Great Sass: Providence Family Ties Series

by Mary B. Moore

  And just to thumb my nose at her a little more: garden, aubergine, courgette, to-mah-to, bah-sil, route, coriander, ore-gaahno, aluminium.

  Okay, so I was still feeling salty after what we’d found out that she’d done to Elijah, so sue me.

  Going from the sweltering heat in the car park—take that, Shonelle!—to the building's air-conditioned interior was like going from hell to heaven. I loved the heat and warmth, something we didn’t get a lot of back home, but I also had a new appreciation for the strength and skills of air conditioning.

  Yesterday, Elijah had taken photos of me with my top lifted to show the bottom of my stomach, both standing and lying down. We were going to start doing pictures every week and record the baby’s growth for us to look back on for years to come. I was officially sixteen weeks pregnant, and my tummy looked like I’d swallowed a grapefruit whole. It wasn’t a noticeable bump unless you really looked, but to us, it was the most incredible thing ever.

  “Miss Dahl?” the nurse called as soon as we checked in, so we bypassed the pregnant ladies club and followed her down to a room at the end of the hall. Opening the door, she stood back and waved me through with a massive grin on her face. “I hope the baby plays ball today so you can find out. Good luck!” And with that, she was off and skipping down the hallway.

  Greeting the woman who was sitting next to the machine, I introduced Elijah and myself.

  “I’m Pam Goodwin, and obviously, I’m here to do your scan and meet your baby. Do you want to lie down, lift your top up above your stomach, and then tuck the sheet into your bottoms and pull them down so we can get to your lower abdomen?”

  It was a rhetorical question, because who didn’t come here to do that?

  Helping me up onto the bed, Elijah stood back as I got comfortable and arranged my clothes as she’d asked.

  Wheeling herself over on her chair, she went through the same routine that the girl in Gonzales had, squirting the gel onto my stomach and then sticking the weird thing on top of it. Almost immediately, the sound of a drum underwater filled the room.

  “Is that my heartbeat or the baby’s?”

  “Hear how fast it is? That’s the baby’s heartbeat. Now, if you look here, we’ve got a fist… Oh,” she gasped, then burst out laughing.

  I didn’t know whether to be horrified or proud at the finger sticking up at us on the screen.

  “Is he giving us the bird?” Elijah wheezed, pulling his phone out and taking photos of it.

  “That would be a yes,” she snickered, moving the wand through the gel and pressing in slightly. “Okay, so, here we have your beautiful baby’s head. Right now, he or she is looking straight at you guys, so I’ll hold still so Daddy can get a photo of it on his phone.”

  Glancing over at him, I saw Elijah doing just that, the smile on his face wider than I’d ever seen on him.

  Then, moving the wand over a little more, she stopped again. “That fluttering is the baby’s heartbeat. As you heard before, it’s strong and perfect for this stage of the pregnancy. Moving down, we’ve got the umbilical cord, a chubby belly, and a long thigh. Definitely takes after Daddy with that, then.”

  Looking down at me, Elijah gave me a wink and lifted a shoulder. Yes, we knew he was tall and I wasn’t, but was it necessary for them to point it out during every scan?

  “I’m just going to press in slightly here to see if we can get baby to change positions and widen those thighs a bit. Let me know if it’s uncomfortable.”

  There was no way in hell I was going to tell her that my bladder was about to burst all over her office. Well, unless she said it would help her see the baby better.

  “Ah, and there we have it,” she sang, looking at both of us. “Okay, which one did you both think?”

  “A boy,” I told her.

  “I just want a healthy, happy baby,” Elijah shrugged, looking back at the screen of his phone. Apparently, he’d moved onto videoing this part.

  “Well, sorry, Mom, you were wrong. See this right here, you have a mini momma.”

  I was staring at the screen, trying to figure out how she’d gotten a vagina out of what we were looking at, but Elijah almost tripped as he swung around to ask, “It’s a girl?”

  “That’s right, it’s a girl. Congratulations, guys!”

  I didn’t know what to say or do. All I wanted to do for the next five months was to stare at my baby on a screen. I hadn’t even met her yet, and already I was completely in love.

  Her.

  Holy shit, it’s a girl.

  “Are you sure?” I whispered, needing that confirmation again.

  Pointing at the screen, she explained what the different parts looked like, and sure enough, it was definitely a girl.

  “Holy shit,” I mumbled, then winced and looked at the lady. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. I promise I won’t do it once the baby gets here. Well, I promise not to do it after she’s born. The labor might be a tough one to control what comes out of my mouth, so there’s no point in promising not to do it then.”

  Laughing loudly, she told Elijah to hold his phone up again and went back through everything, pointing out limbs as she took measurements. “I’ll print out some photos for you, so don’t worry. But baby looks perfect, and you’re measuring a day ahead of schedule. That’s probably because of those long legs, though.”

  “It’s not going to come out looking half eel, is it?”

  Glancing at me and then Elijah, she shook her head at my question. “No. When the parents or one of them is tall like your husband is, it’s perfectly normal for a baby to have longer limbs.”

  Shaking my head to clear the awful mental image, I asked her some more questions as she printed off photos for me.

