a strand of glittering Christmas lights, or the defeat of a bitter rival. Joy was earned, it wasn’t a state of being.
But when Beau came back into my life, I stopped trying to achieve happiness.
At first, I was focused on mere survival—counting down the days until I could be back on my feet and continue conquering the world—, but then I found pockets of joy in mere existence.
What began as quiet contentment with Beau had turned into deep comfort that led to occasional glitters of exhilaration—and he hadn’t made me earn any of it.
I had sworn off commitment because I had seen men take and take from my mother, but Beau was different.
He gave. Not just money, cars, or jewels, but he gave himself, even when I wouldn’t reciprocate.
Being with him had been so easy that I had thought I was falling into a trap, but what if I deserved an easy life? What if I deserved happiness?
Accepting that I deserved comfort and happiness from another person might have been the hardest thing for me to do, but like my mother said, I could do hard things.
I put the pen down on top of the forms. “Beau?”
He opened one eye. “Hmm?”
I wrung my hands in my lap. “You said you love me, but do you trust me?”
He blinked both eyes open and then stared off into a corner for a moment. Just when I thought the sleepless night had caught up with him, he turned back and looked at me.
“You’ve always been true to yourself and true to your word,” he responded. “Everything you said you would do, you’ve done. So, yes, I trust you.”
I pursed my lips and dropped my eyes to the stack of forms. I glanced back up at him. “What do you want from me, Beau?”
Beau looked at the sleeping babies on his chest and then turned his attention back to me, his eyes soft. “You know exactly what I want, Olivia.”
I nodded, my decision locking in place. I picked up the pen and started filling out the first form.
Beau leaned forward a little. “What are you doing?”
“Giving the twins their full legal names,” I responded as I wrote.
He swallowed. “And…what name are you giving them?”
“I’m doing exactly as I said I would do,” I said as I filled out the second form. “Our children are going to have my last name.”
A tense silence enveloped us for a moment, but then Beau gave a short nod in acceptance, leaving me to complete the forms in peace.
When I finished, I straightened the sets of documents and set them neatly in my lap.
“I’ll take the babies so you can sign,” I offered.
His mouth formed a fine line and he slowly rose from that stiff hospital chair. Gently, he handed me Brady, then Annie. The babies cooed and grunted as they settled against me, their bodies warming my chest. I held them close as I watched Beau take the stack of forms and settle back into his chair.
Beau’s eyes lazily roved over the beginning of the form for a second, but then he paused, his brows furrowing. He blinked and read the form again. The paper crinkled in his hands as he pulled out the second form from behind the first and held them side-by-side, his eyes bouncing between the two.
He looked up at me over the papers. “Wh-what does this mean?”
“I told you,” I said plainly, “the babies will get my name.”
Beau looked down in disbelief, staring at the forms where I had written “Annie Cherie Fontaine” and “Brady Louis Fontaine.”
“So…?” Beau asked.
Maybe the sleepless night had gotten to him.
A flush crept across my cheeks and I smiled. “Yes, Beau. I will marry you.”
The forms fell from his hands as he rose to his feet. He stared at me, wordless, as the sunlight from the window cast him in a golden glow. Then he smiled, softly at first, but then that smile grew until he was laughing.
A giggle formed in my throat, but he stole it with a kiss before it could leave my lips. He cradled my head, kissing my temples and the tip of my nose before giving each twin a kiss on the head.
When Beau moved back next to me, the sunlight caught the fine hairs on Annie’s head and made me pause.
“Look,” I said as I brushed Annie’s hair back with my palm. “Do you see—?”
“I do,” Beau responded.
We both looked at our daughter, snuggled in her blanket, as I smoothed down her very red hair.
I blinked. “Beau, you like statistics. What are the odds that Chuck and I are related?”
He hummed. “Mathmatecally speaking, it would be a long shot. But with my good luck, I’d bet the ranch on it.”
Beau gave me another kiss and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. We rested our heads together as we watched our babies sleep in the warm afternoon sun, making a perfect picture of the Fontaine family.
And then, with a quiet exhale, I made Beau Fontaine III a silent promise.
I was going to stay with him, forever.