Page 69 of Hot Dad Summer

Daisy lay there between us, chest heaving, covered in all three of us and the last of the whipped cream, and then she said the words we had all been waiting to hear.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

It was the first time she’d said it out loud and I couldn’t wait for her to say it again and again.

“I love you too, sweetheart,” Flynn said. “Obviously. Look at me. I’m a wreck.”

“I love you,” Wes said into her hair, steady as ever.

“Same,” I said, and Daisy laughed so hard the whole bed shook.

“Same? Maximillian.”

“I said it earlier. It’s still true. I’m not a poet like these lover boys.”

She burrowed back against my chest and pulled Wes’s arm over her waist and hooked her leg through Flynn’s, arranging us around her like she was building a fort out of men. “So what happens now?”

“Now?” Flynn propped himself up on one elbow, and I could hear the grin in the dark. “Now we take Betty out and I eat you out on the top deck at sunrise. Wes grills you dinner every night until you beg him to stop, which you won’t, because have you had his ribs? Max builds you a display case for the new bakery and pretends it only took him an afternoon.”

“It will only take me an afternoon.”

“We take the kids to the amusement park and I kiss you at the top of the Ferris wheel until Charlie makes gagging sounds. We teach Hank to swim to the sandbar. We make you laugh in every single room of this house and then we start on the boathouse.” He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “And we take turns making you come until you lose count, every night, forever. That’s what happens now.”

“Forever,” Daisy repeated, soft, tasting it.

“Forever,” Wes said.

“Forever,” I said, and this time nobody laughed at me.

She fell asleep like that, tucked into the middle of us, holding my hand against her heart like she was afraid I’d go somewhere.

I wasn’t going anywhere. Not ever again.

The End.

52

Epilogue

Daisy: One year later

“If anyone touches that cake before four o’clock, I will end them and I will not be sorry.”

“You’re very scary in a robe with your hair half done,” Kacey said, steering me back into the chair by my shoulders. “Sit. Lily, guard the cake.”

“On it.” Lily positioned herself in front of the cottage kitchen door with her arms crossed like a bouncer at the world’s most delicious nightclub.

It was ten in the morning on my wedding day, and Calloway Cove had already become pure chaos. I was getting ready in the kitchen, because I’d refused every other room in the house. This was where everything had happened. If I was going to marry three men, I was going to get beautiful in the room where I’d fallen in love with them.

Through the window I could see the lawn transforming. White chairs in rows down to the water. An arch by the dock that Max had built without telling anyone, laced throughout with brightly colored flowers. My wedding cake, four tiers of lemon and lake blueberry, sat safe in the cottage kitchen behind Lily, and the display case at the bakery had a sign in it today that said CLOSED FOR THE BEST POSSIBLE REASON.

My bakery. A year in, Oopsie Daisy Sweetwater had a line out the door every Saturday and a wait list for wedding cakes through next spring, and the same town that had once whispered about me and given me judgmental stares, had spent the last month fighting over invitations to my wedding like it was the Super Bowl.

“Aunt Daisy!” Poppy skidded into the kitchen in her flower girl dress, already missing one shoe, which put her ahead of Charlie, who was missing both. “Hank won’t keep his bowtie on and Hazel says the processional is going to be a mess now.”

“Tell Hazel the processional will survive with or without Hank’s bow tie.”

The door to the hallway cracked open two inches, and a voice that had no business being that close said, “Is she decent?”