by Dani Wyatt
I work my way to the bedroom and grab her a easy, loose floral dress, a pair of pink Keds and her already packed hospital bag.
When I get back, her face is more relaxed. The mid-morning sun is streaming through the windows, lighting up her pink cheeks. The vision of her sitting there, hands rubbing her belly, dark hair a sex mess with her legs open and my seed dripping out, is almost most than a man can take.
“I’m taking a picture.” I set her clothes on the arm of the sofa and the bag next to the front door.
“Oh no, you are not.”
I step to the kitchen table where both of her cameras are sitting, and she points a finger at me.
“You look beautiful.”
“You think I always look beautiful.” Her eyes narrow. “Put. It. Down.”
I half laugh, but decide not to poke the pregnant beast.
“Wow.” She looks at me. “I mean, I’m having another one. They are close together, Daddy.”
“Let’s get dressed. It’s almost an hour drive, I’m going to pack some towels and water and other stuff in the car, just in case.”
My heart is pounding as I race around the cabin and get the truck prepped. She’s having another hard contraction as I ease her into the passenger seat and buckle her in. I hold her head against my chest, whispering love into her ear as her hands grip my forearms like clamps.
When she finally relaxes, I kiss her and run to the driver’s side, hop in and get us on down the road to the hospital before this baby decides to make its entrance halfway down the mountain.
“We’re going to have a baby.” Melody chirps as I take the turn onto the main road toward the hospital.
“Looks that way. Text Doctor Hamilton, let her know we’re heading to the hospital, your contractions are coming fast and hard.”
“Oh yeah.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out her phone.
“Good girl. You’re going to do great.”
She smiles and releases a long sigh. “I hope so. I’m nervous.”
I see her swallow hard and her eyes look to me for comfort.
“You will. I’m not leaving you for a second. I’ll be there for whatever you need. You can boss me around, dig your nails into me, call me names. I’ll be there to protect you, support you, love you…”
“You’re going to be a great dad.”
I grin and take my own deep breath. “I hope so. I’m nervous too.”
Four hours later, the room is quiet. Melody’s mom and dad have just left and we are laying together in the bed with Nathanial cradled on my bare chest, with my wife’s head on my shoulder.
In nine months, so much has happened. My brother pleaded guilty to reduced charges and spent six months in a federal low security prison. He and Cynthia are together and living at the estate, fixing it up and getting Phillip’s career back on track.
Marietta has come to visit three times and will stay for another week to help with the baby. Melody and her mom are doing great. Marietta and the yogi fizzled out and she’s bouncing back and forth between London and her visits here, trying to decide what is next for her own life.
She and my brother are polite, and for the most part Melody has made her peace with the implosion of her former life.
I’m still chopping trees. Being half owner of the business has worked well; I’ve got Vin helping and we’ve branched out into some new areas so revenue has doubled in the short time since I took half ownership.
Ginger and Vin have their own wild romance going on as well. Her family wasn’t too happy about her falling ass over teakettle for an older tree chopper like me, but once he sunk his hooks into Ginger she had no chance.
Melody got pregnant so fast…we were planning on getting her into some college classes, but for now she’s put that on hold. She’s started a photo blog and it’s doing very well. She’s taken more pictures of me than I’d like, but for whatever reason it seems my crooked, caveman face is something people want to see.
“You were like a fucking rock star.” I whisper, my throat tightening. “I’m so fucking proud of you.” My voice cracks and tears stream out of the corners of my eyes.
“Daddy, please don’t cry anymore. You’re going to make me cry again.”
I struggle to hold it back, but the tidal wave takes over as I look down at the most perfect creature I’ve ever seen.
“I can’t help it.” I half sob, bringing my hand up and pinching the bridge of my nose, trying to stem the tide of tears. But I fail.
“You’re going to wake him up.” Melody chimes, trying to soothe me, and I take a couple deep breathes as I try to get my man card back.
“He’s so perfect.” I lower my hand from my face and trace my index finger down his tiny, perfect nose.
“He gets that from his daddy.” Melody kisses my cheek. “I think he’s pretty dang perfect himself.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t have anything left to wish for.” I lean over and press my lips to hers. “All my wishes have come true.”
“You big tough lumberjack. My Uncle Cain. My Daddy. My husband. You are everything I ever wished for and more.”
“Forever.” I nod, looking into those blue eyes that taught me more in the last nine months about love and kindness and laughter than I imagined I would ever know.
“Forever.” She nods and answers, laying her head on my shoulder, and the tears start all over again.
Chapter Fifteen
Melody
Epilogue Two
Twenty years later
“Shhhh. You’ll wake him.” I shake Cain’s shoulder.
“Was I snoring?”
I nod on a smile. “Yes, Daddy, like a freight train.”
Cain shakes his head. “Babies are tough.”
“We’ve had plenty of practice.”
“I know. But I’m out of practice I guess.” He sits up and reaches over to me. “Give him to me, you’ve been hogging him all afternoon.”
Our oldest, Nathanial, and his wife are off on a weekend getaway. Our first grandbaby, Nathanial Junior, is here and has had us running since they dropped him off on their way out of town this morning.
