“Are you Briggs?” she asked, suddenly having not a shy bone in her body.
“No,” he answered gently. “I’m Gio.”
“Do you write books, too?”
“Nope. I fly airplanes.”
Giovanni smiled into Evangeline’s eyes as Maisy bravely tried to cover her disappointment. “Oh. That’s good, too, I guess.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Maisy.” He crouched and put his arms out, and Maisy went to him. When he stood, he had her wrapped in his arms.
He closed his eyes to the pleasure of the hug, and, when he opened them, Evangeline felt just a little bit excluded. He kept Maisy in his arms as he turned into the house.
“That’s Briggs there,” he pointed out. “She likes that you’re a writer.”
“I hear you’re a good reader. It’s nice to meet you, Maisy.”
Briggs stepped close and held up his arms. Maisy went in to them like she’d never known a stranger in her life. Briggs held her gently but buried his face into her hair, and Evangeline knew he was breathing her in.
She stayed back at the door, feeling uneasy, like she was intruding.
Maisy leaned back to look at Briggs, though her arms casually circled his neck. “Will you read your books to me, like Uncle Ted does to Keith and Mikie?”
Briggs nodded. “That’s a thing I’d like most in the world.” He gave Evangeline a quiet look. “If your mother hasn’t already done it.”
“She read them all to me. But I’ll like it better if you do it.”
“Ah. Well, then.” The look he sent Evangeline now was both pleased and sheepish.
Maisy touched his face, regaining his attention. “There aren’t any pictures.”
Briggs nodded again, like he’d just been given the best of advice. “We might have to fix that.”
Maisy accepted that as natural and looked over at Chase, who’d been watching quietly.
“That’s Chase.”
“Does he fly airplanes or write books?”
“He’s a doctor. He fixes people.”
“Like when Keith broke his arm?”
“Yup. Just like that.”
“I got to write my name on his arm.”
“On his cast?”
“Uh-huh. And I drew a stop sign, because Aunt Charlene said he should stop to think before he jumps out of a tree.”
“Wise woman. Do you want to say hello and give Chase a hug?”
Maisy looked at Briggs. She said, “Yup,” and made him grin like—like a proud father.
She went into Chase’s arms just as easily as she had the first two. Chase held her without speaking for a long moment. He turned with her, so Evangeline couldn’t see his face. All she could see was those two heads bent together, light curls so much the same that she couldn’t tell where one started and the other stopped. Briggs and Giovanni stood at either side, almost closing a circle with her on the outside. For a long, difficult moment, Evangeline felt the weight of the decisions she’d made, felt the grave error she might have committed in keeping Maisy from them.
She almost backed away in shame and grief, almost stepped back through the door. But Giovanni turned his head and looked at her.
He walked over, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her. “You made the best call you could. Chase said we were all idiots back then, and that’s pretty close to the truth. It’s possible not a one of us would have known how to be with you, or how to be a good dad. You raised a sweet, loving girl all by yourself. You should be proud. And now we’re here. It’s all good, Evvie.”
She pressed her face into his shirt for a minute, damping back tears. Then he tugged her arm and brought her to the group. Chase turned and she could tell by his face that he wasn’t giving up hold on…his daughter.
Maisy looked up at her from Chase’s shoulder. “Mama?”
“Yes, baby?”
“Are they my daddies or my uncles?”
Evangeline only half-successfully smothered a cry. Gio took her in, snugging her into his chest. He was the one who answered Maisy’s question. “We’re your daddies, honey. We love you already, all of us.”
“Mama will kiss all of you, like Aunt Charlene kisses the uncles?”
Evangeline lifted her head. “Well, like Charlene kisses Uncle Ted, sweetie.”
“She kisses all of them. She said sometimes a woman has enough love for more than one man.”
Into her hair, Gio muttered. “I really love the Victorys.”
She was sure Briggs and Chase had mouthed the same words.
“She kisses all of them?”
