The Hail You Say (Hail Raisers Book 5)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  Probably not.

  My mother stopped at the side of my chair, and then ran her finger down the length of Baxter’s cheek.

  “I want to apologize.”

  I blinked, surprised to see her actually acknowledging that she had a problem.

  “I already apologized to Krisney.” She swallowed. “It’s taken me weeks to realize that what I said and did was stupid.” She breathed out deeply then continued. “If I had a chance to talk to your sisters again, I’d tell them that I love them. I’d tell them how I’m always thinking about them and how I wish I could give them each a hug one more time. I’m sorry for the ugly words I said to you before you made such a huge, selfless sacrifice for the woman you love. I’m so sorry, Reed, and I hope that one day you’ll forgive me.”

  I looked down at my two boys, then back up at my mother.

  “I know you said some hurtful things,” I murmured. “But I didn’t take them to heart. I know that you were just hurt and scared.” I paused. “But I’m glad you apologized. I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear it until you did.”

  She touched the top of my head, and then dropped a kiss on it. “I have other babies to see to, but if you need help, just holler.”

  I didn’t reply as she walked away, but my heart was somehow healed, even when I didn’t know it needed to be.

  I guess it showed how mothers knew best.

  I sat that way for a good twenty minutes, talking and recounting a story to the boys while I waited for their mother to make it back from lunch.

  She didn’t take long.

  “Seriously, does every cute nurse in the universe have to stop by when you’re shirtless?” she asked with a flustered smile on her face.

  I looked up to see Krisney hustling toward me, and behind her were three nurses, none of which I knew, staring inside at me.

  “What?”

  “They’re here for you, for your information.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s like mommy porn.”

  I shook my head. “I feel like you’re high on something.”

  She snorted and walked up to me, peeking over my shoulder at her two boys.

  Baxter opened his eyes at hearing his mother’s voice and tried valiantly to lift his head.

  It didn’t happen, but he was trying and that was all that mattered yet.

  “Look at you,” Krisney cooed, running her finger down Baxter’s cheek. “You’re getting so big.”

  She was right about that. It felt like they changed, even from day-to-day.

  They’d been in the NICU now for six weeks and they looked like entirely different babies from the ones that were first brought here.

  “Your mom apologize?” Krisney whispered in my ear.

  I nodded, not looking at her. “She did.”

  “Did you accept?”

  I nodded.

  She pressed her lips to my cheek. “Good.”

  ***

  Later that night, I finally had enough of my secret project done that I delegated tasks to my family as well as a few of the men from Hail’s Auto Recovery, and I decided to call it an early night.

  Krisney didn’t know what I was doing in my spare down time, but she didn’t ask because I told her it was a surprise.

  Ever since she’d gotten out of the hospital, we’d spent quite a lot of time together, so I was sure it was burning her ass not to know what I was doing for two and three hours a night without her.

  I expected her to question me on where I’d been, like she always did, when I walked in the door, but found her nowhere to be found.

  “Krisney?”

  She didn’t answer, but I knew she was home. I’d called on my way to ask if she wanted anything to eat. When she’d denied needing the food, I’d assumed she was already cooking, only I didn’t find her or dinner in the kitchen waiting for me.

  I also didn’t find her in the laundry room, the living room or the pantry.

  Heading down the hall, I peeked my head into the boys’ room which still wasn’t furnished but was gathering supplies for the babies for when they did come home, and still didn’t see her.

  “Kris?” I called again.

  Pushing through the open door to my room, I came to a sudden, bone-jarring halt right inside the door, and stared.

  “Kris,” I croaked.

  She was lying on the bed, spread eagle, as she watched me.

  “I’ve decided.”

  My brows rose. “You’ve decided?”

  She nodded, then trailed a single finger from the tip of her wet tongue, all the way down her throat, down her shoulder, and to one perfectly pink nipple.

  As she circled it, she watched me.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “I’ve decided that it’s been six weeks, you’re healthy. I’m healthy. And I freakin’ want you.”

  My dick was already hard, but at her words, it thickened even further.

  There wasn’t a single thing in this world that I wanted more.

  “I thought you were going to make me wait for our wedding night?” I teased.

  She blushed.

  “I can’t be expected to abstain when you take your freakin’ shirt off every time you enter the NICU and hold our boys.” She squirmed. “God,” she closed her eyes, “there’s something wrong with me that all I can think about when I see you hold them is that you’re half naked. I should be excited that you can hold them, not thinking about getting you home later that night and doing bad things to you.”

  “What kind of bad things?” I asked, shuffling closer to the bed.

  I hadn’t taken anything off yet, but I was about to.

  Or at least, I would have had she not spread her legs wider, opening herself up to my gaze.

  I growled and kneeled on the bed, my erection straining the front of my scrub bottoms, and leaned forward until my nose was inches from her pussy.

  “You know,” I said casually as I took a deep breath, smelling her sweet scent. “I can’t tell you how many times these past few weeks that I thought about rolling you over until your head hung off the side of the bed.”

