“What did the doctor say about your iron level, Dallas?” Natalie asked. “Is it something to worry about with the way you’ve been craving those crazy ass things lately?” Nat had told me Dallas feared it might be a condition known as pica making her crave not only salty foods, but some pretty bizarre things in the last few weeks. Like laundry detergent. Nasty. Of course she hadn’t actually ingested it, but she’d been complaining about wanting it. A lot.
“Dr. Rashid said that my hemoglobin level was perfect. He thinks that my cravings are just that—cravings. And the laundry detergent thing was just a part of me that wanted to start nesting.” Her eyes narrowed on Natalie. “I should have known that you were pregnant. No wonder you’ve been acting so weird. How is everything going?”
While the two chicks talked about their pregnancies, I leaned my head back and watched the girl on my lap closer. The worry that had left her forehead tight for the last few hours was gone now that she knew that the baby was okay, and she didn’t have to hide her pregnancy any longer.
Now she seemed to glow and I guessed it was what pregnant chicks were supposed to do. I liked it. The glow made her natural beauty shine brighter and I had to admit that it made me hard just to look at her like this. Unable to stop myself, I pulled her head down to kiss her, stopping her midsentence.
Her arms wrapped around my neck without so much as a protest for interrupting her conversation. “I love you,” she said with a small sigh before taking control and deepening the kiss, but only for a moment. Then she was pulling away and resting her head on my chest before continuing the conversation she was having with Dallas.
Twenty minutes later, Lana came out with Drake carrying a sleeping Neveah in his arms. If I’d been expecting my future brother-in-law to shoot me a death glare for knocking up his sister, I was completely wrong. He saw me holding Natalie and stopped, taking the two of us in for a long moment before finally grinning and shaking his head.
“Arella has my nose,” Lana informed everyone as she waved the pictures in her hand at us. She’d had a 3D ultrasound done and when I finally got to look at the glossy pictures, I had to agree that baby Arella was going to look as much like her mother as Neveah did.
Seeing the ultrasound and then looking at Neveah made me wonder what our baby would look like. Would she look just like Natalie? Or was it a boy and would look like Harris and me? Whose eyes would the baby have? They were going to be blue, there was no getting around that, but would they be mixed with gray like Natalie’s or green like mine?
Excitement bubbled inside of me and I couldn’t wait to see our baby in December. Couldn’t wait to meet him or her and complete our own little family.
Natalie
The star wasn’t straight.
I stood in front of our Christmas tree, turning my head left and right to see what way I needed to adjust it so that it would sit perfectly on top of our first family Christmas tree.
“I like it like that,” Harris grumbled from his seat on the floor in front of the sectional. He was supposed to be helping me put this tree up so that it would be ready by the time his dad got back. For the most part he’d been a great help, but he was getting bored with it now and was more interested in his phone.
Or more to the point he was interested in if Lucy had texted him back. Normally she was blowing up his phone a hundred times a day, but in the last few weeks she had been avoiding him. I had my suspicions why, but I wasn’t about to tell them to my poor unsuspecting stepson.
Now that Lucy was getting older and had officially hit puberty, I’d been noticing that the way she looked at Harris was a hell of a lot different than the way she used to look at him. She was nearly twelve and I could remember the confusion I’d felt at that age about how boys made me feel.
It was killing Harris though. He was so used to having her to talk to at any time of the day that her avoidance was driving him up the wall.
Finally I stepped back onto the small stepladder and twisted the star to the left. It was nice to be off bed rest and I could do more things around the house. The last two months of my pregnancy had in no way been fun since my blood pressure had been off-the-scales high. It had been so bad that at thirty-seven weeks my doctor had induced me because he’d thought it was the safest course of action for both the baby and me. But in the weeks leading up to the baby’s birth, I’d been useless around the house.
When I finished, the star was even more crooked than it had been just a moment ago. Muttering a curse, I decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to pick up the whole fucking thing and toss it out our living room window into the Pacific Ocean that acted as our back yard.
“Good thing we don’t have to worry about your blood pressure going up anymore,” Harris muttered without taking his eyes off his phone.
I stepped off the ladder and shot him a death glare. “You’d better be glad I’m not one of those stepmothers that makes her stepchildren’s lives hell. I would send you off to some military boarding school and forget all about you.”
“You would miss me at three thirty every morning,” he assured me with a smirk, not in the least scared that I might suddenly become that kind of stepmother to him.
Of course he was right about the whole three thirty thing, too. Ever since the baby and I had come home from the hospital, Harris had been helping out even more than I would have ever expected him to. When his little sister woke up crying for a bottle, he was there, ready to give her a bottle of the breast milk that I pumped every day so that he and his dad could get to experience feeding her.
The first time I’d gotten to sleep through the night just two weeks ago, I’d woken up scared that something had happened to my newborn daughter since she hadn’t made a sound during the night. When I’d gone into the nursery to find her asleep on Harris’s chest and an empty bottle sitting on the little table beside the rocker, I’d had my first postpartum meltdown.
I’d gone back to bed, sobbing so hard that my entire body had hurt. I’d woken Devlin up from my crying and he’d been at a loss at how to deal with me. I hadn’t been sad or hurting, just so overwhelmingly happy at seeing my stepson taking such gentle care of his tiny baby sister. After I’d calmed down enough that I was able to explain that to Dev, he’d rocked me to sleep in his arms. How could anyone be as happy as I was now and not implode from it?
It was hard for me to remember that at this time the year before, I’d been miserable and hating Devlin Cutter. Now I was so happy I couldn’t even remember how much pain I’d been in after finding out about that stupid bet.