Epilogue
Oh, I’ll make it weird. I’ll make it weird AF.
—Sage to Gentry
Gentry
Ten years later
“Real police interrogations aren’t as tense and scary as they look on TV,” I heard my wife say. “All of mine have been very relaxed and friendly. I got pregnant at one.”
Silence.
Dead fucking silence.
“Sage.” I threw my head back and laughed.
Sage shrugged. “I did!”
I threw a grape at her and it hit her in the side of the face.
“You can’t say stuff like that in front of your kids.”
She rolled her eyes. “They’re all the way over there.”
I looked at the kids, that were crowded around the food table with all the other kids from the Dixie Wardens MC family.
Walker stood a whole head and shoulders over his brother, Cole. Even though Cole was older.
Cole reached over and took a massive turkey leg and bit into it, and I could do nothing but shake my head.
There was no way he’d finish that.
“I mean,” Ida Bell interjected, “you could always just admit that she’s telling the truth.”
I pointed at one of Sage’s best friends.
Bernice, her other best friend, snickered. “She has a point.”
My wife chose that moment to lean over into my space and say, “You hear that? I have a point.”
I caught her by the chin and pulled her closer. “Give me a kiss.”
She came willingly, giving me a kiss that tasted like barbecue and Sprite.
When she pulled back, I tapped her nose and said, “Your kid just got the turkey leg you told him not to get.”
She gasped and pulled back, glaring across the yard at her oldest child.
“That kid.” She got up and marched away.
I enjoyed the view as her ass swayed as she moved across the yard.
“All these years and you still have it bad.”
I looked at my brother who’d yet to find a woman he wanted to be with.
That didn’t seem to bother him, though.
Him and Dean? They were thick as thieves. And Van was also thinking about going to travel for the summer in Europe with Dean after he graduated in the fall.
Which fuckin’ knocked the wind out of me because it didn’t seem like Dean should be old enough to drive, let alone graduate.
That was what the party was for.
A celebration that Dean had made it.
He’d had a lot of catching up to do once we got him away from his mom, but he’d flourished.
Now he was graduating with his entire life ahead of him.
My phone rang, and I glanced down at it before sighing and answering it.
“Black, what’s up?”
“We got a body,” he grumbled. “Time to get to work.”
I stood up. “I’ll be there. Send me the address.”
I made my rounds to my children, then my wife.
Dean was last as I caught him and gave him a hard hug.
The girl he was talking to giggled.
“Gotta go to work, bud,” I said. “See you later.”
Dean slapped my back before saying, “Bye, Uncle Gentry.”
Later that night, as I got home from work, I found my family passed out on the huge sectional in the middle of the living room.
Cole was on one end with his feet extended into the bend of the couch. Walker’s feet touched his as he stretched out toward the other. Walker’s head rested on our new dog, Poppy. Poppy was a good dog, but she wasn’t like our Neo.
Neo had made it to fourteen years old before he’d passed.
Sage and Dean had cried for days.
Walker and Cole had been devastated as well, but nothing like Sage and Dean.
Poppy came along last year when Sage finally admitted that she wanted another dog.
She was sweet and loving, but she didn’t have that inner fire like Sage’s heart dog, Neo.
There’d probably never be another dog like Neo.
But that was okay.
“Hey,” my wife whispered.
I looked up to find her in the kitchen with a cookie in her hand.
I walked around the couch and headed for her, kissing her hard.
“Chocolate,” I said as I pulled back.
“Nightcap,” she murmured. “How was the crime scene?”
I grimaced. “Might need your internet sleuthing powers.”
She giggled. “I’m there whenever you want me.”
I snatched the cookie from her hand and shoved it into my mouth.
“Hey!” she said, affronted.
I grinned and showed her the chewed-up cookie all over my front teeth.
She rolled her eyes. “You boys are all the same.”
I winked and picked her up, tossing her over my shoulder and heading to the bedroom.
“When the children are asleep…”
I tossed her onto the bed, then went back to close and lock the door.
She was already stripping out of her clothes when I turned back around.
I came down on top of her moments later after stripping my own clothes off.
She wrapped her legs around my hips and threaded her arms around my neck.
“The parents will have sex?” she finished my earlier sentence.
“Something like that,” I growled against her mouth.
The next morning, the bright Montana sky woke me.
When my eyes blinked open, I smiled at the hair that was spread over my chest.
I turned and curled my body around Sage’s, surprised to find her still in bed.
Usually she was up at the crack of dawn with the kids.
But today they hadn’t woken us.
I realized why moments later when I heard the whispering and the clang of pots in the kitchen.
“Shit,” I said as I pushed away from my warm wife, leaving her sleeping so I could go out to the kitchen to investigate.
After slipping on some sweats, I headed out to find my kids looking up guiltily from the stove.
“What are you doing?” I asked the two boys who had their mothers’ eyes and my everything else.
The funny thing was, they looked exactly like Dean when he was their age.
To say that the male genes ran strong in this family would be an understatement.
“Making breakfast for Mama.” Walker held up the bowl of scrambled eggs.
I grinned. “Carry on.”
They did, making an unholy mess.
But seeing the look on my wife’s face as they brought her the food was nothing short of priceless.
The words that came out of her mouth, though?
Even better.
“I couldn’t have dreamed a better life than the one y’all gave me.”