Tyler snorted. “Love? Y’all have known each other for a very short time.”
Who was this guy? He didn’t know me.
I mean, he’d obviously hit the nail on the head here, but he didn’t have any way of knowing that. And what was between us in the beginning was definitely more concrete now.
“Did you know that she sat by my hospital bed for weeks while I was in a coma?” I crossed my arms, ignoring the burn from the ball I’d taken to the arm in the last inning.
“Yes.”
“Did you know that she nursed me back to health?” I pushed.
His eyes narrowed. “She told me that she was employed by you in a text message…not that she was sleeping with you and going to marry you. I just think it’s all kind of sudden. And my mother and sisters are naïve when it comes to the love department.”
It was sudden, yes.
“It wasn’t,” I lied. “I married her because I wanted her. I love her. That’s all you need to know.”
Tyler growled. “I got a call.”
My brows rose. “And what did this call say?”
“That you were in between a rock and a hard place, and you used my sister as a means to an end,” Tyler said. “I don’t want my sister hurt.”
I didn’t want her hurt, either.
“Come home with me,” I said. “You can see for yourself that she’s fine.”
We arrived at my house less than twenty minutes later, and I waited just long enough to make sure that he knew to come in before I disappeared inside.
“Henley?” I called out.
Nobody answered.
I felt a coil of unease filter through my belly, and I walked through the lit-like-a-Christmas-tree house until I found her curled up on my side of the bed in our bedroom.
She was watching a movie on the television with subtitles on.
I frowned and moved around the bed, carefully touching her toes to get her attention.
She blinked, moved her eyes over to me, and smiled weakly.
“Are you okay?” I asked, making sure to speak slowly.
She nodded her head. “Fine.”
“Do you have enough energy to get up and talk to your brother?” I asked.
She rolled over onto her other side slowly, then looked up to see her brother filling the doorway.
Henley’s face was sweet when she smiled at him and waved.
“Is she sick?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “Strep throat, bronchitis, pneumonia and what remains of the flu.”
“Shit,” Tyler said as he made his way into the room. “Always the sick kid in our family.”
Henley made an agreeing noise in the back of her throat but didn’t say much else.
She was barely moving, and I could tell that she was much sicker than she was letting on.
She didn’t want me to know that she felt like shit.
But, she could pretend all she wanted. I knew better than most.
Over the last couple of months, I’d gotten to know Henley on a level I’d never known anybody—not even my sister.
She was my best friend and confidant, and she was seriously the only thing keeping me sane in a world that was attempting to crush me.
I never saw her with a bad look on her face.
She took everything life had to give her and didn’t complain one bit.
God, I loved her.
I touched her foot. “When was the last time you took some medicine?”
She shrugged, meaning it’d been a long while, more than likely.
“I’ll be back,” I said to Tyler. “I gotta go get her some meds. She’s feeling like shit and is trying to hide it.”
***
Henley
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, furrowing my brow in confusion.
Tyler sat on the edge of my bed, lifting one knee up and allowing one foot to stay firmly planted on the floor as he leaned back against the headboard. The move put his hips, and his gun, directly next to my face.
I pushed him over a bit and then scooted and twisted until I was on the opposite end of the bed as him. The new position made it to where I could see his face when he spoke.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here for your wedding,” he said, looking contrite.
I smiled, my eyes growing heavy. I’d taken some Benadryl about an hour ago, and it was about the time that they should start kicking in.
“It was kind of last minute,” I excused him. “I thought that you were at work today?”
He smiled. “I was…but I got a call from Rome who said he saw you at the emergency room, and I thought that maybe I ought to come up here and check on you. Make sure you were all right.”
“You got a call from Rome?” I asked in surprise.
Rome was a football player for the Longview Liners. Rome used to be his best friend until they’d fought over a woman—Tara, Tyler’s ex—and Rome had won.
Since that had happened, Tyler hadn’t been back—not that I blamed him.
I wouldn’t have been back, either. Especially since Tara and Rome were one of Longview’s ‘It’ couples.
Then again, last I checked, so was I.
Though, not in the same way that Tara, a buxom beauty, and Rome were.
Nope, I was that girl that Rhys Rivera, Longview Lumberjacks’ star third baseman, was married to. I was that girl that had taken the star player off the market.
Though, everyone expected Rhys to make a reappearance imminently.
Apparently, he’d been a bad boy before me, and they didn’t expect me to be able to hold him down for long.
“Yeah,” Tyler rumbled, startling me out of my thoughts. “He called twice, so I thought something was wrong. I answered, and he said he saw you at the ER after he had his wrist looked at after a scrimmage last week. Said you looked really bad, and there was a scary dude sitting next to you that kept scaring off every nurse and doctor alike.”
I smiled. “That’s my man.”
Tyler made a gagging sound.
I flipped him off, then closed my eyes.
It wasn’t until I felt a touch on my cheek that I opened them again to find Rhys standing over me, a glass of water in one hand, and a palm full of pills in the other.
