My brother’s laugh was infectious as the rest of the family in my hospital room laughed right along with him.
The only one not laughing was my husband. My husband who was now a father.
My husband who’d been holding our twin daughters in his two hands since they were born when they weren’t needing fed.
My husband who was a baby hog.
My husband who hadn’t relinquished them to anyone, not even my father who’d all but begged.
“In a minute,” I heard him rumble again.
Bruno was going to be a good father.
I knew that.
“How’s it coming out?” I heard Priscilla yell through the door.
I growled.
I was scared as hell to go to the bathroom.
Mostly because I’d ripped from my vagina to my ass, and I was goddamn terrified to do either number one, or number two.
However, the laws of nature didn’t care that I had a grade-four tear.
They only cared about making my bowels work overtime.
Luckily, things turned out better than expected, and when I emerged twenty minutes later, freshly showered among other things, it was to find my dad finally getting to hold my girls.
I smiled as I walked over to Bruno, who carefully pulled me into his lap.
He was a witness to the tearing, and he’d treated me like glass ever since I’d given him his children.
I didn’t blame him. If I’d seen what he had, I would freak out, too.
“You okay?” he whispered in my ear.
I pressed my forehead against his temple. “Hurt. But it went… okay.”
He pressed a kiss to the side of my neck and then wrapped his hands around me tighter. “I want them back.”
I smiled and turned so that I could see into his eyes. Those gloriously beautiful eyes.
“I’m sorry that I ever rejected your farmers-only invitation,” I teased.
He rolled his eyes. “It all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”
It had.
It most assuredly had.
• • •
BRUNO
Nine years later
“Foul!”