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“I said I didn’t want— Oh, it’s you.” Sierra closed her eyes, her face pinching.
“What can I do?” I asked, moving to her side.
“Just be here for her,” Danielle, the “midwife,” answered. “She’s doing great.”
“Good to know,” Sierra panted. She turned to me. “What are you doing here? I thought you had a job.”
“I did enough. Jor and Samuel can handle the rest.”
“Kylie called you, didn’t she?”
“Youshould have called.” I took her hand between both of mine and raised it to my lips. “She’s my daughter too. I want to be here.”
Sierra’s fingers squeezed around mine with a grip that made me glad I heal fast. There was a good chance she was going to break my hand before this was over.
At least she wasn’t trying to kick me out of the room.
After hours of Sierra being a fucking rock star and a lot more hand crushing, Danielle was placing a tiny, beautiful baby on Sierra’s heaving chest.
Shit, she was gorgeous. They both were.
“Nate, she’s prefect,” Sierra whispered, not looking away from our daughter.
“Of course she is.” I leaned in and kissed my wife’s damp forehead. “She came from you.” I ran my fingertips over our daughter’s soft little cheek.
She blinked and stared at me with sharp green eyes, and my heart seized in my chest. I didn’t know it was possible to feel this much love for someone so fast. All she’d had to do was look at me and I was gone.
Not even a year ago, I’d told Sierra I couldn’t imagine having a family. I’d meant it. The idea of loving anyone enough that they could destroy me the way my sister’s death had was terrifying.
I’m not going to lie. Looking down at my daughter, that fear was there, mixed in with love and fierce protectiveness. I was scared out of my mind of anything happening to her. Yet I’d never been so happy to hand my heart over before.
“Have you two picked a name?” Danielle asked, startling me. I’d forgotten she was in the room with us.
“Nova,” Sierra answered.
I’d refused to offer suggestions for names. I’d wanted Sierra to choose something she liked, and the only girls I knew other than Sierra’s friends and family were all angels. I didn’t have a lot of ideas about what made a good name on Earth. So Sierra had picked names, and I’d offered opinions.
Nova was a last-minute decision, named after a singer Sierra had discovered about a month ago while we were working on our house.
“Do you want to hold her?” Sierra asked, finally looking away from Nova to glance at me.
“I…”
Sierra placed Nova in my arms without waiting for me to finish whatever it was I was trying to say.
I stared down at my daughter, who I swear weighed about as much as a feather, and let the burn in my throat take over. Tears ran over my cheeks as I promised my little girl that I was going to protect her from the world. That she would always be loved and wanted and cherished.
* * *
Sierra
A weekafter Nova was born, Nate and I were finally moving out of the apartment we shared with Kylie and into our own home.
Nate’s job as an assassin for Heaven paid astronomically well, so we’d left Kylie everything that was in the apartment since we didn’t have to worry about how we were going to afford to furnish the house.
Nate pulled my car up outside the two-story home we’d designed in his sketchbook one night. Turned out Nate wasn’t just good at drawing houses, he was pretty decent at building them too. We’d been working on the house since the second we got back from our honeymoon, doing as much of the work as we could ourselves.
Correction. Nate did as much of the work as he could and became an overbearing, protective ass whenever I tried to help.