I saw the familiar pink ones I’d just taken and nudged them. “I can’t take those. Just took them an hour ago. The rest I can take, though.”
He handed the bottle of water to me then took the two pink pills out of his hand before handing the rest to me.
Once I had them in my mouth, I took a big swallow, and immediately regretted it.
I moaned in pain as the razor sharpness started to throb in my throat.
My eyes had inadvertently closed, and it wasn’t until I had a hand on my cheek again that I realized that I was crying.
“You need anything else?”
I shook my head.
The next time I woke, my brother and Rhys were gone, and I was kind of sad.
I’d wanted to talk to Tyler some more. I hadn’t gotten to talk to him like that—or see him for that matter due to his time constrictions at work—since he’d moved. I missed my big brother.
I slowly got up from the bed, and by the time I was standing, I was already out of breath.
I decided to go ahead and use the bathroom and brush my teeth since I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d done that. By the time I was finished, I was ready to get back to bed.
But, if my brother was still here, I wanted to see him.
Which was what kept me walking instead of crawling back into the bed and committing myself to sleeping another four hours.
I arrived in the kitchen to see Tyler’s back to me, but Rhys facing me.
He saw me immediately and started my way.
I smiled at him when he stopped halfway and grabbed a blanket for me—one he’d obviously washed by the looks of the half-folded mess that was on the table—a
nd wrapped it around me once he came to my side.
“You want to sit on the couch? Or the bar stool?” he asked, making sure that I was facing him when he asked.
I pointed at the bar stool. “I want to sit there. My brother’s still here.”
He nodded and led me to the seat that Tyler was standing next to.
Tyler looked over at me, and his face softened once he took a good look at me.
“So…your husband told me y’all have babies on the way…not by you,” he teased.
I felt my heart start to beat a little faster.
We did, in fact, have babies on the way.
Four of them.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I remembered now, wanting to talk to Rhys about it.
That’d been the first thing I’d meant to say to him when he’d come home. I’d told him on the phone earlier and then had felt a familiar sort of panic set in that had nothing to do with excitement.
How the hell was I supposed to do four kids?
The doctor told me that it was a possibility that they all wouldn’t make it, and that had sent me even more into a panic. I didn’t want one of my children to die.
I wanted them all.
I laughed then. “I told you one day I would do it…”
He snorted. “That you did.”
Rhys caught my eye, and the confusion written there was obvious.
“When my sister had her daughter, I witnessed the birth. So did Tyler. We both made a vow right then and there that we wouldn’t have any kids of our own…that we’d have someone else have them for us so that we didn’t have to experience that.”
Rhys’ lips twitched.
“It couldn’t have been that bad,” he said.
“My sister pooped on the table,” I started. “And she ripped from ass to vagina. They had to put stitches in her asshole, and she told me she would never have kids again. Let’s just say that it traumatized me, and I think it’s kind of funny that we’re now doing this the way that I always wanted to do it.” I paused, remembering the rest of it. “My niece had some problems and was rushed out of the room, and my sister passed out from blood loss because they couldn’t get her uterus to contract. Let’s just say it was a scary time.”
I caught Tyler nodding his head, and I turned to see him talking.
“…she was okay after, but it scarred us for life. I just had no clue that Henley was actually being serious about not having her own. Or that she was going to start having them the moment that she got married.”
I flipped my head to Rhys to see him laughing.
I paused there, my eyes lit on his face, and felt a sliver of peace surge through me like a lightning bolt.
Was this what happiness felt like?
I was sick as a dog, could barely hold myself aloft on the bar stool, but I was so freakin’ happy I could cry.
My brother was here. My husband was here.
We had babies on the way.
Babies. On. The. Way.
Holy shit.
“We’re going to have to move!” I blurted out. “We can’t stay here!”
Rhys tilted his head and looked at me oddly. “You don’t want to stay near your sister and niece?”
I paused.
I did want that…but I knew that with four kids possibly on the way, a two-bedroom duplex wasn’t going to cut it. No way, no how.
“I do,” I said, momentarily wondering if I was talking too loud when Rhys’ eyebrows rose. “But I also want to have room for our kids. I don’t want to have to move when they’re infants, either.”
Rhys nodded his head, and Tyler touched my shoulder, getting my attention.
“You should ask Mom if you can move into the farm,” Tyler said the moment I was facing him.
My eyes widened. “But that’s y’all’s place.”
He scowled then. “That’s our family place, and Mom doesn’t want to live there anymore. She tells me all the time that she hates it, and that she wishes she had something smaller. You should let her move in here, and then y’all take over the farm.”
The farm was a four-bedroom, three-bath monstrosity of a house on eighty acres. My mom didn’t want to live there anymore because it took quite a bit of upkeep to keep the place looking pretty.
