She straightens and dries her hand on one of the boys’ bath towels, eyeing me doubtfully. “Where?”
I shrug. “Maybe we could talk Emmett into giving up the suite.” Then inspiration strikes. “Or maybe we can knock out the wall between Harry and Mattie’s old rooms and make that space into a second master suite and nursery. There’s time.”
Wearing an indulgent smile, Millie steps up to me and drapes her arms over my shoulders, raking her fingers gently down my scalp at the back of my head. Pleasure runs down my spine. Pleasure and a promise. In this full house of ours—getting fuller by the minute—we will find time and space for each other.
We always do.
“It’s so sweet of you to offer that. To even consider it,” Millie says, smiling up at me. Then she shakes her head. “But I don’t think they’d want that.”
I frown. “Why not?”
She quirks the sexiest of all brows. “Being right down the hall from our boys and Emmett?Really?”
I think about Marco and Mateo’s tendency to burst into Emmett’s room. And Emmett’s recent discovery of eighties metal bands.
“You have a point.” I narrow my eyes, but even I’m skeptical. “You think they’d move in with my family?”
Millie winces. “I don’t think they’d have much more privacy there.”
Alex shared an upstairs with Abuela his whole life. I doubt he’d be eager to pick that up again. And then there’s Mami. And Aunt Lucinda. And the cousins. They don’t live there, but some days, they might as well.
“Honestly, I think they’d pick the twins if it came down to it.”
Millie sniffs a laugh then releases me. She bends down and snags Mateo before whipping off his shirt and jeans. Socks and underpants go flying. I’ve got Marco stripped an instant later.
We get both boys in the tub and waste no time dropping to our knees. The first order of business at bath time is to wash the twins’ hair—which they hate above all other things. All conversation ceases while we simultaneously rinse, lather, and rinse again. Well, all conversation except Marco and Mateo’s shrieks of protest. It’s fast—and it’s furious.
When their heads are clean and dripping, Millie and I sit back on the floor, facing each other. The look of exhausted satisfaction on her face isn’t the one I ache to give her, but “the shampoo shitstorm,” as she calls it—or the “S.S.” if the boys are around—is behind us once again.
We’re leaning back on opposite walls while the boys forget their troubles with Boon jellies, and Millie taps her bare foot against my knee.
“I do have an idea, though.”
I reach forward, grab her foot, and run my thumb along the bottom. Her breath hitches.
“What kind of idea?” My voice stalks like a predator.
She arches a brow. “Notthatkind,” she says, but she doesn’t pull away, so I let my thumb retrace the move, and I’m rewarded with her sigh of pleasure. “I mean…” She blinks and regathers her focus. “About Mattie and Alex.”
I sit forward, pull her foot into my lap, and get to it with both hands. Millie moans. It’s one of my top three favorite sounds.
Her moans.
Her laughter.
Her calling my name.
Not justthen.Anytime. Every time.
“You gonna share?” I tease. Because she’s slipping down the wall, puddling just a little under my touch.
“Mmmm.”
I grin, pleased with myself for being able to give her this right now. For seizing this moment to make her moan—even if it isn’t strictly sexual—in the middle of this nightly chore. With a house bursting with family.
She narrows her eyes at me. “You and your dimples,” she mutters, shaking her head. “What about that three bedroom that’s for sale on St. Louis?”
My hands still. St. Louis is the street behind ours. The house she’s describing is behind us, two doors down.
