Wild Like the Wind (Page 80)

And that something was not good.

Shit.

“What?” I asked.

“Babe, how ’bout we come out to the brothers before we get into real estate,” he suggested.

“What was that look that you just blanked?” I pushed.

“What look?”

Oh no he didn’t.

He wasn’t going to lie to me by hiding from me.

“What were you thinking when I said we need to move?”

“I was thinking I just moved a bunch a’ shit outta my place to make room for the shit you moved into my place and then I moved a bunch a’ shit outta two places to clear out Jean’s and move in with you, so I’m not real hip on talkin’ about movin’ a bunch more shit someplace else.”

This answer made sense.

He was still hiding from me.

“That’s not it.”

Hound started getting impatient. “That is it, woman.”

“Talk to me, Shep. We said we’d be open and we need to be open. What was it you thought when I said we should find our own place, get a fresh start?”

I mean, did he want me to keep this place because Black gave it to me?

That’d be sweet, but unnecessary. I had what I needed from Black and always would.

Or did he want me to keep this place for the boys, thinking that it was their home and they might get pissed if we got rid of it?

This was something that was also sweet, but unnecessary. Or I hoped so. We’d have to talk to the boys.

“Keely, just drop it,” he muttered, taking his hands from his hips and looking like he was going to walk out of the room.

“Don’t walk away from this conversation, Hound,” I snapped, and he stopped moving to lock eyes on me.

“We need to be careful here, baby,” he said warningly.

“I know,” I agreed pointedly. “What are you holding back from me?”

“Babe—” he started like he was going to keep trying to blow it off.

“Please, don’t keep anything from me. If something’s bothering you, talk to me.”

“Right now, my woman getting up in my shit to push me to talk to her is what’s bothering me,” he clipped.

I stared into his eyes then turned mine to the laptop while I reached out and slapped it closed, shutting away websites about fabulous vacation destinations.

Then I pushed off the bed and murmured, “I’m gonna take a bubble bath.”

“Babe,” he growled.

I kept walking toward the bathroom.

“Keely,” he called irritably.

I was at the door to the bathroom when he spoke again.

“Got two boys.”

I turned to him.

“That aren’t mine,” he finished.

So it was about the boys.

“They are,” I whispered.

“They are and they aren’t and it’s the way I lived my life, my choices that I didn’t make a kid of my own. Now I got you and you’re right. We should move. We should move because it’s always gonna be the house Black bought for you and that’d eventually get under my skin,” he admitted. “And we’ll get on that after other important shit is sorted. But you said you and me don’t need all this space. The boys have moved on. And it just dug in that you and me don’t need all this space.”

We didn’t need this space. We were just two people. I knew he’d long since broken ties with his family. He was standing in the room when I’d irrevocably broken ties with mine. It wasn’t like we were regularly going to have out-of-town guests (though my family, and Graham’s, lived in town . . . still).

Except . . .

I didn’t make a kid of my own.

Oh God.

I stared at him.

“You want a baby,” I said quietly.

“Never thought about it,” he grunted.

“But now, you’re thinking about it.”

He said nothing.

But now he had a woman.

Now he had a home with a woman.

A woman he loved who loved him back.

And I was that woman.

“You want a baby,” I repeated.

“Keely, babe—”

“So we’ll have a baby.”

It just came right out of my mouth.

Shit.

He went perfectly still.

Every inch of him.

God.

Oh God.

Shit.

He wanted a baby.

“Hound,” I whispered.

“You’d give me a kid?”

That question was guttural.

Oh yes, he wanted a baby.

“Well, uh . . . my parts still work, I love you, you love me and—”

Christ, I was babbling . . . about having a baby.

“You’d give me a kid.”

“I’m not twenty-three anymore but my lady parts haven’t shriveled up yet, honey,” I joked.

“We’re not laughin’ about this,” he declared.

And that declaration was flinty.

“You gotta be sure about this,” he decreed. “You don’t say that shit to me unless you’re sure about this. What it means to you. What it might mean to Dutch and Jag. What it means for us. What it means for me. You just don’t throw that out. Not that. Not you and me makin’ a baby.”

No.

Hound didn’t want a baby.

Hound wanted a baby with me.

I stared at him in those jeans and that tank with those tats and his badass hair and his amazing eyes and that look on his handsome face, and for the first time in the years of us being together when we were not and in the past months of us being together in a way we actually were, it was only then I felt the true fullness of the decades of love he’d given me.

It was overwhelming.

And it was exquisite.

Plus my boys were gone. On the path to building their own lives. They’d been the only true, long-lasting joy in mine. I still had them but I had them in a way I missed them, because they weren’t my little boys anymore.

I could make another one. Another one with lapis-blue eyes and a handsome expressive face who every time I looked at him, he reminded me not only how much I loved him, but how much I loved his daddy and the love we had for each other that made him.

“He has to have your eyes,” I whispered.

“She has to have your hair.”

Oh my God.

Shit.

Oh my God.

Hound and me were going to make a baby.

“No cursing rule in this house until she’s thirty-three,” I said, sounding croaky.

“Get your ass over here,” he said, sounding bossy.

“We can’t make the baby now,” I said, sounding panicked. “We have to tell Chaos first.”

“We’re not making the baby now, Keekee,” he said, sounding amused. “We have to tell the brothers and then we gotta move to a different house. Sayin’ that, we’re gonna practice up real good so when it gets down to doin’ it with a purpose, we got it set.”

“I think we already have it set, honey.”

“We’re still gonna practice.”

Oh yeah we were.

I got my ass over there.

Hound didn’t attack me.

No.

What Hound did was reach with both hands, grab my head, yank me to him and then wrap both of his arms around my head.

He held me to his chest that way.

I’d never been held that way in my life.

There was something poignant about it, profound.

Amazing.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My man wanted to make a baby with me.

I circled him with my arms and clutched his wife beater in my fists between his shoulder blades.