Tyler looked at Rhys as if he was talking, and I turned to see Rhys say, “…can ask her if you want. I wouldn’t mind buying it from her, and the last time I was there, it was beautiful. The house is a little outdated, but that’s an easy fix. Something we can do before we move in. Just have your mom come stay in our spare bedroom until we get it all to our liking.”
I held up my finger. “Can you go get me my transmitter?”
Rhys didn’t hesitate. He moved out of the room and beyond into the bedroom, coming out moments later with it in his hands. He didn’t let me put it on, though. Instead, he hooked me up himself, and then tucked my hair back into place once he was finished.
I smiled at him as he turned it on.
Then the world came into sudden alertness. “Thank you,” I said to him.
He winked. “Anytime, baby.”
Then he was back in his spot where he was leaning against the front of the counter, across the bar from us.
“Instead of tearing that house down…I think we should leave it. I think it might make more sense for us to just build a house out there rather than move into there. Plus, Alana and Autumn could just move in with Mom like they’ve been saying they’re going to do for a while,” I explained.
Tyler grunted, reaching for me as if he was going to tap my shoulder, then remembered that I could now hear. “Why hasn’t Alana done that yet?”
I shrugged. “I think that has more to do with her false hope that her ex-husband is going to get his head out of his ass than anything else.”
Tyler snorted. “That asshole isn’t going to come back. He’s fucking a night nurse that I heard he knocked up.”
“Where did you hear that from?” I questioned.
Tyler’s mouth turned down in a frown.
“Rome also said that he saw that douchebag there. Said he came out of a linen closet with his nurse, and the nurse was much more rumpled than she’d been when she’d left Rome’s room,” he explained.
Rhys snorted. “Sounds like she got a winner, Alana did.”
Tyler leveled Rhys with a look that clearly said he didn’t think very highly of him. “Let’s just say if me and that douche nozzle ever got into a dark alley and he couldn’t point a finger at me, I’d turn him into a eunuch for what he did to my sister.”
That was the truth.
I’d often thought the same thing.
“Anyway.” Tyler pushed up out of his seat. “I have a few things I need to do tonight in town, and then I have to go back home. I have the early shift tomorrow morning, and I wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Dealing with that town’s hatred of cops is sometimes nearly too hard to bare.”
I felt awful for him.
Tyler had been in the Marines for years before he’d gotten out. He’d immediately gone the police route and had found a job in Longview before being offered a different job in Hostel. And since that shit had gone down with Tara and Rome, he’d been in a hurry to leave the city.
Now he was doing a job that he hated, away from his family, and not getting any respect while he did it.
“Tyler…”
“I’ll be fine, Hennie. Trust me.” He ruffled my hair. “But…if you need anything, give me a call.” He looked pointedly in Rhys’ direction. “I’m only a phone call away, and things have settled down for me.”
With that, he left without another word, leaving Rhys and me staring at the closed door where he’d just departed from.
“Your brother, he’s a real nice individual,” Rhys drawled.
I snickered as I turned back to give Rhys my eyes.
“He’s…something,” I snickered, then remembered he’d had a ga
me today. “How was your game?”
He grimaced. “Let’s just say, I could’ve done better had I gotten my head out of my ass and stopped living in my head.”
I knew exactly what he meant. “Next time an important phone call like that comes in, I’ll be sure to wait until after the game to tell you that we’re having four children.”
His eyes filled with laughter. “That’d be appreciated.”
I shuddered. “I think four kids is going to be our beginning and ending point,” I told him. “I’d like to have one of my own…but yeah. I don’t want five kids.”
He watched me carefully for a few moments. “I want a baby with you. I want to see you swell with my child. I want to see you breastfeeding our baby.”
I swallowed. “I can breastfeed our children without actually giving birth to them. A lot of adoptive parents do that.”
He didn’t agree or disagree. “And I have a fetish for pregnant women. Pregnant women named Henley that make my dick hard.”
I shivered then. “Rhys…”
“One and we’ll stop.”
I bit my lip. “Five kids is quite a lot…”
“We don’t have to have the baby any time soon,” he said. “In a couple years, once we’ve gotten these potty trained. Then we’ll have one.”
I thought about that, then nodded. “I think that would be okay.”
“Birth control,” he said.
I smiled. “Yeah, that’s probably a must at this point. It’s a good thing that I’m too weak to do anything but lay there.”
His eyes went wide. “I could make you enjoy it.”
I had no doubt that he could. “I’d also give you strep throat, and then you wouldn’t be able to play in the next playoff game.”
He frowned. “I thought they said you had to be on the antibiotics for twenty-four hours. It’s been eighteen. I can wait until tomorrow.”
I laughed, which then turned into a coughing fit.
When I finally got a hold of myself, I found Rhys placing a glass of water in front of my face.
“I’ll call your doctor tomorrow and have her send some birth control pills over,” he said.
I shivered. “That sounds like a good idea.”
Rhys winked at me, then turned to survey the kitchen. “Now, we can have pizza, or I can make you soup out of a can…then order pizza for myself.”
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