Epilogue #2
The master suite was dark, illuminated only by the dying orange embers of the fieldstone fireplace and the silver moonlight cutting across the king-sized bed.
Coast stood by the open French doors of the balcony, his back to the room, wearing only dark gray sweatpants.
His shoulders were a massive, shadow-draped expanse of dense athletic muscle, marked by the functional scars of nine months of professional violence along the boards. The three-inch skate laceration across his left clavicle was silvery in the moon, raised and permanent.
I walked across the woven rug, my bare feet silent on the wood, dressed in a thin black silk camisole that fell to my mid-thigh.
I didn't announce myself.
I stepped up behind him, flattening both of my bare palms against the hot, ridged muscle of his lower back, leaning my cheek against the warm hollow between his shoulder blades.
Coast didn't flinch.
His lungs expanded on a deep, shuddering inhale, his head tilting back as the tension from sixty minutes of NHL hockey drained out of his spine in a single, ragged exhale.
"You're quiet tonight, sweetheart," he rasped, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that rattled straight through my hands into my forearms.
"You played like an unchained animal in the third period," I murmured, my thumbs tracing the heavy line of his lats. "That check along the boards was audible from the press box."
"The kid was leaning into our crease," he muttered, turning slowly in the circle of my arms until his chest blotted out the sea air.
His large, calloused hands came around my waist, his thick fingers gathering the thin silk of my camisole, hauling my hips forward until my thighs were pressed flush against his heat.
The physical scale of him—six feet, four inches of solid bone and muscle—still made my breath hitch in my throat. He looked down at me, his pale green eyes dark and heavy with a possessive, unyielding hunger that had only grown fiercer with every year of our marriage.
"You wore my sweater in the box," he whispered, his thumb catching my chin, tilting my face upward into the silver moonlight.
"I always wear your sweater," I breathed, my hands sliding up his chest, my fingertips tracing the scar over his heart.
"Good girl," he growled, the praise sliding through the dark like warm steel, sending a sudden, delicious wave of heat pooling low in my abdomen.
He leaned down, his mouth catching mine in a slow, deep, devastating kiss.
It wasn't a tentative reunion. It was a rhythmic, sacred claiming that left zero room for the rest of the world.
His tongue swept deep, tasting of mint, cold mountain rain, and the unshakeable devotion that had become the oxygen of my life.
My hands tangled into the thick dark hair at the nape of his neck, my body arching upward into his frame as he lifted me off the floorboards by my hips, carrying me across the room in three strides.
He laid me down in the center of the dark linen sheets with that agonizing, unhurried reverent care that had defined him since the night of the blizzard in Lake Placid.
He followed me down, settling his heavy frame between my parted thighs, bracing his full weight on his forearms so his chest hovered millimeters above mine.
"Coast," I gasped, the cool sheets contrasting with the scalding furnace of his skin as his large hand slid up the curve of my thigh, peeling the black silk up and over my head, tossing it onto the floorboards.
His gaze dropped over my bare body in the moonlight, taking in the soft curves, the high flush staining my collarbones, and the flat, smooth expanse of my stomach.
A muscle in his jaw jumped, his pupils blown so wide the green of his irises was swallowed in black.
"Look at you," he rasped, his voice rough and ruined with reverence. "My wife. My whole damn life."
He began to worship me.
His mouth moved over my jawline, down the sensitive arch of my neck, lingering over the leaping, rapid pulse at my collarbone.
His stubble grazed my sensitized skin, his large, scarred hands framing my waist, sliding down to cup the curve of my hips, anchoring my pelvis against his with an immovable, grounding weight.
He entered me with a slow, agonizingly patient glide that drew a long, ragged cry from my throat.
The friction was thick, liquid heat, every nerve ending in my body locking onto his cadence.
"Good girl," he whispered against my lips, his breath hot and ragged as his hips rocked into mine with a slow, punishing depth that made my fingers dig hard into the dense slabs of his shoulders. "Take all of me, Tallulah. Just like that."
"Coast... oh God, Coast," I wept against his mouth, my heels locking around the backs of his calves, pulling him deeper into the fire.
