Chapter 30
I think I need to quit my job to focus on my laundry.
— Pepper’s secret thoughts
PEPPER
1 week after the accident
“ I adore you?”
The man sleeping at my side jolted awake.
Which meant the little boy in his arms jolted awake, too.
Forest always woke silently, and never cried—fucking Emory .
I might never forgive her for hitting me with her car, but I certainly wanted to murder her in cold blood for how she treated her son.
“ You remember,” he said.
“ I remember,” I confirmed, reaching out my hand for Forest but stopping when I saw. “ How long have you been sleeping here?”
“ For days ,” he shrugged.
“ And Forest ?”
Did he hear the longing in my voice?
I wanted them closer.
But I was scared that I looked as hideous as I felt.
“ Forest has been a trooper.” He moved, reading my mind. “ Mom comes to get him in the morning, and either Dad or one of my brothers bring him back to me when he gets out of school.”
“ You’ve been here since it happened?” I gasped.
The gasp made my entire body jolt, causing a significant amount of pain.
“ Here ,” he placed Forest on my bed. “ Stay here, buddy. I’m going to get a nurse.”
Atlas was gone, leaving me with Forest .
He stared at me.
“ Hey , buddy,” I said. “ I missed you.”
“ Miss ooo, Peppa .” He leaned forward and crash landed on my chest.
Pain —two different types, both physical and spiritual—rocketed through me.
I breathed through the pain, though, because there was nothing better in this world than Forest hugs… unless you counted Atlas hugs. But to be honest, those were a very close second.
I was so absorbed in the hug that I didn’t hear Atlas come back in until I felt a soft touch on my cheek.
I opened my eyes to find Atlas standing over the bed, his eyes… full of tears.
“ I love you so much, Pepper ,” he breathed.
Then Forest jerked up and slammed his head into Atlas’s mouth.
“ Love hurts sometimes,” I teased when he wiped away blood.
He threw his head back and laughed.
Forest laughed with him.
3 months after the accident
Learning how to walk again was for the birds.
I sat down heavily, my eyes filling with tears.
“ I’m never going to get it.” I sniffled.
Forest walked over to me and stopped at the end of the bars across the space from me.
He stared at me with those big brown eyes just like his daddy’s and said, “ Come here, Mama .”
Tears .
There were copious amounts of tears.
It’d taken me three days after waking from my coma to regain all of my memories.
It’d taken me six weeks to get all of my casts off.
It was now three months later and though I was closer than I had been, I still felt like walking might never happen.
At least the kind of walking I used to do.
“ Come on, Princess ,” Maven ordered. “ You have to try. You’re getting married in three months, and you want to walk down the aisle to your man, right?”
She was not wrong.
Three days ago, Atlas had gotten tired of me stalling for time when it came to marrying him, and he’d declared that our wedding day would be three months from last Thursday .
That put me at a March wedding.
“ I think he should change it,” I grumbled. “ It rains a lot in March .”
Shayne snorted. “ It rains, yes. But your wedding is inside.”
That was true.
“ I’m scared I won’t be able to walk,” I breathed.
“ Then I’ll carry you.”
I looked up to find Atlas there.
I knew he would be.
I mean, Forest didn’t arrive on his own.
“ I don’t want you to carry me,” I grumbled, standing up again with the physical therapist’s help.
Linda , my PT , lifted me using the belt around my waist.
I walked to the end of the bar.
It was hard.
It was stupidly hard.
But I did it.
And I’d keep doing it.
For them.
ATLAS
6 months after the accident
I stood at the end of the aisle.
My heart was pounding.
It wasn’t pounding because I was about to get married and sign my life away— I’d gladly give my life for hers a million times over.
No , it was pounding because I was standing in the middle of an open field with all of my brothers on one side, all of Pepper’s brothers on the other, and she was walking down the aisle on her father’s arm.
Her father who looked like he was with it today.
Thank God .
That’d been her one and only want throughout this entire process.
She wanted her father to walk her down the aisle.
She didn’t care where we had it, when we had it, or who was there.
She just wanted to be walked down the aisle by her father.
What did I want?
I wanted to marry her.
As long as she was happy with everything, I didn’t care how she got there. As long as she said ‘ I do’ at the end of the day.
My smile had to have been huge as she started walking—yes, walking—toward me.
It’d been a very long road.
Forest , who’d been our ring bearer, leaned into my side, babbling happily about what I thought was princesses.
He’d gotten a whole lot easier to understand in the last six months—whether that was because he was bigger now or because I was able to translate baby alien—so I could tell he was comparing her to a Disney princess in her white, puffy gown.
It had to weigh a ton.
It had so many rhinestone crystals on it that the sun was catching all of them and sending out tiny little rainbows all over the ground as she walked.
She truly did look like a Disney princess.
My Disney princess.
She didn’t stutter in her walk at all.
Three months ago, when she didn’t think she would be able to walk, it seemed impossible to me as well. But she was a determined woman.