  “W-what?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I leaned down and stuck out my tongue, pressing just the very tip of it to her clit.

  She jolted.

  “What would t-that accomplish?” She squirmed.

  “Then I’d get to fuck your throat,” I informed her.

  She gasped, both at the thought of me fucking her mouth and my thumb pressing against her clit.

  “I would’ve let you,” she explained.

  I grinned. “I know you would.”

  Then I ate her, pouring a considerable amount of sexual frustration into reclaiming Krisney’s pussy.

  I devoured her.

  There were no other words for what I did.

  One second I was enjoying myself, tasting and licking, and the next she was pulling me up by my overly long hair.

  “Can I help you with something?” I rasped, pressing my mouth to hers.

  My beard was glistening with her juices, but that didn’t bother her in the least as she kissed me back, almost as if she were punishing me for what I’d just done to her, stopping when she was so close.

  Yet, I wasn’t the one who had stopped—she was by pulling me up by my hair.

  Granted, I didn’t have to go, but I could tell that she wanted me inside of her.

  Hell, I wanted to be there, too.

  “Condom.” She slapped me on the chest, and a crinkle of the condom wrapper followed the movement.

  Grinning, I shucked my shirt over my head by pulling the back of the collar and tossed it down on the bed beside us, before hastily yanking at the fastenings to my scrub bottoms.

  It took point four seconds to get it loose and shove them down below my balls, and another ten to get the condom rolled into place.

  A few seconds after that, I was sliding home.

  “Ahhhh, God.” She arched, her pretty pink
nipples reaching up into the air. “You feel so good.”

  She did, too.

  But I was finding it hard to breathe, let alone tell her that.

  So instead of speaking, I fucked her in hard, deep strokes. Pulling myself almost all the way out before roughly shoving myself back inside.

  Over and over until I felt her start to clench around me.

  And when she screamed, I watched her fall over the edge into orgasm.

  Once she was sated and lying on the mattress below me, I pulled out, ripped off the condom, and stroked my cock until I released all over her stomach. The white come dotted her belly, which was still slightly stretched out from our sons. Stretch marks lined both sides, and I reached forward to rub it all in, paying extra attention to the areas where our sons were more evident.

  “What are you doing?”

  My eyes flicked up to hers.

  “I’m memorizing everything about you all over again.” I growled. “Every single day, I find something new about you to love.”

  Chapter 24

  Bitches love a man in uniform.

  -Reed to Krisney, the day she finds out about his deployment

  Reed

  The thing about the Reserves is you never know when you’ll be called. You never know when your services will be needed.

  Lord knows, if my moral code had allowed it, it wouldn’t have been three days after my sons were released from the NICU. And it wouldn’t have been ten minutes after I was married.

  No, it wouldn’t have been then, because I was so fuckin’ happy I could burst. I wanted to be able to stay here, in my new life, and memorize every single moment.

  What I didn’t want to do was take over for a doctor that was stationed in fuckin’ Germany. The one that I’d been temporarily filling in for when I was there when all of this had started with Krisney and me.

  Yet, I couldn’t sit well with myself if I didn’t help.

  I only said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  My phone had rung ten minutes after saying ‘I do.’

  Thinking that it was the call center telling me a woman was in labor, I answered it, intending to tell the attendant that Torres was on call for me today.

  What I got instead was a man telling me that I was being summoned to take over for a doctor that had been hurt in the line of duty.

  “When?” I asked, praying I’d at least get today.

  “One week to get your affairs in order,” the man on the other end of the line said. “The doc is really hurt. There’s no way he’s finishing his stint. The next doctor has to close down his practice and was given three months to do so, so you’ll be covering for him until he can get over here.”

  Fuck.

  I nodded. “Okay. I’ll get ready to go. What time does transport leave?”

  “0400 hours on the twenty-second.”

  Fuck.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up, and I looked at the closed bedroom door that I’d been standing in front of to take the call.

  Fuck.

  I shoved the phone back into my pocket and returned to the party, a little less excitement in my step than there had been on my way into the room.

  I found my wife in the bedroom with our children.

  “Do you like it in here?” I questioned softly from the doorway.

  Krisney turned tear-filled eyes toward me. “I love it. I can’t believe this was what you’d been doing for these last few months.”

  She hastily swiped her eyes, and I walked further into the room, wrapping my arms around her.

  “I wanted it to be perfect,” I whispered. “I wanted it to be everything we’d always wanted.”

  “It is.” She sniffled, burying her face between my pectorals. “It’s everything I ever wanted.”

  I squeezed her a little bit tighter.

  It’d officially been ten weeks since the boys were born. Ten weeks since both of us had had our operations to save Krisney’s life. Ten weeks of praying, loving and relearning everything there was to know about each other.

  I’d had my brothers show her the house an hour before the ceremony started.

