And…”why are you asking me? Shouldn’t you be asking Tristan about this?”
“No, I think this is the proper course of action,” Bev butted in. “What could he say, without your permission?”
She had a point.
“But now I just need his permission,” I said numbly.
“If you told him you were okay with it, he’d do it,” Frankie pointed out. And she was right.
“Which one of you wants to carry the baby?” Bev asked her.
Frankie’s nose wrinkled up. “We’re working that out. You’re going to think we’re demented, but we both want to get pregnant.”
Bev nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I do think you’re both demented. Danika, aren’t you guys trying to adopt again?”
I nodded. “Yes. Domestically, this time. You know how it goes, though. A lot of waiting. We are very lucky we got our first two babies as fast as we did.”
“I might have an idea that will give both you and Estella a chance to go through a pregnancy,” Bev said quietly to Frankie, as sweet Nikolaj kissed her all over the face. He was the most affectionate boy.
That stumped me, and I just stared at her.
“Oh yeah?” Frankie asked her, sounding just as stumped.
“One of you can get inseminated, and the other can act as a surrogate for Tristan and Danika. A baby for everyone.”
Cue the long pause.
I blinked. Several times. “Bev, you know I had a hysterectomy.”
She was unfazed. “I also know they were able to leave your ovaries intact. There’s a chance you can still produce eggs, my dear. And eggs, combined with sperm and a surrogate makes baby. And these two lunatics want to get pregnant. There are no certainties, but it’s certainly worth looking into. The stars seem to be aligning for this.”
“I feel a double pregnancy coming on,” Frankie said, looking just thrilled about it.
I felt like an idiot. I’d heard the lingo, but I’d never even realized that you could produce eggs after a hysterectomy.
After the idea was presented, I was afraid to even give it too much thought. Though I did tell Tristan, the moment I saw him.
“Frankie and Estella want your sperm for their baby,” I began.
He blinked, then bent down and kissed me on the nose. “Will they buy me dinner first?”
I rolled my eyes and tried to stifle a smile, then waited patiently while our children mobbed him. He had one smiling child on each hip when he looked at me again. “How do you feel about this?”
I chewed on my lip, but this was the easy part. “I’m okay with it. I’m excited for them. I want another baby, too. For us.”
Ming chimed in loudly that she would also like another baby. She was baby crazed.
“Well yeah. We’ve already decided we’re having at least two more. We just have to be patient.”
I didn’t bring up the second part until the kids were sound asleep in their rooms, and we were in our kinky bed.
I was naked and straddling him. I’d just given him a hell of a ride, and we were both still panting from our efforts.
He was rubbing the side of my thigh with one hand, my bad knee with the other, and looking at my body in a way that let me know he was quickly going to be ready for a second round.
“There’s a chance I can still produce eggs,” I told him.
He sat up, then flipped us both until I was on my back, and he was looming over me. “I don’t understand.” He started playing with my clit, watching the action with enthralled attention, still half buried in me. Clearly, this was not the best time to bring it up.
“Frankie said she’d be a surrogate for us, and there’s a chance I can still produce eggs.”
He pulled his hand back, looking confused. “I don’t understand.”
“I guess they were able to leave my ovaries intact with my hysterectomy.”
“I didn’t know they could do that.”
“Yeah, me neither. What do you think? About giving it a try?”
“I’m happy with whatever makes you happy. I want more kids, but I’m not at all picky about how we get them.”
God, I adored this man, every single inch of him.
Though a few minutes later, I might have loved several specific inches of him best.
Of course, there were a million ifs and plenty of odds not working in our favor. All three of us were over thirty. After a lot of stressful doctor’s visits and nerve-wracking test results, Estella and Frankie wound up being pregnant at the same time. They even wound up with close to the same due date.
Frankie was carrying our baby, Estella theirs. And coincidentally, Bianca and James finally decided to get pregnant around that time. There were a solid twelve months in there where the four of us couldn’t be in the same room without talking about all things baby. I loved it.
Jared Jeremiah Vega was born huge and healthy.
Tristan couldn’t stop crying when he wrote that name down on the birth certificate.
He was born only five days past his due date, but weighed in at a whopping eleven pounds. Frankie blamed Tristan one hundred percent for that, and cursed him up and down every single time she saw him for nearly a year.
Maria Sosa-Abelli was born just days after Jared. She was only five pounds, but healthy and beautiful.
Ming was in heaven. “We have so many babies now!” she said, twirling her pink dress around like a mad woman.
None of the adults in the room could stop laughing about that.
Nikolaj didn’t care for the hospital, but agreed that his little brother was, “Pwetty cool.”
We’d had to buy a mini-van. I was in heaven. We had so many kids that I was officially a min-van mom. We loaded them all up and took our Jared home.
We didn’t sleep the first night. When I say we, I mean all of us. Tristan and I couldn’t tear ourselves away from the nursery, and Ming wouldn’t stay in her bed. Even Nikolaj couldn’t stop coming to check on his new brother.
“Why did we name him Jared, Daddy?” Ming asked between adoring glances at her baby brother.
