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“Ready to make it official, kid?” I asked.
Sage took a deep breath. “It already was official. Now we’re just making it legal.”
Harlow laughed, her hand squeezing mine. Happiness came in so many different ways, from different people and places and moments. I’d experienced it plenty in my life, a long list of good things that couldn’t be taken away, no matter what else balanced it out.
They had their own lists of happy too, things that brought us together, that we could share and talk about and experience together. And past that, we had an entire lifetime that we’d get to create together.
And as we walked inside the building together, I knew the best parts of that life were yet to come.
Epilogue
Harlow
Six Months Later
“Mom, do I have to wear a dress?”
“Yes. We tried it on, and you loved it in the store. We don’t have time to figure something else out, young lady.”
“But what if people think I look weird because they never see me in dresses?” she yelled from the top of the stairs.
Lord save me. I counted to ten and took a few deep breaths.
“Sage, I promise, no one will think that.” The stomp of her feet sounded a whole lot like a mom victory to me, and I exhaled slowly, tapping my fingers on the front window and watched the delivery truck take its sweet friggin’ time coming down the driveway. “Oh, come on, come on, we have to leave in five minutes, let’s not take all damn day,” I muttered.
“So impatient.”
The whispered words had my mouth curling into a smile, and when Ian eased his big hands over my hips, circling them around my waist to anchor my back to his chest, I melted instantly. The man’s power over me had not faded in six months of wedded bliss.
It was annoying, honestly. All he had to do was look at me across the room, and my skin overheated. Sage had caught us making out in the hallway more than she cared to admit because we thought we’d hear her coming down the stairs, and we just … didn’t hear anything once we got hands on each other.
“I’m only impatient because he has a very important box on that truck, and I’d like to open it before we leave.”
His lips trailed along the line of my neck as he hummed and damn if my eyes didn’t flutter closed like he had a direct hook-up to my nervous system.
“I like that you’re impatient,” he said, hands spread wide over my stomach. “That’s what got us into this situation.”
Now my eyes stayed closed because I just might burst into happy tears. Again.
We hadn’t told anyone yet.
There was so much chaos in the Wilder family as it was—Adaline’s wedding just around the corner, don’t even get me started on Poppy throwing everyone’s world upside down—we decided to keep our little news to ourselves for just a bit longer.
“How are you feeling?” he whispered, making soothing motions on my still-flat stomach.
I snorted. “Fine now, but I barely made it to the bathroom this morning before I puked up my cereal.”
“Not that crap Sage has in the cupboard, is it?”
“It sounded good,” I said primly. “And cereal is easier to throw up. So until you have to deal with pregnancy side effects like this, I’ll take no judgment on my breakfast choices, sir.”
Ian chuckled low and deep, and the sound of it did things to me. If I wasn’t living it, if I was someone viewing our relationship from the outside, I’d probably get sick from that too.
We weren’t perfect. We disagreed. He was still as stubborn as a mule, and I had a tendency to overthink everything. But this man and I were so perfectly matched, so blissfully happy, that I never would have believed that love could be this effortless, this all-consuming.
The other day, he was showing Sage how to build something in the barn, and the only logical response I had to something so overwhelmingly simple and heart-explodingly perfect was to burst into tears at the way she smiled up at him.
Add to that the fact that I was growing a mini-Ian Wilder inside me, and I was an absolute goner. Well … I thought it was a boy, at least. Ian steadfastly disagreed, he was sure it was another girl—something he said was just fine by him, because he was already practicing with Sage, so being a girl dad was a piece of cake.