  And five minutes after the ceremony was supposed to begin, I’d had to go find her, knowing that she was overwhelmed.

  I hadn’t been wrong.

  She’d started crying harder the moment she saw me, and then accused me of trying to make her look splotchy in all of her wedding photos.

  I hadn’t, but I’d shouldered that blame.

  Then I’d picked her up and circled around the outside of the house, dropping her at the end of the stupid black rug that doubled as our faux ‘aisle.’

  Once my brother, Dante, had her by the arm and settled her, I made my way to the altar and waited for her.

  She didn’t wait for the music at all. She just hurried toward me, threw her arms around me, and told me she loved me before the opening notes of the wedding march even started.

  We were laughing, and she was crying, as Dante just shook his head and made his way to the seat that was saved for him beside my other brother, Baylor, and his wife.

  Ten minutes after that, we were husband and wife, and I was kissing the living hell out of her.

  Minutes after that, I’d received my phone call and had excused myself.

  Which led us to now.

  “I can’t believe you were able to get all this done.” She shook her head. “Reed, this place was crazy bad.”

  I grinned.

  “It was,” I agreed. “But I had my brothers helping me, as well as some surprise help from the other men who work for Travis. Did you know that Rafe was once a home inspector for six months?”

  She shook her head. “That man is a Jack of all trades.”

  He was.

  She ran her hand over the mobile over Baxter’s bed, and grinned as she reached forward and picked something up.

  “What’s this?”

  “A baby monitor called the ‘Owlet,’” I said. “When they get off their machines, they’ll graduate to that. We can never be too safe with them.”

  It was a monitor that measured the heartbeat of the baby. If the heartbeat slowed too low, then the alarm would sound on my phone, alerting me to a potential problem. Likely I was being a little too paranoid, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

  “I like it,” she murmured, her eyes turning up to meet mine. “I love you, Reed Husband.”

  I chuckled. “I love you, too, Krisney Wife.”

  ***

  It was over six hours later when the last guest finally left, leaving us alone in our newly-refurbished house, on our wedding day.

  I was glad for them to be gone, but I was scared to death to tell Krisney after everything that had happened, when we were finally all together, I was given orders to leave.

  God, there was nothing in the world that I wanted to do more than be there with my family, but I’d made a commitment, and if there was anyone in this world who would understand that, it was Krisney.

  After stripping off my clothes, I took a few moments to collect myself.

  Once done, I got up and made my way to the bathroom, brushing my teeth and somewhat trying to contain my hair, before I gave up.

  Walking into the kitchen, I looked around and smiled when I saw the mess of bottles, food from last night’s rushed dinner, and my scrubs folded neatly on the countertop inches away from a pot containing leftover spaghetti sauce.

  Shaking my head, I bypassed the mess and walked into the living room, smiling when I saw my three favorite people on the couch.

  Krisney was on the middle couch cushion, her body scrunched forward so the majority of it was lying on the ottoman that was shoved up next to the couch. Both babies were on either side of her in a football hold, feeding each baby from a bottle.

  Krisney originally wanted to try to breastfeed, but with the anti-rejection medications she was on for the donor liver and kidney, sh
e hadn’t been able to do so.

  Now, the boys were completely on donor milk from a multitude of sources, a vast majority of those being from my brothers’ wives.

  “Babe?”

  I looked up from my boys to my wife.

  “I need to talk to you.” I sighed.

  She frowned. “Is it about that phone call you didn’t want me to overhear?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “We should probably put some sort of soundproofing in the walls for later on.” She grinned, but it quickly fell. “When do you leave?”

  “The twenty-second.”

  She sighed. “Dammit.”

  I walked around and sat on the ottoman. “My thoughts exactly.”

  ***

  One week later

  I shouldered my bag and looked down at my little family.

  The rest of my family was standing off in the distance, watching me say goodbye to Krisney and our kids without interrupting.

  “Baby?”

  I grinned down at Kris.

  “Yeah, honey?”

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, suddenly nervous.

  “I have something to tell you before I go.”

  Her eyes suddenly took on a shade of nervousness.

  “Do you…”

  I shook my head and pulled her in closer to me. I knew what she was thinking. She thought that I was saying a ‘just in case’ kind of thing. In case I died over there like the last doctor almost had.

  I wouldn’t be doing that. I would be coming home.

  “No, baby. That’s not what I was going to say.”

  Relief flooded her tightly-strung body.

  “Shit.”

  I wrapped both arms around her, being mindful of the babies that I was somewhat squishing to get the hug, and pressed my lips to her forehead.

  “I love you, Kris,” I told her. “I want you to think about something while I’m gone.”

  Her head tilted up to allow our gazes to meet.

  “What is that?”

  I pulled back, then dropped my mouth to place on the baby’s forehead that was riding on the front left side of Kris’s body. Moments later, I moved to the one on the right.

  Once I’d gotten a good inhale of their scents, and gave them one more kiss each, I pulled away, and reached for the box in my left front pocket.