Page 56 of Kicking Up Dust

With a sigh, I push her hair from her face. She’s so fucking beautiful it hurts sometimes. I hope our kid looks far more like her mother than she does me.

“Do you feel like I’ve trapped you here?” I ask her hesitantly, a whisper.

I watch her brows furrow, cataloging every movement. The way she jerks back a centimeter, the way her nostrils flare.

“What? No!” She sounds almost offended I even asked her that.

“I took you from California and brought you to this ranch, so far away from people and beaches and everything you probably loved there. Away from your friends.”

“I’m used to moving, Colt. I never get attached to one place for very long.”

I still, my hand falling from her head. That wasn’t something I’d considered. I’d worried I trapped her, but I hadn’t considered that she could simply leave me any time she wanted to. Right now, she didn’t have a job, but I’d bet she could find one pretty easily. She had a college degree, after all. She could put it to use.

“Do you think you could become attached to Cedar Creek?” I whisper, terrified.

I’d follow her, is the thing. It was a shitty thing to think, and I’d never admit it out loud, but if she left… I wouldn’t let her get far. Especially knowing she had my kid with her.

“Colt,” she says back, just as quietly. She scoots closer on the sofa and I resist the urge to just tug her straight into my lap. “At risk of sounding like a clingy psychopath, I’m here as long as you want me here. Or, well… if you start acting like an outright jerk, I may leave, but I don’t see that happening.”

“It won’t,” I’m quick to promise, sounding ridiculously desperate. “It won’t. I’ll take such good care of you, Blair. You and my babies.”

“Babies? You want more?” she asks, her smile growing wry. She slips into my lap of her own accord, and I think that’s even better than me dragging her here.

I hum, wrapping my arms around her middle.

“Definitely. And I want to get married, after she’s born. I’ll propose properly later, but just… I want to make it clear that you’re my forever.”

Her fingers thread through my hair.

“You’re my forever too, Colton Whittaker.”

THIRTY

BLAIR

28 weeks

Baby is the size of a cowboy boot

Colt has me making an absolute fool of myself in this class. The stuffy, old teacher with the plastic model of a woman’s reproductive system keeps shooting daggers at us every time I giggle, but the things he’s whispering in my ear make it hard.

“Quit it. You’re getting us in trouble,” I whisper, elbowing him in the ribs as I try to keep my mouth as still as possible so I don’t get glared at again.

He’s relatively quiet until a few minutes later, when the cervix is mentioned.

“You’re telling me the baby comes out of that part in you that feels like the tip of an AirPod?” he whispers.

I blink, still staring forward, watching the woman’s knobby finger trace the cervix on the plastic model, before turning slightly so I can see him behind me. He genuinely looks curious and I’m shocked silent.

“What?”

“I don’t like that you know what a part of my body feels like that I don’t,” I tell him. I know his cock is big enough that it hits my cervix. Or rather, hit it, the one time we had sex. But it didn’t occur to me, for some reason, that he’d have associated a… texture to it.

And it definitely never occurred to me that it would feel like an AirPod of all things.

“An AirPod?”

He nods. “The ear piece. You know, like the circular rubber part that you can replace?”