He got choked up at the question, but eventually, haltingly, he started to tell our Ming the story of his brother, Jared. It was an important story, and though she wasn’t old enough to really understand it now, I knew that we would be sure to teach her that, though those we loved may die, our love could keep them close to us forever.
Ming fell asleep halfway through his story, sitting on his lap in the rocking chair. He just held her closer, kissing her on the top of the head. Nikolaj had fallen asleep in his other arm a while back.
I was sitting in a rocking chair facing his, cradling Jared in my arms.
We shared a look. What a journey it had been. I had a whole lot of happy under my belt these days, but never in my life had I been so happy as I was in that exact moment.
“I love you,” I mouthed at him.
He flashed one ruinous dimple at me. “Love you more.”
BOOKS BY R.K. LILLEY
IN FLIGHT (UP IN THE AIR #1)
MILE HIGH (UP IN THE AIR #2)
GROUNDED (UP IN THE AIR #3)
LANA (AN UP IN THE AIR NOVELLA)
BREATHING FIRE (HERETIC DAUGHTERS #1)
BAD THINGS (TRISTAN & DANIKA #1)
ROCK BOTTOM (TRISTAN & DANIKA #2)
LOVELY TRIGGER (TRISTAN & DANIKA #3)
AND COMING SOON…
THE WILD SIDE (A NOVEL)
CROSSING FIRE (HERETIC DAUGHTERS #2)
MR. BEAUTIFUL (UP IN THE AIR #4)
Thanks so much for reading this series! Keep up to date on all of my current and future projects at www.rklilley.com, and if you liked this book, please, please, please, review and tell all of your friends!
Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming standalone erotic romance.
Coming 2014
THE WILD SIDE
ARE YOU READY TO TAKE A WALK?
Alasdair Masters is in a rut. He just hit forty, has been nearly celibate for the past yea
r, and his life has turned into a daily sequence of lonely patterns that revolve around avoiding human contact.
His tidy life is turned on its head when a hot young blonde at the gym that’s been pseudo-stalking him decides to rock his world. A very young blonde. Way, way too young for him. The problem is, he can’t seem to tell her no, and she just keeps coming back for more.
It doesn’t help that he’s ninety percent sure she’s a criminal, and still, he can’t seem to turn her down. What is a dull introvert to do when a chaotic cyclone that oozes sexuality comes twisting into his life?
At first, he thinks she’ll give him a heart attack, but after his twenty-year marriage ended a year ago, he’s been a little lost, and when she comes crashing into his life, he realizes that he’s never felt more alive.
Is a walk on the wild side just what he needs to get his life on track or a disaster in the making? Is it possible for someone that much younger to be just what he needs, or is she a fortune hunter, as everyone keeps telling him? Is it his hormones telling him that the mysterious younger woman is the one, or could it be more?
I set my two perfectly folded gym towels down on a chair by the treadmill and got on the machine.
I always brought two. I wasn’t even sure why. I was a creature of habit. Once I started a pattern, I tended to stick to it, rain or shine.
Kind of like my marriage. Of course, that hadn’t lasted forever, but that hadn’t exactly been my choice.
I punched in my settings and began my warm-up. I had already done twenty minutes of stretching at home. My three-hour daily workout was very precise. I had a family history chock-full of heart disease, and so I aggressively fought to stay healthy. I was intelligent enough to know that I’d brought the whole thing to an extreme, but honestly, what else was I supposed to do with my free time? I was busy enough with work, but my work involved a lot of sitting down and tapping away at a computer, and I felt I had to counter all of that physical inactivity, somehow.
I’d just had my dreaded fortieth birthday, and I felt like I was in as good of shape as I’d ever been. My waistline wasn’t growing, thanks to my three hours a day in the gym and an impeccable diet, and my muscles were well toned and good sized. I had no idea what age I actually looked, but I figured the liberal salt and pepper at my temples brought it at least close to forty. I didn’t really give it much thought, as I stayed largely to myself, and any time I was on camera, I went out of my way to avoid seeing it.
The gym was busy, as it usually was, so my time there was literally the most social I was in an average day, and I usually got away with a nod and a good morning to the receptionist on the way in.
That was it. The only verbal interaction in my day.
Sometimes I had to talk on the phone for work, and once, maybe twice a year, I did a few television or radio interviews.
And that was it.
The scary part was it was effortless for me. It had started with an ugly divorce just over one year ago, and slowly shaped its way into this. A sad, old man that could have easily embraced a life as a complete recluse.
I did still go out of my way to work out at an upscale gym, instead of just building one in my house. I had the room. I certainly had the money. I figured it was only a matter of time before I resorted to that, too.
The strange part of it was, I wasn’t worried about it because I was lonely. I was worried because I wasn’t. I did miss being with a woman in the literal sexual sense, but that was about it. I’d considered the idea of hiring a prostitute briefly, but even that seemed like an ordeal. I detested breaking the law. It was so very chaotic.
A familiar figure moved onto the machine next to me, and I met smiling light green eyes in the mirror, nodded once briefly, then looked back down.
She was a shapely little blonde woman that had started sharing my gym hours nine days ago.
Girl, I corrected myself. She was a girl, way too young for me to even sneak a long glance at, though I was only human, and she was wearing next to nothing, so I’d caught many, many glances.