Cain takes the baby and settles him on his chest, reminding me of the moment in the hospital when he did that same thing for the first time with our own Nathanial.
Twenty years and six of our own kiddos later, the next generation has begun and what a ride it has been.
We still have five of ours at home. Wendy, Eric, Veronica, Emmett and Madison keep us crazy busy running them from school to sports to arts classes and everything else.
We are the picture of domesticity, but with our own backwoods sort of flair.
After our Nathan was born, Cain quickly realized the cabin was adequate but with his sights set on more babies he set out building us another cabin a few acres away from his original.
This one has become our home. It grew as he built, ending up over five thousand square feet of timber and beams that he cut and carved all on his own, with love and blood and sweat and tears.
A few minutes go by, and I hear the baby and Cain breathing steady. I ease up off the sofa and sit down at my laptop on the kitchen counter.
In between babies, I did finish my degree in teaching. I taught photography part time at the local high school for a few years and enjoyed myself. But, the demands of six children, a garden, five dogs, seven cats, four goldfish and a dozen or so chickens took its toll and I decided my joy was here.
With my husband. My family. And all the chaos that it entails.
Cain has done well with the lumber business and still goes out several days a week with the crews and swings his ax. They’ve expanded into ten states and brought back a whole new breed of old school lumberjacks—and a few Jills, too—along the way.
Cynthia and my Dad married and they run a bed and breakfast together, as well as a wedding venue at the estate.
Mom is still in London, that is where her heart was,
but she has a small home here in town as well where she stays a few months out of each year, doting on the grandbabies and living the backwoods life until London calls her to come home.
Ginger and Vin are their own crazy story. They are our best friends and our kids were practically raised together. They live on the other side of the woods, to the east of us, and have a different yet similar life in many ways.
I look over at Cain and still get butterflies in my stomach. We are still as hot for each other as ever. Unless there is something major going on—we are sick, the kids are sick or things are out of control—he’s got his hands, mouth or cock on me, or in me, several times a day.
I’m not complaining.
Quite the opposite. My desire for him seems to grow with the years. The bit of gray in his hair and beard, the little lines around his eyes…dang. He’s sexier to me than ever.
My lumber-Daddy.
Cain still writes. He’s published over a hundred short stories and novels so far. His books have made the New York Times bestseller list and nearly every one lands on the USA Today list, but his pen name is still a secret.
He says it gives him the anonymity to write what he feels, as well as he likes our privacy. He’s still no social butterfly and small talk gives him hives, so life in the spotlight would be more stressful than any benefit to him or our family, so he does what he does on his terms.
I scoot off the sofa and grab my digital camera from its usual spot on the desk next to the fireplace, and snap off a few pictures of Cain and Nathanial Junior.
The dogs start barking and I hear a car coming up the drive. I step to the window and see it’s one of the old trucks, filled with three of our kids coming back from town where they went to see the newest Avengers movie.
They half fall out of the truck, laughing about something, and the dogs jump and wag their tails running around them in circles.
I look back to see Cain staring at me with a half-smile.
“What are you looking at?”
He sighs, holds the baby tight against him and stands, walking over to kiss my cheek, then leans down and presses his lips to my ear.
“Forever, babygirl. I’m looking at forever.”
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HARD CUT
CHAPTER ONE
Flint
“Flint!” Danny Wilson’s voice rises, but I hear it as a kind of distant echo inside my head, like when a movie goes into slow motion and all the voices sound like that teacher from Charlie Brown. “Where the hell are you going? You gotta pay for the fucking food, man.”
On automatic, I reach into my back pocket and tug out my wallet. With a quick glance over my shoulder to check he’s looking my way, I cock my arm back and send the worn folded leather in an arc through the air. He catches it and grumbles something to the cashier, but I don’t care. Something far more important is going on across the street, and I need to get over there more than I need the months’ worth of groceries I just stocked up on.
“You okay, man?” Danny squints an eye at me when I glance over then back across the street. “You see a ghost?”
“I’m fine. I’ll be right back…” My voice trails off as I stumble away, my legs numb with adrenaline like I’m back in the marines and walking into some fucked up fight.
A light just turned on inside of me, and it’s starting to thaw some of the ice that’s formed over my heart. It’s a light I didn’t even know was there until about sixty seconds ago when I saw the world’s finest ass climb up on a ladder outside the new salon that’s opened up across the street from Ollie’s Market. That salon wasn’t there on my last monthly trip into town.
She wasn’t there.
She’s wearing these tight white capri jeans, a lavender checked oxford, and a generous helping of fresh innocence that has things waking up inside of me I never knew were asleep. Physically, she’s full and womanly, but there’s an air of sweetness in how she’s dressed and the way she moves, a kind of youthful exuberance that makes my heart pump like a steam train. Her ass fills out the pockets and more on her pants and her curves have my hands clutching to dig into her soft flesh.
Her chocolate brown hair falls to the middle of her back in ringlets and waves, catching in the wind so it’s sent flying in a swirl around her shoulders. Caramel-colored highlights catch the sun and send my dick into overdrive.