“Yup.” She looked at Briggs for his nod of approval. “They all hug and kiss together when we’re on sleepovers. That’s what Alexandra says.”
“Oh.”
Briggs had a certain amount of fire in his eyes. Evangeline could see the gears working in his brain. He hadn’t overwritten the back story he’d made up for the Victorys. He’d underwritten it.
Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at Chase, waiting for his friend’s nod. Then he took Maisy and handed her over to Gio with a reassuring kiss to her cheek. “Let’s take a look outside, Chase.”
The two were out the door even as Evangeline looked to Giovanni. He had Maisy against his hip and moved to follow the others. At his first step, he put his hand back and waited for her to take it. They got outside in time to see Briggs and Chase disappearing around the corner of her house.
“What are they doing?”
Giovanni looked back at her and pulled her in under his arm. Across his back, Maisy curled fingers into her hair.
Evangeline felt complete there, a sense of deep rightness, with a man who could hold both her and her daughter in his arms. And two more men prowling around her house. She and Maisy were safe, owned. It felt remarkably good.
“They’re planning your addition.” He squeezed her shoulder, giving her the courage she might need. Her life was no longer her own, entirely. “Maise,” he said. “Your mom has enough love for three men. Do you have enough love for three daddies?”
Maisy put her fingers against Giovanni’s cheek, already rough with his beard. “Yup,” she said.
Giovanni smiled and kissed her. “Good girl.”
Chase and Briggs appeared from the other side of the house. “We offset the new wings on each side,” Briggs was saying. “Then we’ll have an enclosed yard, be able to keep the kids corralled.”
Kids. Evangeline’s heart soared, and she felt the flex of Giovanni’s grip on her shoulder.
“If we push the yard out, fence it, maybe corner it off with a gazebo, we’ll have room for a pool.”
Briggs kissed both Evangeline and Maisy as he arrived, but his attention was still on the house. “We’ll have to fence the pool, too, for safety.”
Giovanni caught her eye and smiled. His life, too, was no longer entirely his own.
Chase waved his hand. A fence around the pool for safety apparently went without saying. “With two floors to both wings, we have space for a suite for each of us, and still enough room to add on kids’ bedrooms.”
He, too, gave absentminded kisses to the two females in Giovanni’s arms. “Do you own the land here, Ev, this lot your house is on? Can we build?”
“Yes, I own it.”
He nodded. “Good. We thought you might want to keep your space mostly as it is, Ev. We kind of like your office off the main living area.”
The easier to keep her close at hand, she took that to mean.
“But we figure you’ll want a bigger bedroom.” He gave her his full attention for just one hot minute, letting her know why that might be. “So we’ll punch that out a little to the back.”
Briggs nodded. “That’ll work.”
“I figure we’ll keep my house in the city, at least for now. It’ll be easier for you, Gio, when you have to fly out, and for you, Briggs, too, when you travel. And I can sleep there when I’ve got night shifts, or even a run of days.”
“Yeah, that’s good
,” Briggs agreed. Like keeping a semi-mansion as a second home was akin to having a little hunting camp tucked in the hills somewhere. He looked at Evangeline. “We can live there during the construction, too, if the noise gets to be too much to work through. Right, Ev?”
Right, she thought, imagining her life as a runaway train, entirely out of control.
“Does Chase’s house have a dog, Mama?”
Briggs answered before she could open her mouth. “I think the farm is a better place for a dog, Maise. What kind shall we get?”
That train just clattered on. Evangeline decided she’d better make an effort to apply the brakes. “Maisy and I already have an agreement that we won’t talk about getting a dog again until she demonstrates responsibility by making her bed every day for a month. Right, Maise?”
“Right.” The girl fessed up, though she wasn’t happy about it.
“Ah, tough love,” Briggs commented with sympathy. “How close have you come so far?”
“Two weeks. Almost.”
Evangeline could feel the laughter in Gio’s chest.
“Ah. Well, where are you at now?” Briggs had the same laughter in his eyes when he glanced at Evangeline.