The doctor’s outlook had been correct.
She would walk just fine.
The doctor was also optimistic that she would run, too—but only if she wanted to.
Looking at her now, you wouldn’t guess that she’d been almost crippled six months ago.
She finally arrived at my side, and the man at my back— Garrett , because he’d thought it would be funny to get ordained and officiate—said, “ Mr . Emmanuelle , do you give this woman’s hand in marriage to this man?”
Emmanuelle looked at me. “ I do.”
Something passed between us.
A promise that I would take care of her now. That he would no longer have to worry—at least if he remembered to worry—about her ever again.
Because I would be there for her, forever and always.
The wedding ceremony went fast.
There were no objections—but I had a feeling that if Sage was out of jail, she would have found a way to get here and ruin it.
Two days after Emory and Sage had purposefully hit Pepper with her car, I’d raised an unholy stink with the DA’s office, and the DA had officially ‘retired.’
He better be glad he did, because I’d made it my mission from that moment on to make his life a living hell.
As it was, the Carter Clout was enough that the DA had moved out of Dallas completely. He would never work here again, if I could help it.
As for Sage and Emory , both of them were spending the foreseeable future behind bars.
Their trials had come and gone.
Emory , who’d been driving, got seven more years than Sage’s thirty-four.
My hope was that they’d die in there.
Bitches .
“ Hey ,” a cool hand touched my cheek.
I looked down into my wife’s— Jesus fuck, did it feel good to call her that—eyes.
“ Yeah , baby?” I asked.
“ You were lost in your head again,” she said. “ Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
So she knew me well.
“ I’m sorry,” I said. “ I just hate them.”
She smiled and threaded her arms around my neck.
“ Hey ,” she teased. “ How about you help me get out of this dress.”
A new interest perked up inside of me.
“ Yeah ?” I pulled her close.
“ Yeah ,” she said. “ There are a lot of buttons.”
She let me go and tugged me toward the door to the room where she’d gotten dressed this morning.
When we were inside, unnoticed by the crowd, she locked the door then turned her back to me.
I started to pull the buttons free of the tiny loops.
She shivered as my knuckles brushed her bare back.
When she was fully unbuttoned, I lifted it up and over her head.
My breath caught at what she was wearing underneath… which was nothing.
I had seen her naked, of course, in the last six months. It was kind of impossible not to with how much I’d had to help—even if she did regret every second of it.
But there’d been a lot going on, and I hadn’t made love to her since the night before her accident.
Not for her lack of trying.
“ Well ?” she asked. “ Can we have sex now?”
I chuckled softly as I pulled her deeper into my arms, my face buried in the crook of her neck as I took a deep inhale of her scent.
“ Yes ,” I said. “ If you’re up for it.”
Her broken hip had been the hardest thing for us to navigate around.
Sure , she’d tried really hard to act like it wasn’t bothering her, but we both knew that it was.
She was a trooper, though, and powered through.
“ I’ve been up to it for months,” she challenged.
Instead of starting our usual argument, I chose to lift her up into my arms and carry her to the couch.
“ You’ll tell me if anything causes you pain?” I asked.
She nodded, her eyes fevered now.
“ What about birth control?” I wondered.
She bit her lip.
She’d stopped it when she’d been on her plethora of medications when she was recovering.
We’d never talked about her going back onto it.
Though , we’d both agreed that we wanted more kids.
“ Nothing ,” she whispered. “ I’m ready.”
I closed my eyes for a few short seconds before pushing myself up off of her and reaching for my tie.
I was naked, and back between her legs, in a few short moments.
Her eyes were wide as she stared at me with longing and need.
“ A baby is gonna kill us.” I chuckled as I notched myself at her entrance.
There was no need to see if she was ready. Her pussy was so wet that it was coating her thighs.
God , this woman.
My woman.
My wife.
“ Doesn’t matter.” She panted. “ We’re pretty good at surviving.”
She was right.
We were.
And when my cock sank deep inside of her, I knew that we were going to have another baby in nine months.
Maybe she wouldn’t conceive today, but it’d be soon.
Our lovemaking was wild and out of control.
Our urgency made it damn near impossible to hold off, and we were both coming in an embarrassingly short amount of time.
“ Hey , babe,” she whispered into the aftermath.
“ Yeah , Pepper ?” I was half on, half off the couch.
She was half on me, half on the couch.
Note to self, don’t buy a tiny little couch.
“ I want to adopt Forest ,” she murmured. “ I want him to be mine.”
“ He is yours, paperwork or not,” I promised. “ But I’ll look into what we need to do to accomplish that tomorrow.”
She sighed, nuzzling my neck.
“ We should probably head back out there,” she grumbled, pushing off of my chest.
The flash of my wedding ring on her hand caught my attention.
A feeling of rightness consumed me.
“ Yeah ,” I said. “ But only after we’re finished here.”
And I made love to her one more time.