AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 31
Liam (bonus content)
Iswitch off the kitchen light and make my way to bed. Conor and Mikey are working in the club, but they should be back up here soon. We have Jessie’s scan tomorrow and I know everyone is nervous as hell, and also excited beyond belief for it.
As I pass the den, the lights are off, but I see his silhouette against the moonlight. He’s sitting on the sofa staring out of the window, silent, unmoving. Brooding?
Shoving my hands into my sweatpants, I head over to him, my bare feet hardly making a sound on the warm wooden floor. He hears me anyway, always alert. Always switched on. He turns his head slightly, one corner of his mouth curling up in a greeting before he takes a sip of the glass of whiskey he’s holding.
“You okay?” I ask him as I flop onto the armchair.
“Hmm,” he murmurs before downing the last of his drink.
I arch an eyebrow. “You sure?” Jessie falling pregnant is by no means a shock to any of us because we’ve been trying to knock her up for months, but it’s still a lot to process. We’re going to become dads—at least me, Mikey and Conor are—but this man right here has been a father for a long time.
He gives me his full attention, his brow furrowed in a scowl. “I just said so, didn’t I?”
“Actually, you said hmm, which isn’t really an answer now, is it?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “Why don’t you go back to bed, kid?”
“Why don’t you talk to me about why you’re sitting here all moody instead of being curled up in bed next to your pregnant wife?”
“I’m not moody,” he retorts.
I arch an eyebrow at him. “No? Sitting alone here in the dark with only a glass of whiskey for company? Staring at the moon?”
I see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. He always swore he’d never have kids. But that was until we met the firecracker that is Jessie Ryan and she turned every single one of worlds upside down in the best possible ways.
He doesn’t answer my question so I try a different tactic. “You remember the first girl who broke my heart?”
His lips twitch with the flicker of a grin. “Jodie Maloney. Her dad owned the sweet shop at the end of the road.”
“Jodie Maloney,” I say with a soft sigh. “What was I? Like twelve?”
“Eleven,” he replies.
“You remember how cut up I was because she dumped me for Simon O’Flaherty?”
“I do,” he says with a nod of his head. “All because his Pa had a Rolls Royce and she thought he was going to make her a princess.”
“Fucker dumped her two weeks later,” I snort.
He laughs quietly.
“Hurt like a mother fucker though,” I say with a lean as I sit back against the chair. “She was the first girl who let me touch her boob.”
“You went on hunger strike as I recall,” Shane says.
“I did.”
He laughs a little harder. “For like seven hours or something?”
I frown at him. “I believe it was eight.”
“Seven and a half,” he counters.
“Yeah, well you cooked sausages and chips for tea and you knew I’d cave as soon as I smelled that wafting up the stairs.”