“Three days.”
Evangeline looked around Gio’s chest, and Maisy frowned.
“Maybe just two.”
“Okay, then,” Briggs said. “We’ll have her licked in twenty-eight more days. You’d better start thinking of a name.”
“Fluffy.”
Seeing the look on Briggs’s face, Evangeline laughed.
Gio seemed to think it was funny, too. He kissed Maisy’s temple. “I think Briggs was hoping for something more like ‘Killer,’ baby.”
“No,” Maisy said, showing a little bit of Giovanni stubbornness. “Fluffy.”
Briggs didn’t completely cave. “Maybe we can negotiate. We have four weeks.”
“Maisy has to make the bed herself,” Evangeline pointed out. “It doesn’t count if you do it for her.”
Whatever manly effort Briggs made to look righteously offended fell just short.
Chase laughed. “She’s got your number, dude.”
They took a moment, the five of them. A family, they were, enjoying each other.
“We’ll need a tree house,” Gio said. And every one of them nodded.
Chapter Fourteen
“You have to be more that fifteen weeks, Ev. Your uterus is up to your belly button. I can see it.”
Evangeline rolled her eyes. She hadn’t even caught her breath yet. The four of them were spending a sleepover Saturday night in Rochester. They’d shopped for furniture for the new rooms that were under construction at the farmhouse, and then they had dinner out. Lastly, they’d wasted themselves on an orgy of triple-penetration, rowdy sex.
Of course Chase had seen her uterus. It tightened with the pleasure her men gave her, making itself more obvious than normal.
“I have three babies in there. You know I’m going to be big.” She didn’t even try to keep the annoyance out of her words. If anyone deserved to have a little attitude, she did.
“You’re not having triplets, Evangeline.” Chase’s voice was grim, final. Like he knew. “The rate of spontaneous triplets is one out of eight thousand.”
The idiot. She had ultrasound photos. Three gray circles, each with a new little being in it, already moving. He’d made her mad, though, and she wasn’t sharing them. She wanted his belief, his trust. He was convinced she’d conceived that first weekend she’d been with each of them. She hadn’t. She’d gotten pregnant the next month. With triplets.
“What did he say, Gio? Zero out of eight thousand?”
Gio was kissing her fingers—he might have got his breath back already. He and Briggs were trying to stay out of this argument—they’d had it before. But he knew his line. “No, baby. He said one out of eight thousand.”
“I’ve told you, Chase. Charles women have multiples.”
“You hardly know any Charles women, Ev.”
“I know that much.”
“Briggs, dammit, can you talk some sense into her?”
“She says she’s carrying triplets, dude. Why would I doubt it? Why would I want to?” Briggs had his tongue nuzzling her belly button, just exactly where those three babies grew.
“Shit.” Chase rolled off the bed. He stood with his hands on his hips looking down at her like a naked god. “I’m serious, Ev. If you were being honest about this, you’d need high-risk care now. I know you’d understand I couldn’t forgive you for taking chances with our babies. I want you to tell me the truth now.”
Evangeline knew he was right about that. Triplet pregnancies were high risk. There was a greater risk of early loss, preterm labor, and delivery complications. She knew that because Gio had already taken her to Rochester to a perinatologist.
They’d agreed. Everything they could do to prevent miscarriage was already being done. She could see her midwife for two more prenatal visits, then she’d transfer for high-risk care at the medical center.
Chase would know all this if he wasn’t being such an ass about it. One day soon, she knew she’d have to stop being stubborn and give him the proof.
But that day wasn’t today. “I’m not taking chances. I just want you to trust that I am telling the truth.”
He lifted his arms and tore his hands through his hair. “Fuck it. I’m out of here.”
He turned his back and didn’t make eye contact again. Gio had his arm around her as she watched Chase rummage for clothing and then leave the room.
From the third floor, she could hear the back door slam. She dropped her head onto Gio’s shoulder and clasped Briggs’s hand where it rested on her hip.