We moved together in the moonlit room, the rhythm deep, steady, and ancient, our heartbeats pounding in wild, synchronized fury against our joined chests.
Every stroke was an echo of every battle we had fought: the subterranean lab, the blizzard, the threats, the ice, and the victory that had brought us to this ocean.
When the release came, it was an avalanche.
My muscles clamped tight around him in long, shuddering waves of sensation that arched my spine off the mattress, my breath shattering into soft, broken sobs against his cheek.
Coast’s control broke a second later.
A choked, guttural sound tore from his chest—a raw, ruined sound of absolute surrender—as his hips drove deep one final time, burying his face in the crook of my neck, his seed pouring into me in heavy, rhythmic surges that burned like silver.
He shuddered against me, his massive frame trembling with the sheer exhaustion of his claiming, holding me so tightly my ribs groaned beneath his weight.
We lay tangled together beneath the heavy duvet as the clock on the mantel ticked past 1:00 AM, our breathing gradually slowing to match the rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocks outside.
Coast shifted, rolling onto his side, pulling me back against his chest so my spine was nestled into the curve of his torso, his heavy arm draped securely over my waist.
His large, calloused hand came to rest flat against my lower abdomen, his thumb stroking a slow, possessive circle over my skin.
I smiled in the dark.
I reached down to the bedside table, my fingers closing around a small, smooth wooden box I had hidden beneath my book before the game.
I brought it under the covers.
I took Coast’s right hand, turning his palm upward, and placed the small box in his fingers.
Coast went very still.
The slow stroking of his thumb stopped.
"Tallulah?" he rasped, his voice suddenly rough, his chin lifting from my shoulder.
"Open it," I whispered.
His large fingers were clumsy as he slid the wooden lid back.
Inside lay a single white plastic stick.
Beneath the faint amber light of the embers, the digital screen was locked and unblinking:
PREGNANT / 2-3 WEEKS
The air left Coast’s chest in a sharp, concussive rush that rattled the mattress.
He stared at the black pixels for five long, paralyzed seconds.
His breath hitched—a ragged, choked sound that made his massive shoulders shake.
He dropped the box onto the bed, rolled me onto my back, and hovered over me in the dark.
His bloodshot green eyes were wide, swimming with a brilliant, scalding sheen of tears that spilled over his dark lashes, tracking down through his stubble.
"Tallulah," he wept, the word breaking into rough, bleeding pieces against my mouth. "Are you... is this..."
"Number two, Captain," I whispered, tears burning hot and sweet behind my own eyes as my hands came up to frame his scarred face. "We're having another baby."
A dry, shattered sob broke from his throat.
Coast didn't stay on his elbows.
He slid down the mattress, burying his face against my bare stomach, his arms wrapping around my hips, holding my womb against his cheek with a terrifying, worshipful reverence that shook his entire body.
He kissed my belly over and over—slow, scorching, tear-stained kisses that soaked into my skin, his large hands splaying wide across my hipbones as if he could shield our new child from the entire universe.
"I've got you," he sobbed against my stomach, his voice thick with an unyielding, ferocious devotion that echoed off the timber rafters. "I've got all of you. Oh God, Tallulah... look at what you've given me. Look at our life."
He crawled back up the bed, his face wet with tears, and crushed his mouth down onto mine in a fierce, breathless, desperate kiss that tasted of salt, surrender, and eternal victory.
He pulled me flush against his heaving chest, wrapping his heavy arms around my frame, tucking my head beneath his chin as the salt wind whistled through the hemlocks outside.
I closed my eyes, listening to the slow, indestructible pump of his heart beneath my ear—the heart that had once been an iron cage, the heart that had broken for me, the heart that was now my permanent sanctuary.
Coast’s lips pressed into the dark curls at the crown of my head, his voice a low, gravelly whisper that settled into my bones like iron forged in the fire:
"From that cold basement in Lake Placid to this bed tonight... you are my only home, Tallulah. Everywhere. For the rest of my life."
"Everywhere," I promised against his skin.
The tide rolled in against the stone.
The house was warm.
The iron had held. And the reckoning was complete.