“Are you almost ready?” I called. We were going to be late, and I’d never hear the end of it.
“I’m coming!” Laila called from the bedroom. After I’d returned home from rescuing Calix’s friend Eliska, Laila and I had bought a house—In the same fucking neighborhood as Voodoo, Angel, and Chains.
It had been almost a year since we moved in, and we were supposed to be going to a Halloween party at Chains and Jasmine’s.
She sauntered out of our room, and I had to adjust my dick. “Goddamn, woman. Are you trying to kill me? You can’t be parading around in front of the brothers in that!”
Laila looked like a wet dream in a sexy pirate outfit complete with thigh-high black boots and a jaunty hat. She’d let her hair go back to dark blonde, but she had red streaks in it now, and with her tattoos and piercing, she looked like a badass.
One I really wanted to strip out of that fucking costume.
Hips swinging, she closed in on me until we were a mere breath apart. Then she looked up at me with those big blue eyes. Despite the height of the heeled boots, she barely came to my nose.
“I just figured I better look sexy while I can.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I growled with a frown. She’d been really bummed since turning thirty, but I couldn’t give a shit. She was beautiful, and she was mine. She’d be the most gorgeous woman in the world to me when she was eighty.
“Well, I doubt if waddling will be overly sexy,” she said with a pout. Then she batted her thick lashes as she slid her fingers up my chest to wrap around the back of my neck.
“Huh?”
Slowly, she wet her lower lip, and I was so captivated by the glisten it left behind that I didn’t catch the words that she said.
“Are you even listening to me?” She chuckled as I shook my head honestly.
“Sorry, those lips distracted the hell out of me. How about we skip the party and you wrap them around my—” She pressed a finger over my mouth before I could make the suggestion that I thought was a much better idea than attending a Halloween party.
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered.
The world stopped spinning. Wind quit blowing; birds were silent. All I could do was blink at her like an idiot. Because I was pretty sure she said she was pregnant.
I pulled my upper body back to look at her flat stomach, not sure what I expected to see, but maybe a suddenly noticeable bump.
“I’m not that far along. I wasn’t sure if it was just my irregular periods, so I went to the doctor. I’m about twelve weeks already.”
My heart that had stilled with everything around me suddenly exploded and raced until I was nearly dizzy. “You’re sure?”
Laughter broke from her lips as she nodded. “Definitely.”
She lifted her hat and pulled a paper from it that she handed to me. Eager, I took it and stared. We’d been trying for almost eight months to have a baby because she was paranoid about not being able to have kids before she was too old.
When pregnancy test after test came up negative, we consulted Madame Laveaux on one of her trips. She told us it might not be time and to be patient.
Then she’d pulled me to the side later that night and told me she was worried that because I walked both sides of life and death that maybe I couldn’t father children.
“Well?” Her tone trembled slightly.
We’d talked about adopting. We discussed a donor, because I wanted her to experience every aspect of motherhood if she wanted to, but the thought of some other guy’s shit in my woman’s uterus was not cool.
Call me a dick, because I know a lot of people were okay with that and happy to have a child any way they could; I simply couldn’t.
“I’m gonna be a dad,” I said, staring at the image that blew my mind. It actually looked like a baby. Arms, legs, kinda big head, little potbelly. It was perfect.
“Yeah,” she sighed.
My gaze lifted, and I met her sky-blue one that waited expectantly. “And you’re gonna be a mom,” I said in awe. Her eyes filled with tears, then she nodded.
A grin split my face, and I scooped her up and swung her around. She held her hat and squealed with laughter until I abruptly stopped and gently set her down.