Gio held her and spoke with his lips in her hair. “He’s suffering, babe. You have to show him the pictures.”
Briggs lifted his head. “Jesus Christ. It’s true?”
* * * *
The tree house was a good one. Briggs had commissioned its blueprint from the set designer for his movie. It was a miniature of Castle Daneskar on Planet Northgaard. And the inspiration for that had come from a certain domed bedroom on East Ave in Rochester.
And so, when Gio made love to his wife, as he was doing now, bright fall sunlight fell from the glass cupola to cast a golden glow over her skin. They lay on a circular mattress that took up most of the space in the round room.
Low bookshelves circled the space. Maisy nested there most days after school, safe and content, as her mother had done in that rough tree house miles and years distant. Her favorite moments came when Briggs was there, and she lolled against his shoulder while he read to her.
Or wrote with her. They were working on a book together, Gio knew. They had an artist. This one would have pictures.
Evvie had set up a little workspace, too, for when the construction noise was too much to bear. They’d used the Rochester house a lot over the summer, but Evvie liked being on the farm once school started.
Gio’s favorite moments in the tree house were different, and he was enjoying one of them now. Construction on the farmhouse was still underway—they’d fast-tracked it, but it was a big project. The exterior work would be done within the month, before winter made further progress impossible. But there would still be a couple more months of indoor work, with saws and hammers and work crews underfoot.
All of which made his request to have the tree house completed first a moment of pure inspiration. He spent a lot of time on the farm now. He was learning about wine production from Preston, but mostly he enjoyed being out in the fields. With Scott, he was learning how to grow grapes.
There were, indeed, Diorio vineyards in Italy. He’d met the families who owned them when he’d taken Evvie there for a honeymoon.
He’d gotten his way and married her first. He knew Briggs wouldn’t give up, or Chase either. Eventually, he’d have to give her over to a nominal divorce and let the others have a turn at wedding her. But he’d been first, and that meant somet
hing.
He’d had Maisy’s help there. The three of them were still bickering over who got to lay a legal claim on Evvie first when she’d piped up. “Alphabetical,” she said, with a certain disdain for their childish squabbling. “Like we do at school.”
That had Briggs crowing until Gio had pointedly asked Maisy if they went alphabetically by first or last names. Hah!
Working on the farm, he was home a lot. He took lunch breaks. He’d noted early on that the Victory men tended to take a good long time over lunch—a trend he’d seen increase when the school bus started coming around again in September and carting kids away for the day. The Victory women made themselves scarce around noontime, too.
And so he had the opportunity to lie midday in a circle of sunlight, snuggling up with a beautiful, naked woman in his arms. A thing he particularly loved was running his hand over the growing bump of her belly. She’d gotten past those couple months of nasty nausea, and that bit of time when she’d needed to be coaxed out of sleep if one of her men wanted a little attention. She’d wanted to sleep a lot.
She was better now, and more beautiful than ever. He had a wicked hard time even looking at her without wanting to mount her. She had their babies in her—his, and Briggs’s, and Chase’s. It turned out nothing was a hotter turn-on than that.
The prideful little vixen knew it, too. Her lips curved into a somewhat scary, witchy little smile whenever he stroked her belly or even if she caught him looking at it. Very likely, when he looked at her, his man-pride was blatantly visible.
But her smile was a little shakier the last couple weeks. Briggs had been gone. They’d started filming his movie, and he’d gone with the crew to New Zealand. He’d talked his way into a little cameo.
More importantly, Chase hadn’t come to the farm since he’d last argued with Evvie and walked out of the house in Rochester. As far as he knew, the two hadn’t even spoken.
His girl was sad, and he’d had enough of it. Briggs was on his way back, and Gio had tasked him with bringing Chase with him. More like, he’d been told to not come home without him. Gio honest to God didn’t care if it came to blows. Briggs should be wheels down by this time, and he’d better have Chase in hand.
Three Men and a Woman: Evangeline (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Page 22