She probably thought I was dad material, I told myself, as she started to jog on the machine, her full, perky breasts bouncing with every smooth step.
She really needed to go shopping for a more supportive sports bra, I thought to myself, my eyes catching on her, then darting away, then glancing again within a few bounces.
She wore only a hot pink sports bra and the tiniest skintight white lycra shorts I’d ever seen in my life. Her abs were toned, waist tiny, her skin smooth in a way that happened only in the very young.
Way, way too young for you, I reminded myself, my furtive gaze catching on her lithe hips as she jogged her sexy little heart out.
My eyes moved up to her face, and I flushed to find her watching me watching her. I looked down and kept on jogging.
There’d been no censure in her eyes, and so I found mine wandering back to her face.
She was beautiful. Not a scrap of makeup on, her white-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, and still she could’ve stopped traffic. A real bombshell. None of it was artificial either, just plain old good genetics at work.
She was friendly, too. I wasn’t sure why, but she usually took the machine next to mine, if it was empty, though there were lots to choose from. She always had a smile for me, too.
Maybe I reminded her of her dad. Or fuck, her grandpa.
It didn’t bear thinking about it.
I’d never been with a younger woman, let alone one that much younger. Hell, she’d probably give me a heart attack. I shook off the thought. A flawless little thing like that wouldn’t give me a second glance, and I told myself that was a good thing.
For all I knew, she could have been jailbait. Needless to say, for a man that’d never even had a speeding ticket, even the idea of that was too scandalous to linger on.
Still, my eyes were drawn, time and again, to her perfect figure jogging hard on that treadmill. Her legs were incredible, long and slender, bare from the top of her thigh to her ankles, and so toned and tan.
I made myself look away and not look back.
I hit the one-hour mark on the machine when I saw her slow and stop out of the corner of my eye. This had become a pattern, too. I did exactly one hour of cardio, before I hit the free weights. She seemed to be working a similar routine, and every day I saw her, it became even more similar.
I almost jumped in surprise when she approached me directly, standing on the very front of my machine, to get my attention.
My eyes traveled slowly up, trying not to linger on the way her breasts rose out of her sports bra’s neckline as she leaned into my machine. She was spilling out of the thing.
She beamed at me.
I swallowed hard, catching the side bar and swinging first one leg, and then the other, onto the footrests on the sides, coming to a stop.
I popped out an ear bud, raising my brows in what I hoped was a look of polite interest.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey,” I panted back, shutting the treadmill down. May as well quit, since I’d reached my goal.
She handed me my towel, and I took it, immediately wiping my brow. This was a new development and a strange one, to be sure.
She held up the second towel, my OCD towel, if you will. “I saw that you have two. I forgot mine. You mind if I borrow it?”
I shook my head. “Go for it. Glad I could help.”
She smiled again. Her teeth were gorgeous, straight and white against her tan skin. “What’s your name?” she asked me.
I was caught off guard, and so it took me a few extra beats to answer awkwardly. “Alasdair.”
She raised her brows, looking intrigued. “Nice name. It has a lot of character. Do you shorten it at all, or should I call you that, Alasdair?”
Hearing her say my name made me feel indecent. Just beastly. I briefly considered cutting my workout short. “Sometimes my friends call me Dair.”
“Dair. I like that too. And are you daring, Da
ir?”
“Not particularly,” I said quickly, my heart pounding. I couldn’t quite believe that she was hitting on me, but if she was, I needed to put a quick stop to it.
Way too young, I told myself firmly.
I moved to the weights, and she followed like we were old friends. I started doing curls, eyes glued to her as she grabbed some smaller weights and started doing dead lifts with a hammer curl.
The sight of that nearly had me slack-jawed. The move consisted of her bending down at the waist, her legs straight, and touching the ground, then lifting back, her ponytail bouncing, back arched, her incredible ass sticking out, and bringing her arms into a curl.
She faced away from me when she did it, giving me a perfect view. Her shorts were so thin, her skin so supple, that it was more perfectly designed to turn me on than a porno. And I’d watched plenty of porn. The girl was set on giving me a heart attack today.
She kept doing it for the longest time, sending me a look over her shoulder as she straightened on the last rep. She smiled that sweet little smile at me. “Well, aren’t you gonna ask me?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but my mind went very dirty with it.
Could you do that one more time, but pull your shorts down for this one, so I can fuck your brains out? I was pretty positive that wasn’t what she meant.
Can I give you a ride home? Or maybe a hard ride on my cock? Nope, those two were out, too.
Or how about, Want to grab a coffee after this? That one was better, but I held my tongue.
“Excuse me?” I asked instead. The safest bet of all.
“My name. I know yours now. Don’t you want to know mine?”
I smiled politely, sincerely hoping that my raging hard-on wasn’t too obvious. I was wearing athletic pants and a long sweatshirt, so I was probably safe. “Yes, of course. Nice to meet you…”
“Iris.”
My brows shot up. You didn’t see many girls her age named Iris. “Iris?”
Her eyes twinkled at me. She gave very good eye contact. Intense, but good. “Don’t you like it?”