  Then, she turned and rubbed her hands together. “So, are you guys ready for the 4D scan now?”

  “Absolutely,” Elijah replied, gripping my hand with the one of his that wasn’t holding his phone.

  Moving the machine out of the way, she wheeled over another one. “This is a new machine we only got two days ago. The technology on it was invented in Germany and is purely for 4D and 3D scans in 8K definition. This means we’ll be able to see your daughter moving in real-time, take a video of her, and she’ll be in super high definition, too.”

  Squirting more stuff on my stomach, she put the new probe thing down into it, and within seconds we were looking at the baby’s chin and neck on the screen.

  Holding his phone up to take a video, Elijah started to point out things. “Look at how cute her chin is, it’s just like yours, Sadie.”

  Smiling at me, Pam nodded. “She’s got your chin.”

  “And her heart-shaped face.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen again. Before had been amazing, but now? I felt like I was actually looking at her face-to-face.

  “There’s a button nose, and over here, we’ve got her eyes.”

  This time when we saw her hand, it was clenched into the tightest fist instead of sticking a finger up at us. And then she did the sweetest thing, and I wanted to burst into tears. She started moving her arm back and forth like she was waving at us.

  “Oh, baby wants you to know she knows her mommy and daddy are looking at her.”

  It was bullshit, well, it was probably bullshit, but Elijah and I looked at each other like she’d raised the Titanic. This was the second scan she’d done that in—she had to be a genius.

  “Moving down, we’ve got those long legs I was talking about, and these adorable little piggy toes. Then if we move back up, uh, yup, we’ve got us a girl.”

  This time when I looked at it, I didn’t need to squint or ask for an explanation for it. That was definitely the tiniest vagina in the history of vaginas.

  “This video’s going to be great at her eighteenth birthday party,” Elijah chuckled. “And here’s your vagina in utero, kid.”

  “I think you’ll have bigger problems, Mr. Townsend-Rossi. With her legs being as long as they are and her D
NA coming from the two of you, you’re going to have boys knocking on your door from the second they can walk. By eighteen, you’ll probably need to hire security.”

  Seeing the scowl on his face, I groaned. “Don’t say that. He’s got five brothers and a million other members of his family who’d step up for the job. The poor girl’s never going to get to date.”

  Elijah’s head almost fell off his shoulders with the speed he turned to glare at me. “She’s not dating, period.”

  Meeting the lady’s eyes, we both shook our heads, like we were bonding over what a twat he was. I’m fairly certain every father said that and that she’d heard it hundreds of times throughout her career, and how many of the girls never dated? Probably close to zero.

  By the time we were finished, Elijah was oozing tension, so I took the DVD and paperwork from her and was the one to guide him through the doors this time. I had an appointment in two days for a checkup with the OB/GYN, so I didn’t have to hang around this afternoon to see him.

  As we cleared the doors and walked to the truck, I glanced up and had to hold back the laughter that wanted to break out of me at his expression.

  “Plenty of men have daughters,” I told him, trying to reassure him. “Look at my dad, he’s got two.”

  “That doesn’t put my mind at ease after meeting your sister,” he muttered, unlocking the doors so we could get in.

  Six days ago, Cynthia had arrived at Dad’s place with Wick, to stay until after Orson had been caught and arrested. We’d been allowed to FaceTime, where Elijah had finally met her and my nephew and had endured hours of taunting, and I mean hours.

  Every time I’d tried to hang up, she’d come up with a new topic or question for me, no doubt seeing the look in Elijah’s eyes and knowing what it meant. Yup, even with us in Florida and her in Austin, she’d managed to cock block him like a champ.

  As he pulled out of the parking lot, he surprised me by taking a left instead of the right that we usually took to go home. Figuring he needed something from the store, I opened up the envelope with the baby's photos inside it and stared at them.

  “I think she’s got your nose, you know. And your forehead.”

  Pulling into the parking lot in front of a row of shops, he cut the engine and looked at the photo in my hand. “All I see is you in her. When we have boys, I’ll make sure they take after me.”

  And with that bomb, he got out of the truck and left me staring at him open-mouthed as he walked around to open my door.

  “When we have boys?” I stuttered as he helped me out.

  Taking my elbow to help me up the step onto the pavement, he guided me toward a glass door. “Yeah. If you look at the number of males in my family, it’s inevitable. Mom and Dad tried for years to have a daughter, but they kept get males. Uncle Jack and Uncle Jerome were lucky because they had Layla and Ariana on the last try, but the law of averages dictates we’ve got boys coming next.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me as he opened the door and gently moved me into the store.

  That’s when he shocked me again. I was standing in the middle of a baby shop. Our first trip to one, and it was together after finding out we were having a girl.

  “You don’t think we should wait?”

  Walking over to a display that had tiny white rompers hanging from the type of hangers I’d expect to find in one of those bear building stores, he said over his shoulder, “No. Our daughter has DNA from three of the strongest families in the world. I want to celebrate today by getting her some things that we can keep once she grows out of them. I also want to start looking at nursery shit and general baby shit for her. The average pregnancy lasts between thirty-seven weeks to forty weeks. With it being your first one, we could even go as late as forty-two, but given how sick you’ve been, I don’t want to get complacent in case they end up inducing you. So, we need to stock the nursery, decide on furniture, and make sure we’ve got all her stuff ready because we might only have another twenty-one weeks until she’s here with us.”

