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Whenever we’re close, we can’t help but move our hands across each other, touching each other continuously, as though we’re both terrified of breaking the contact.
“I’ll keep us safe,” he says. “But there are more variables. There’s a bunker in the safe house too. You’ll have to live in there.”
“Whatever it takes,” I declare, digging my fingernails into the solidity of his chest. “If we can be together, I don’t care what I have to do. I want this craziness to be over.”
“Not our craziness, though,” he smirks.
“No, never that,” I say quickly.
“We’re always going to be crazy about each other.”
“Forever,” I sigh, laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes.
His heartbeat hammers against my ear, moving through my head in a heavy drum-like beat, quivering through my body as though to let me know how strong and full of vital energy he is.
My womb quivers in return, answering his call, crying out in belonging.
“How many?” he asks.
“Four,” I say, knowing that he means children.
“So specific,” he says, a smirk in his voice.
“Two boys and two girls. Don’t you think that would be just perfect?”
“It would be amazing,” he says, squeezing my shoulder with barely-withheld passion. “Have you thought about this before?”
“A little,” I admit. “I used to daydream about having a family one day. But before we met, I never took it seriously. It was more like I was torturing myself with thoughts of a life I could never have, I guess.”
“But now you can have it. You will have it.”
I kiss his sweaty chest, savoring the feel of his hot skin.
“What about you?”
“Four sounds great to me,” he growls. “As long as they’re happy. As long as they have purpose. As long as they have a mother as wonderful and caring as you, they’ll be just fine.”
A glow moves through my body, setting parts of me alight, hot stars whispering through me.
“I can’t believe I didn’t want to believe this was real,” I whisper. “It feels so real, Ryland. It feels so meant to be.”
“That’s because it is,” he says, his chest reverberating with passion. “And don’t you ever forget it.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ryland
I sit behind the wheel of my sleek bulletproof sedan, glancing into the rearview as Harold gets Jackie set up in her seat.
She waves a hand at him when he moves to fix her seatbelt for her.
“I love you, young man,” she says, with the same sassiness in her voice I recognize in her daughter. She might be sixty-one, but she’s still got a lot of playful energy in her. “But if you insist on fussing over me anymore, I will make you regret it.”
Rosie giggles from beside me.
“Mom, he’s just trying to help.”
Harold grins and walks around to his side of the car, sliding into his seat.
“Dealing with unruly patients is part of the job, I’m afraid,” he chuckles.
I chuckle. “She’s nowhere near as bad as my old man.”
“No comment,” Harold chuckles.
I laugh again, shaking my head, and then double-check that all the doors are locked.
Chopper is curled up in my woman’s lap, Rosie’s hands fixed in his fur. She’s wearing tight-fitting jeans and a hoodie that does nothing to hide the shape of her fertile, no-longer-a-virgin body.
“Is everybody ready?” I ask.
Rosie looks across at me, biting her lip, her eyes wide and filled with meaning.
I can tell she’s not ready. She’s not sure.
“But I want us to live a life together, not in hiding,” she said to me last night, passionately in my arms. “If this is the way, we have to do it. We owe it to our children.”
My chest fires at the memory, the truth of her words thundering into me.
“Yes,” Jackie says.
“Yeah,” Harold says, nodding.
“I’m ready, Ryland,” my woman says, and I know she’s talking about more than the road trip.
She’s ready for us, for the life we’re going to live together.
I press the button to start the electric engine.
This car was built to keep the people inside safe under any circumstances, which is why it’s bulletproof and blast-proof.
I pull out of the garage and into the morning sun.
Vito needs to know where we’re going, and his men are amateurs.
If I left it until nighttime, they’d never keep up.
“This is a lovely drive,” Jackie comments about an hour in, as we roll through the winding country road, bordered on all sides by bright spring-green.
Rosie smiles across at me, glancing down every so often as she wrestles the tiny rope from Chopper. The Chihuahua is on his hind legs, his forepaws laid against my woman’s stomach, as he fills the car with his loud playful growling.
“Very scenic,” Harold says. “It almost makes one long for the days of I, spy.”
“Makes one?” Jackie laughs. “Are you the poshest Englishman in America, young man?”
Harold grins at the good-natured joke.
I know because I’m glancing in the rearview every few moments, making sure that Vito’s dumbass men are still following at a distance. Maybe they think they’re being discreet, always leaving a few cars between us, but I clocked them the moment I left the estate.
