Gage didn’t see her again.
Not alive, at least.
And he didn’t utter a word of the conversation to Lauren. The only secret in the world he’d ever keep from her.
Lauren
Three Months Later
I stared at the slab of rock accusing me with its ugly truth.
A tear rolled down my cheek.
It was quickly brushed away by the man holding me in his arms.
One scarred arm was resting on the swell of my belly, as it was almost constantly, the other trying to wipe away my pain.
“She couldn’t have held on long enough to meet her great-grandchild?” I choked. “We’re supposed to hold on for that. Death is supposed to wait for that.”
Gage kissed my temple. “She held on longer than she was supposed to, with all that pain she was carrying around, Will,” he murmured. “And death doesn’t wait for anyone.”
His words weren’t light, full of lies to try to cover up the ugliness of my grief. No, they were harsh but gentle.
Painful.
Exactly what I needed.
I gazed down at the stone.
Anna Garden.
She loved life.
It loved her back.
She was also a stone-cold fox.
And she was Mick’s.
She’d added the fox part, obviously. It was written in her will. The one that left me half of everything. My father got the other half.
I’d added the part about Mick.
Gage let me stand there in silence for a long time.
I would’ve stood there for a lot longer.
Except the human inside me had other ideas.
We made it to the hospital, though I wouldn’t have been surprised if I gave birth in a cemetery—it was Gage’s baby, after all. But he didn’t let that happen.
Because since the second I’d found out I was pregnant with our son, there was not a single risk taken with that.
So Gage made sure David Mick Mathers was born in a hospital.
And he made sure he was the one to cut the cord with the same knife that had caused him so much pain. The knife that had torn at his skin. That had saved him.
He cradled our son in those scarred arms, tears streaming down his face. His eyes locked with mine and I saw the pain in his. The memories of another child clawing at him, teasing him with how easily the world could be taken away.
But he didn’t surrender.
He battled.
And he did that by laying his lips at the top of our son’s head.