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“You need ice, too,” she muttered. “I’m going to go steal one of your shirts like you said. And I’m going to go get in the shower. While I’m in there—”
“I want to take one with you,” I cut her off. “When I’m done, I’ll let her in, and then I’ll get some ice.”
She breathed out and then nodded her head in assent. “Fine.”
The shower took less than ten minutes seeing as both of us were too well repleted to do anything more than touch.
And when she was drying her hair after the shower, I tossed her a t-shirt from my closet and shucked one on myself.
After slipping my legs into a pair of sweats sans underwear, I walked out to the living room, disarmed the alarm, and opened it.
Brielle stood there, looking annoyed.
“What took you so long?” she snarled.
I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at her with annoyance. “I was showering and doing other things. What do you want?”
She frowned. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“It’s ten o’clock at night. It’s too late for you to be coming over to talk. And have you ever heard of a cell phone?” I asked.
“Bayou, what’s gotten into you?” she asked, trying to push through me to get inside.
I didn’t let her at first, but movement out of the corner of my eye caused me to see Isa standing in the doorway of her bedroom, looking sleepy and annoyed.
My lips tipped up as I walked to her, allowing the nuisance to come in after I’d vacated my position.
“Hey, baby,” I said, dropping down to my haunches in front of her.
She blinked at me unhappily, glared at the woman that I could hear closing the front door, and then turned on her heel and walked toward my bedroom.
I watched as she pushed it wide open to reveal Phoebe sitting on my bed looking blankly at the wall.
Phoebe glanced up, saw Isa, and grinned as she held out her hands.
Isa went to her easily, and my two girls crawled deeper into my bed.
That was when Brielle went completely rigid.
“Bayou, what the hell is going on?” she asked quietly.
I turned to survey my sister, and read the devastation in her eyes.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.
“You’re going to have to get used to it, Brielle,” I said softly. “She’s mine. They’re both mine. They’re going to be a very big part of my life, and if you’ll let them, part of yours.”
Brielle didn’t respond.
Instead, she took a good long look at Phoebe, who’d crawled underneath the covers with Isa, and turned around and left.
I didn’t follow her.Chapter 16I leave my read receipt on so people can see exactly what time I didn’t give a fuck.
-Bayou to Phoebe
Bayou
“Here is what I would suggest,” the lawyer said. “Get everything that a little girl would need. Decorate her room. Get her established with a doctor here. Enroll her in daycare—even if it’s a couple of months off. Just get her in, eventually. Buy her some things. Do everything for her that you would normally do for a little girl. Make it look like you’re in for permanence.”
We were at the lawyer’s office the next day, and I was getting a seriously bad feeling about how this was all going to turn out.
I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that I’d get to keep her, because there was no way in hell I was giving Isa back—or Phoebe was allowing it for that matter. However, she wouldn’t have to allow it, because I wasn’t going to entertain the thought.
“I am in for permanence,” I growled before Phoebe could.
“I know. But normally you’d do all of this a little bit at a time. You don’t have that luxury. You want to take away every excuse Ilsa has. You want the girl to have a home here. That way she can’t say that you’re not equipped to have a child.”
I completely understood that, too.
“Okay,” Phoebe said. “What else?”
I looked over to her, happy to see that she was there at my side when she didn’t have to be. She could’ve run when this all came out. She could’ve been upset that she was put into second place, just like Brielle was.
But she wasn’t.
All she wanted was the best for me, and she was proving that.
She was also proving why I had fallen for her so quickly. I was feeling something that I’d never felt before for another person in my life.
But if I was going to find those emotions, and feel those feelings for anyone, it would be her. She’d changed something inside of me when I’d met her all those years ago, and whether she knew it or not, I was hers from the moment that she stood up for me. I was hers whether she wanted me or not.
