by Linda Wisdom
“If you’re thinking that way, we better also think about getting married.”
She lifted her lips to his. “I thought you’d never ask.”
The heat flared up between them like a rocket
“I wish you had been the first” she confided. “But then I wouldn’t have Steffie and you wouldn’t have Lisa.”
He chuckled. “No, we’d probably have a combination of both. Lord help us.”
“So, I gather you like my idea?” she teased.
“Come on in and I’ll show you how much.”
She allowed herself to be pulled to her feet “An even better idea.”
Epilogue
Two years later
“Smile!”
Flashbulbs went off with blinding light
“Okay, Mom, enough pictures,” Steffie begged.
“Keely, we’re almost blind!” Lisa protested.
At age eighteen, both girls were taller, losing the awkwardness of youth and showing the beginning bloom of womanhood. Dressed in formal gowns, they stood next to their prom dates as Keely snapped pictures.
“I have some good ones,” she declared, setting the camera on the table.
“Tell Sam not to scare the boys,” Steffie whispered as she hugged Keely. She grinned and patted her mother’s protruding abdomen. “No more candy bars for you.”
“Watch it or I’ll insist curfew be at ten,” Sam told her.
Steffie wrinkled her nose at him. “Such a horror you are.”
The boys smiled uncertainly at Sam as they ushered .their dates outside. The night of the senior prom was not one to be missed.
“Did you really threaten them?” Keely asked as Sam held her hand while she almost fell back onto the couch.
“Hell, yes, I did!”
“Are you going to be that bad with the new one?” she asked, keeping her hand on her belly.
He sat down next to her and leaned over to kiss her tummy. “Worse. Especially if it’s a boy.” Because of Keely’s age she’d had amniocentesis, but they insisted they wanted to be surprised about the sex of their child.
Keely noticed a few more lines around his eyes and additional silver in the brown hair, but otherwise Sam was the same man. With Chloe locked away in a psychiatric institution and Rainey keeping to himself, the secrets had been kept. As she’d been taken away, Chloe had screamed Rainey’s name as her father, Edgar Willis, but she sounded so distraught no one believed her.
Keely placed her cupped palm against Sam’s cheek feeling the roughness of his skin against hers.
“I love you,” she said, letting all her love and passion for him show in her eyes.
He grinned. “I loved you first”
“I love you more,” she continued in what had become a tradition between them.
“I’ll love you forever.”
Of that, Keely had no doubt.