Blood slams through my veins, filling my entire length in a matter of a few seconds and the loss of blood to my brain makes the whole world feel like a kind of dream. But if it’s a dream, I want to stay in it forever. I reach into my back pocket, pull out my phone, and hold it up, snapping a picture of her as she looks right now. I want to remember this moment for the rest of my life. The first moment she graced my eyes and made my fucking heart pound.
I slam my way out the glass front door of the market, leaving Danny to deal with the finances. I know he will handle everything. He’s one of my very few friends, and that’s only because he’s dumb enough to put up with me. I’ve never really needed anyone else in my life, not friends, not family, certainly not women. Not that I don’t like them—I do, it’s just there’s never been one that interested me enough to want her around. I’m self-sufficient. Solitary life suits me.
Danny was one of the first people I met in Emmetsville. I was in town, at this same grocery, laying in some supplies for my first week on the property in my trailer. He helped me load up the back of my pickup that day, talking nonstop the whole time. Something about him both annoyed and endeared him to me, and we’ve had this odd friendship ever since.
He also introduced me to the owner of Rickson’s that same day as he walked down the street. Danny waved him over and told him I was one of the three that won the land lottery.
Rickson’s is the company I still work for today. So as much as I’d never tell Danny, I owe him for that connection. I love what I do. Swinging the ax. Being in the woods. It’s my life. My church. The place where I find my peace. To be able to live and work where my heart feels most at home is a gift for sure.
Whenever I come out of my solitude to run into town, we usually get together for lunch, and he helps me load up the supplies I’ll need for another month or more of being alone on the island.
I venture into town as rarely as possible, preferring my solitude, chopping down the trees on my land to complete the log cabin I’ve been working on for almost two years.
And when I’m not chopping trees for my cabin, I’m chopping them with the crew of the company I work for on the mainland, in the dense woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Rickson’s specializes in selective and rare lumber. We scour the miles of forests and only take what’s sustainable; a few specialist species of trees and the exotic burl wood knots that sell for thousands of dollars for a few hundred pounds.
That’s pretty much all I’ve thought about for years. Day in and day out. Trees. Lumber. Swinging my ax. After serving my time overseas, I craved the solitude. The things I saw—the things I did—out there in the desert…they’ll haunt me forever. I didn’t know such evil existed in this world, but it turned what was left of my soul into stone, and I focused on being alone and forgetting it all.
Until now.
Never in my twenty-seven years has anything happened like this.
Out in the last spring warmth, a breeze carries the faint hint of her to me. It can’t be anything else. No other aromas have ever sent waves of lust and possessive rage through me like those I’m drawing into my nose right now.
Even from across the street, I know the scent is hers. It has to be hers. And I’m intoxicated by it. I keep my expression as controlled as I can, but it’s fucking hard not to snarl and snap at the air that swirls around my head.
Another young woman, a blonde, emerges from the front door of the salon carrying some sort of flat sign. She stands next to the ladder where my girl has now climbed to the top step. She says
something, drawing my girl’s attention, and then raises the sign upward.
When the dark-haired beauty leans over and reaches down to retrieve the sign, my heart catches in my chest. The world’s ugliest dog has just slipped out through the open door of the salon, yapping like the place is on fire, catching her attention as she’s taking hold of the sign. The dog comes up to about mid-calf on the blonde, fur in patches of gray and brown. Looking more like he—or she—has done a few rounds of chemo. His head is too big for his body, nose scrunched, and even from here the jaw juts out in a hell of an underbite, showing off a few crooked and missing teeth.
The beauty on the ladder shouts something, and the blonde jumps back as the dog nips at her feet, causing her to jerk the sign backward right along with her.
My girl leans farther over, reaching out for the sign as the dog runs and spins in circles, unaware of the chaos he’s causing on top of the unfolding disaster. The scrape of the metal ladder as it shifts against the roof gutter fills the air and sends bolts of panic down the already tense muscle in my back.
I’m at a dead run by the time I hit the street. Car horns go off, and brakes squeal. The air is filled with the sound of locals screaming at me, interspersed with a stream of expletives, but I don’t give a shit.
The blonde lets out a high-pitched yelp and her arms dart out, but it’s not enough. The ladder teeters for a second, frozen in that moment of balance as gravity decides which direction will win.
Then, just before the ladder topples, my girl’s head spins around, and her fear-filled eyes latch on to mine as I run toward her. I swear in that split second there’s the hint of a smile, and the fear in her eyes drains away, replaced by something more like recognition. Not the kind of recognition when you see someone you know, but the kind when you see something you just realized you want.
Physics takes over and sends her airborne, and that magical connection is broken. Both girls start screaming, but I have my arms out already as I hurtle towards them. I catch the dark-haired beauty mid-stride, my momentum carrying me on, and I nearly collide with the brick building before I can get my feet back under us both. No orchestrated symphony could have timed it better. My heart races in my chest as I gather her against my body, turning hard as the metal ladder clatters onto the sidewalk in front of us.