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Before I could dwell on it further, James appeared and offered me a hand. “She’s right, you know.” He followed me down the hall to the bedroom and waited until I slipped under the covers. “That was impressive.”
He slid in behind me. Like a magnet, I curled into his touch, relaxing as I felt his arm close over me. “You think I could really do this?”
“Do what?”
“This whole… domestic thing. Settling down?”
With his lips against my ear, James chuckled. “I hate to break it to you, love, but you’ve been doing that for over a year now.”
Had I? I supposed I hadn’t let my brain slow down enough to think about it—which was shocking considering how much of an overthinker I’d been lately. Panic threatened to rise in my chest, but I leaned back into James and let him chase it away with the whisper of his lips over my skin and the brush of his fingers through my hair.
And with that, I closed my eyes. Because I finally realized that maybe settling down wasn’t so badafter all.
It no longer surprisedme to wake up in an empty bed. It was Christmas morning, damn it. So I flipped onto my stomach, starfishing across the bed and closing my eyes again. Noises from the rest of the house reached me: the sounds of Hannah’s shower, Carlos’s nails clicking on the hardwood floor as he did whatever it was that he did in the mornings before I got up to feed him. I listened for the telltale rustling that meant James was in the kitchen.
I rolled out of bed and padded down the hallway, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Carlos was sitting calmly behind the baby gate for a change, trying like hell to peer around the corner to see into the living room where Kian—still in his pajamas—nestled into the corner of the couch. Carlos had developed a soft spot for the boy over the last couple months and tended to settle whenever he entered a room.
I tried not to take it personally.
Food was the last thing on Carlos’s mind with his friends in the room, so I freed him to join Kian while I helped James in the kitchen with breakfast.
James gave me the hard job—scrambling the eggs. That’s apparently the only thing I was trusted enough to do.
I admit, I was starting to get used to having a full house. I thought back to my studio apartment in Vegas and found myself wondering why the hell I ever lived alone. Well, I had Raleigh, who sometimes treated my apartment as his personal man cave, but even he had someone to go home to at night.
I could no longer imagine a world where I wanted those things for myself: work, an apartment that was more shelter than home, and meaningless hookups in between. I was much happier with where my life was at now.
Someone called my name from the other room, pulling me out of my thoughts.
Hannah, who was glued to Kian’s side, held a small white box in her hand. It was covered in silver snowflakes and secured with a red ribbon. “I want to give you your present.”
“I’m not going to get slapped in the face with frosting again, am I?” I took the box and sat next to the two of them.
“You started that! Open it, already! That thing took me days to get right.”
I tugged on the bow, and the velvet ribbon fell away with barely any effort. James stepped up behind me as I lifted the lid and pulled the tissue aside, removing a palm-sized disc from the box. It was one of those plaster ornaments you crafted in school with a mold of your handprint and the year printed or stamped into it. This one was bigger—much bigger—than the one I created when I was six.
Hannahwas scrawled across the bottom. “It’s got last year on it,” I noted, twisting the green and red tartan ribbon between my fingers.
Hannah leaned farther into Kian’s grip, eyes shimmering. “That’s the year you became a dad.”
I gasped, like actually gasped. The box fell to the floor, but I kept a tight grip on the ornament, holding it close to my chest. I wasn’t letting it go for the world. My throat was tight and my eyes burned. I blinked, pressing my fingers into my eyes.
James’s hand rubbed my back. “Are you okay, love?”
“Give her our gift,” I said, closer to tears than I liked to admit.
While James retrieved the gift, I collected myself and carefully placed the ornament back in its box, tucking it in tight with the sparkly tissue paper. I stood and set it on a high shelf where Carlos couldn’t knock it over and break it.
“I love it,” I whispered, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “Thank you.”
“Aw!” she chuckled. “I made the big, bad Ryder Clark cry!”
“Watch it, kid. You’re next.”
James returned, handing Hannah the…horriblywrapped gift. I cringed. “Why’d you let me butcher the wrap job like that?”
It was my turn for a kiss. “So I could say it was from both of us,” he whispered low enough that Hannah wouldn’t hear. “She’s only going to rip the paper anyway. It doesn’t matter.”
