“I mean, it’s only fair. We haven’t ever had the chance to think about us without Arthur in the equation. So I’m thinking about it now.”
He didn’t get any kind of sense that she wasn’t happy with them being an “us”, so he took a moment to consider how best to reassure her.
“Marrying you and becoming a family man was the best decision I’ve ever made. I was kind of thinking I’d like to do it all over again.”
She blinked in surprise. “You want to get married again?”
He stopped toying with the ends of her hair to trace a finger across the bare patch of skin exposed by her tank top. “No, I’m fine with what we did as long as you are. Though if you wanted to change your name, that’d be cool.”
“I would love to be officially Mrs. Holt Steele.” Her sexy smile gave him the confidence to push on with the rest of it.
“And I want to adopt Maddie. Officially. I don’t want her to ever have reason to think she’s not wanted. And on the unlikely chance Arthur ever comes back, I want to have the rights to do something about it.”
Her dark eyes gleamed with happy tears. “Yes, absolutely. She’s already yours.”
“And…”
“There’s more?” she teased.
He traced that finger lower on her shoulder. “Then I was thinking more along the lines of doing the whole family thing again.”
For one beat, two, she just stared at him. Then her eyes went dark with realization. “You want to have a baby?”
“Yeah. I want one with you. I want to have all the fun of the trying, and I want to get to be there from the beginning. For the whole thing. What do you say? Do you want to give Maddie a little brother or sister?”
The silence stretched out for so long he wondered if he’d pushed for too much too soon.
“I mean, not like we need to tackle that right away. I know we’ve had a lot of changes, and we’re still getting used to a lot of stuff. But I just thought you should know that’s where my brain is headed. If that’s something you want.”
She leaned in close, dropping her voice low. “Then we both better get much, much better at being really, really quiet.”
Holt grinned. “Challenge accepted.” And he kissed his wife in the summer twilight with their daughter’s laughter in the air.