“I tell them about you every day,” she promised. “Their big, badass daddy with a heart purer than gold.”
I just squeezed her closer under my arm, my voice robbed by the sight of the babies I’d been robbed of seeing for the first four months of their lives.
It was obvious who was who, even as identical as they were. Walker was decked out in miniature biker fashion, a black AC/DC shirt worn under a leather jacket and little boots on his feet. He was silent, massive blue eyes already pale like mine or King’s, wide and watchful as I approached him. His sister, on the other hand, babbled away in a high, bright voice, one plump hand fisted in Harleigh Rose’s tee and the other reaching out for her mama and me. She had a scowl on her gorgeous face, and her darker blue eyes flashed like the inside of a flame as if she was irritated with us for taking so long to get to her.
My heart rocketed against my ribs, threatenin’ to break them.
“Fuck me, but they’re fuckin’ perfect,” I said as we stopped before them. My voice was ragged and torn with the emotion cloggin’ up my throat, but no one called me on it.
“Hi, Daddy,” Harleigh Rose greeted softly, almost as if she was afraid I’d disappear if she shouted. “We missed you something crazy.”
I opened my other arm so she could slot herself into my side and breathed in a deep drag’a that floral scent of hers, remembering how that very fragrance had gotten me through my first stint in the can.
“Missed my baby girl,” I told her as I kissed her forehead. “Missed ya more ’an I can say.”
I tried not to focus on the obvious lack of my son in the group, but I could feel it in the lopsided beat of my overfull heart. Still, I had to be strong for ’em all, at least in this first reunion.
Later, alone with my woman and my kids, I would suffer.
Annoyed with her lack of attention, Angel let out a shrill shriek and hit me in the chest with her little fist.
I burst out laughing.
When I recovered, tears gathered in the corners of my eyes, all three of my girls were lookin’ up at me with straight-up adoration that felt like a shot of Canadian whiskey to my gut, warm and fuckin’ heady.
“Got another impatient little miss on my hands, don’t I?” I asked Angel as I ran my rough, scarred knuckle over the petal soft curve of her cheek.
Never seen a more beautiful baby and that was the truth. Harleigh Rose’d been cute as fuckin’ could be, but there was sheer perfection in the red, curvy mouth and the huge, long lashed eyes of this golden curly-haired baby girl. I felt my heart contract as we made eye contact, and I realized my future would include being wrapped around her tiny, dimpled finger.
“Goner just at the sight of you,” Lou murmured, fingering a lock of Angel’s golden hair. “Just like her mama.”
“She’s a smart girl, so it went without saying she’d love you right off,” H.R. reasoned as she pressed her nose into my chest and cuddled closer. “She knows she’s got the best damn dad in the whole fuckin’ world.”
“Could film this shit and sell it to the Hallmark Channel,” Nova called out as he pushed off the side of Lila’s VW bug and sauntered forward, snagging Walker from Bea as he did so. “’Bout cried watchin’ you guys. Really, I did. But I think it’s time to bro down for the men here who’re too insecure to shed some manly fuckin’ tears.”
Lou and H.R. laughed somewhat wetly as they struggled through their tears, but Nova’s typical nonchalance broke the heavy silence in the lot, and everyone rushed forward to exchange hugs and backslaps with me. I tucked Walker under one arm and Angel under the other, Lou stuck to my side like a tattoo I’d never remove as I talked to my brothers, their women, and the rest of our family.
Only when everyone was casually crowded around me, talking over each other and moving around each other in that way we did, did I notice the one person who hadn’t come forward yet.
She stood off to the very left of the lot, her ass on the hood of her modified pink Honda Civic, arms wrapped around her legs, chin to her knees. It was a posture I’d never seen her in, bent and broken like it was a permanent thing. Her normally glossy thicket’a golden brown hair was lank and pulled into a messy bun, her clothes swallowing her both ’cause they were obviously King’s and because she’d lost a fuck ton’a weight she didn’t have to lose in the first place. Ares was with ’er, standing in front and to the side’a her like a miniature sentry. The sight of him like that reminded me of Mute, reminded me of King, the two fuckin’ incredible souls we’d lost that would’a done exactly that for that woman.