  I was standing and staring at him with my mouth open when a smartly dressed lady came over and introduced herself. “Hi there, I’m Angela. Welcome to Baby Booties Boutique. How can I help you today?”

  Still holding the little romper, Elijah joined us. “Nice to meet you, Angela. I’m Elijah, and this is Sadie, and we’ve just found out that we’re having a little girl, so we came in to get some stuff for her to mark the occasion. I was also hoping you might know where we could get something to help us break the news to our families?”

  Beaming at him, she clapped her hands together excitedly. “That’s wonderful news, congratulations both of you.”

  And then she was off. I always thought Cynthia was a psycho in a shop, but this woman beat her hands down. She was talking faster than any ear would be able to keep up, showing us everything, and discussing what babies needed with Elijah like it was a lasagna recipe. What was even more shocking was that he knew what she was talking about and even had things to add to the list.

  By the time we were done, I’d used the employee bathroom twice, had drunk an entire bottle of water, and Elijah was carrying a pile of shit, including a stuffed tiger with a pink bow and the softest pink blanket with white dots embroidered on it over to the till.

  Once she’d rung it all up and I’d tried not to have a heart attack at the amount that it’d all come to, she helped us carry the bags out to the truck, reminding Elijah about what he’d bought to tell our families.

  Because we couldn’t get together to do a gender reveal, and to be honest, it wasn’t really my sort of thing to do, we’d had to get inventive. We were arranging a group Zoom call, with his family and mine on it, to break the news to them all at once. All I needed was family, I didn’t want a party with dramatics and flare, it just wasn’t me.

  As we headed for home, he reached over and picked my hand up and kissed it, not saying anything. That one sweet gesture and the way he held it afterward was more than enough to soothe the shock and mild panic running through me at how the day had turned out. As always, when I was spinning out of control, he found a way to bring me safely back down to earth.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Elijah

  Getting such a large group of people together at the same time wasn’t as easy as it sounded. We had time differences to think about, jobs, commitments, kids… It was like organizing a trip to Times Square with two hundred toddlers in tow.

  When we’d gotten home, we’d organized the call for four o’clock in the afternoon two days later. Sadie’s friends were going to log in with her Nan there, and her brother was on his base in Portsmouth again, so it worked out for everyone.

  There was just the small matter of one last detail that I wanted to finalize.

  I’d been about to do just that when Sadie had walked out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel, and my plans had gone downhill. Which was why I was currently lying on the bed as she moved slowly up and down my length, squeezing me tighter than a fist.

  There was nothing about her that I didn’t find beautiful, not one thing. Even her white-blonde eyebrows and eyelashes did it for me now that the dye on them had disappeared. But seeing that tiny little bump, knowing it was my baby inside of her… there were no words for how gorgeous it made her.

  “Pixie,” I warned for the second time, but she didn’t take the hint, just like the last time.

  “Wait,” she gasped, throwing her head back as her body shuddered. “I’m almost there.”

  “I’ll be past it if you don’t hurry up,” I ground out, really trying to regain control of what I knew was just about to happen.

  And then she shouted out, just as her pussy started to flutter around my shaft, and her rhythmic movements went out of sync. Holding her hips, I took over and moved her up and down as I roared out my release.

  Once it’d left us and we’d caught our breaths, I wrapped my left arm around her and leaned slightly to the side to reach under me. It’d been digging in my ass cheek for t
he last twenty minutes, moving closer and closer to an area it had no business being near. The problem was, I hadn’t wanted it to fall out of my pocket, so I’d hidden it under me when I’d lay down on the bed and told her to climb on, and now I was paying the price.

  “Do you need me to get off?” she murmured drowsily but made no move to do it.

  Not that I’d have let her. Squeezing her, I lay back down flat and took a deep breath. “Can you look at me a second, my pixie?”

  Raising her head, she looked down at me through hooded eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Give me your hand, baby.”

  Lifting her left hand—thankfully—I kissed her as I slid the ring onto her ring finger. When she felt the metal reach the top of her finger, she pulled back slightly and looked at her hand, where the two carat diamond with a row of small diamonds on either side of it now sat.

  “This isn’t the way I’d planned for this to happen, but I’ve been trying to figure out the perfect way to do it for weeks and decided just to be spontaneous because we’ve never followed the normal path.”

  Glancing at me, she blinked rapidly and then looked back at the ring.

  “When I first met you, I recognized a wounded soul that matched my own. That was the first time I felt some of the old me come back, so I knew you were special. I’ve irritated you, I’ve pestered you, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of your sassy personality and crazy dreams. But what you’ve given me is so much more, and I’d love to spend the rest of my life trying to give you even a speck of that back. Will you marry me, my pixie?”

  Sitting upright, she looked from the ring to me and back again. “We can’t tell our families or the kids that you proposed like this. You’ll have to make up something romantic.”

  Fighting back a smile, I asked, “Is that a yes?”