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She wrapped her arms around my neck. “I love you enough to do whatever you want.”
Well, that was a heady offer. “Let’s start with food, and getting you out of these clothes. How does that sound?”
“Like if the birthday boy wants it…”
I grinned.
CHAPTER 7
LOVE ME LIKE YOU DO
FRANKIE
Iwas going to throttle them all, right after I gave every single one of them a huge kiss. Ian had to have known Coop was up here waiting. His offer to go and find me a decaffeinated mocha made all kinds of more sense now.
While decaf was not my first, second, or even last choice—it allowed me the vaguest illusion of coffee when I wasn’t allowed to have any. On really bad days, the decaf mochas worked.
Coop tasted like the real thing, with a bit of spearmint from his toothpaste. He also tasted like home. When he picked me clean up to head into the bedroom, I bit down on his lower lip.
He had one hand under my ass, the other wrapped around my nape. A groan rumbled from his chest, then he was sinking onto his knees before we both “tumbled” onto the bed itself. It was the most graceful I’d felt in a while. I shoved the thought away even as it tried to take purchase.
Ian had spent the past two and a half weeks reminding me over and over that I wasn’t allowed to disparage myself. He asked me to write down a tick mark for each time I’d been mentally berating myself.
Then I got a swat for each one. It had left my ass and cunt aching that first week, but by the second, I’d almost begun to miss the “punishment” as the number dwindled. While we didn’t practice full-time, I still wore his collar. He was my Dom every bit as much as he was my husband and he took both positions very seriously.
The glide of Coop’s hands under my shirt had him pushing it up and I let him tug it off me. Thankfully, I hadn’t bothered with a jacket or sweater. One thing these babies were making me was a furnace.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Coop murmured as my shirt landed somewhere off the bed. “Twice the babies, twice the boobs.”
The droll remark punctured the haze of desire that simmered over the chaos of my conflicting emotions. The crying and missing them had been overwhelming and now…
I cracked up.
Laughter bubbled up through me. It was like cracking through a wall that had gone up around me brick by brick. The mortar shivered before it crumbled. Coop just being here in the first place was enough to disrupt its foundation, but the warmth in his gray-green eyes, the ease in his smile, and the absolute love in his every touch?
That was a wrecking ball for all my loneliness, doubt, and self-recriminations. I had this life because we loved and supported each other. All of us. Yes, I missed them. They missed me too. But I wanted to be here as much as I wanted to be there.
It was okay to want it all, we just had to keep the hands steady on the wheel on our way.
Course, now that I’d equated Coop with a wrecking ball, that song wouldn’t get out of my head. My laughter turned into giggles that escaped even as I tried to smother the humor with a hand over my mouth.
Glee shimmered in his eyes as Coop stared down at me. “That wasn’t even my best material—not that your boobs aren’t the best, Beautiful. Cause, they are. These magnificent mounds of love…”
Mounds.
I died. Laughter shrieked out of me and it just shattered the last of it. Without even an illusion of contrition, Coop’s grin grew.
“Tits. Boobies.” He ran his nose lightly along the curve of my throat to my ear where he whispered, “Jugs.”
The tears slipping down my cheeks now had nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with hilarity. Putting my hand on his chest, I skated my fingers down to the tattoo of the footprints he’d begun adding across his heart.
There were three, each one based on the footprints taken from the babies when they were born. Izzy was there first, then Josh, and finally Charlie. Their names were written in lower case letters along the side of the foot. He was going to have to add two more.
“I love you,” I said, still chuckling as he nuzzled his nose to mine again. “I am so glad you’re here.”
“I am a gift to all who appreciate me,” he murmured, then bent his head to press a kiss to each of my breasts before tracing a finger along the side of my face. “Better?”
“Oh, so much better. I’m going to have to apologize to Ian too…”
