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I felt my stomach somersault.
“She is?”
Castiel nodded. “And she wants to see you. We had to explain about Linnie.”
I looked at Linnie, who was supposed to be discharged in the next hour and decided, to hell with it.
Scooping her sleeping form up into my arms, I made a beeline for Theo’s room that was two floors up from Linnie’s.
The nurses on Linnie’s floor didn’t once stop me.
And when I laid Linnie down in bed next to Theo, who was indeed awake, I got one of the best presents I’d ever been given.
A smile lighting up my fiancée’s face.
“Hey,” she breathed.
I pressed a soft kiss to her temple.
“Hey.”
She smiled as her eyes drifted shut. “It’s over?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “He’s dead. Andy’s being indicted as we speak, and from what I understand, Tara will be buried by the state.”
She snorted. “Thank God.”
I pressed another kiss to her temple. “Yeah. Thank God.”EpilogueSome of y’all don’t know what Billy Bob wrote for Charlene…and it really shows.
-Meme
Theo
I watched from the shadows as Liner dropped down and started to do push-ups.
I snickered when Linnie dropped down and started to do push-ups right beside him.
Liner looked over at Linnie, sweat dripping down his face, and grinned like a fool at her.
Liner loved Linnie so much. There wasn’t a single day that passed by that I didn’t see that love showing like a beacon of light for Linnie to see with her own eyes.
God, I loved the man.
“Ten!” Linnie screamed.
She’d just turned seven. It’d been a year and a half since she was hurt right along with me in that car accident. A year and a half of trying to forget the first twenty-eight years of my life with a family that wasn’t really a family. Well, everyone except for Tyson. My one saving grace. The one man that tried to make living in that hellhole worth it.
God, how I wished that Tyson and I had grown up in a different life. That we’d been able to experience what a real family was supposed to be.
In the year and a half that I’d been married to the man that I loved, he’d shown me what a real family should be like. He’d shown me what it was like to be loved in a healthy way.
He’d also given me a family.
His dad. His club. They all treated me like I was a member of their family.
I was loved.
I was…
“I don’t like burpees, Daddy,” Linnie said. “Can we do something else?”
Liner, hearing Linnie call him ‘Daddy,’ grinned at my—our—girl. Just like he always did when she started calling him that in the hospital.
Not that I’d been awake for that part, but it’d been a sweet sound through the darkness of pain and uncertainty as I’d struggled to live through the trauma that I’d sustained during my accident.
“Yes, burpees,” Liner said with a laugh in his voice. “Sorry, Charlie. It’s part of today’s workout.”
Linnie grumbled, then dropped down and started to do them faster than Liner could even dream of moving his big body.
I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures, loving the look of concentration on my two loves’ faces.
Two that would only ever be two.
We’d discussed trying to have more kids, but in the end, we decided that Linnie would be it for us.
Not only could Liner not have kids, but I’d come to the conclusion that Linnie and Liner were perfect for me. So instead of trying for alternative ways of having kids, we’d chosen to be happy with what we had—Linnie.
Though, that didn’t mean that I didn’t wish, every once in a while, that Liner was able to have kids. Having a baby with his beautiful smile? That sounded like heaven.
But since I couldn’t have that, I was happy with them.
“Why must you take pictures of me, Mommy?” Linnie demanded, catching me in the act.
I grinned down at her angry face. If there was one thing Linnie didn’t like, it was having her picture taken.
After I’d recovered enough to go home with Liner and Linnie, there’d been a lot of reporter activity.
It wasn’t every day that a woman survived her father trying to kill her so publicly.
That, and it hadn’t hurt that my father had done it with a goddamn media circus swirling around the area due to a media convention that had just let loose for lunch. There’d been seventy-two reporters on a bus headed for the biggest restaurant in the city, and that bus just so happened to be four cars back from mine.
The notoriety hadn’t done well for Linnie. She now had a major aversion to having her picture taken, and didn’t care if it was me, Liner, or the media. She didn’t like it. Not a single tiny bit.
That didn’t stop me from taking her picture, though.
It only made all of her pictures angry ones that I laughed at later.
