“I went from having a wasteland to a fuckin’ world, Freya,” he corrected.
My heart did a flip. “You’re making it really hard to be mad at you,” I snapped.
His eyes kept fucking twinkling. “Be mad all you like, Freya, it’s happenin’.”
My eyes narrowed. “Just because you grunt ‘it’s happenin’ ’ without using the letter g doesn’t mean your word turns into law.”
“I think it can,” he argued.
Now I was pissed. I stepped away so he wasn’t touching me anymore. I couldn’t think with him touching me.
“Hades, I’ve worked my entire fucking life to be able to take care of myself,” I huffed. “I’ve worked hard. You can’t just take all of that away from me because you’re an alpha male who needs to feel manly by paying for everything.”
“Fuck,” he muttered as he thrust a hand through his hair. “I don’t want to take shit away from you, Freya. What you’ve done, what you’ve built ... it’s fucking magnificent.” His eyes went around the house, our house, which was almost completely unpacked. “I’ve built nothing in my life except a pile of fuckin’ bodies. Me taking care of you isn’t about feeling like a man, or fuck, maybe part of it is. Most of it is me meeting the reaper, knowin’ that I helped build something magnificent.”
Tears filled my eyes as he stepped forward again, pulling me to him until our bodies met. The process was rather different now with my growing belly, but it worked. No complaints here.
“Now, let me fuck you so you’re not mad at me,” he murmured.
And he did just that.
I wasn’t mad at him anymore.
He also took over the mortgage.
I’d caught up with everyone in town and had re-established my weekly dates with Des, which Hades came to sporadically. He wasn’t allowed to attend every single time since Des said he ‘fucked with his mojo and killed his game.’ There was one person who had been scarce since I came back into town. Someone who finally turned up at our door over a month after we moved back. We’d had a welcome home party which he’d been invited to but hadn’t attended. I didn’t know if it was because the entire club was there, or if he was just being petty.
I was too happy to see him. He was sitting at the breakfast bar, coffee and a plate of cookies in front of him. I’d already eaten five of my own. We had been chatting about nothing and everything. Natasha was doing well at the club. His mom. His sisters. Everything except the elephant in the room.
Kallum’s eyes went up and down my body, pausing at my belly. “You’re happy.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway, cradling my stomach. “Yeah, I really, really am.”
He sighed, long and heavy. “That makes it that much harder to hate him.” He nodded to where Hades was speaking on the phone outside. He hung out there a lot, even though he’d given up smoking. At that moment, I knew he was out there because Kallum was in here.
“Come on, you can’t hate the father of my child,” I teased.
Kallum’s jaw tightened, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t,” he agreed.
“Why do you hate them so much?” I asked. “The Sons?”
It was the question that had been on my mind for a long time, one that felt much heavier since I’d met Hades.
He shrugged. “Fuck, Freya, I don’t know. I guess because they remind me of the gang I used to run with, all the shit I got tangled up in. Fuck, they remind me of what I wanted from that. A brotherhood, yet all I got was a fuck-load of blood and death.” He paused, looking into his coffee like he’d find the answers there. “I still don’t know whether they’re really that much different. There’s gonna be blood and death in your future, being involved with them, Freya, and I fucking hate that.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, thinking of everything that Hades had told me the night I found out my father died. “But I’m going to have a family. One that loves fiercely. Who fight for each other. We both know I never would’ve been able to have a normal, white picket fence life.”
Kallum chuckled. “No, you’d be bored shitless.”
I examined Kallum then. The lines at the corners of his eyes seemed to have deepened since the last time I saw him, only making him more handsome.
“What about you?” I asked. “Where’s your happiness?”
He contemplated that for a long time, but he never answered me.
Because my happiness walked in from outside, nodding to Kallum once before wrapping his arms around me.
Kallum downed his coffee, gave me a peck on the cheek in goodbye, grabbed a handful of cookies then all but ran out the door.
“He doesn’t like me,” Hades commented, nuzzling my neck.