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Tonight, both my kids were happy.

Months ago, that was all I would have thought I needed in order to make me as happy as I could possibly be. Now I felt like maybe something was missing, and that pissed me off.

I blamed Isobel.

And I sure as shit blamed Romero.

As my daughter would say, fuck my life.

I watched her dance with her men and laugh for hours.

I did it wishing her mother was here to see it, which was the stupidest thing I could have done, but once my thoughts went down that path, I couldn’t drag them back out.

I stayed out here until everyone drifted away and Ariel was dragged into that stupid tent for reasons I absolutely did not want to know.

Baxter had planned a sleepover with Trenton and Simon, which was really their nice way of babysitting him without him thinking he was being babysat. The kid was insanely independent, and he didn’t think he needed looking after because he was so used to being the one to have to take care of someone. Luckily for me, he idolized Trenton and Simon, so he was none the wiser.

I had no idea where Isobel had gotten off to, but I decided it was no longer my responsibility to look after her. She was a big girl, she could find her own way home if that was where she wanted to be.

My daughter was good, and my boy was safe.

For now, that was all that mattered.

29

Ihad a happy buzz going that I was certain didn’t have everything to do with all the bubbly I’d drunk. I was fairly certain I had danced most of that off a while ago. But I was still overwhelmingly happy.

But now it was slightly different because there was a little nervous flutter in my belly, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I also didn’t understand why exactly I was nervous, but I was.

Perhaps it was because this was my first night as a married woman. Good grief, that sort of made me sound like an old lady. Like maybe now was the time to hand in my cool card and learn how to knit or something.

Gah, that was not the future I had envisioned for me. There’d be no little wifey waiting at home with an apron on with dinner in the oven. Unless we were talking about Dash, because he actually was the perfect wife.

They led me to the tent and that nervous flutter turned to dread. I’d forgotten to tell them Finn had contaminated the space with his presence and unapologetic bullshit.

Fucking Finn. I thought with how I felt about him, he’d always find a way of getting under my skin. Just thinking about him was obnoxious to me.

“What in the—” My breath caught in my throat as I stepped into the tent and tears filled my eyes.

The sight before me had robbed me of speech.

Either they just knew, or they’d changed things up to something nice for me. Whatever the case, I didn’t care because the end result wasthis.

And this, like everything else they pulled off for me today, was incredible and took my breath away.

These men surrounding me, they really loved me. That was what all this effort they put into today told me.

All of the candles had been cleared out of here and lights had been strung up, covering the entire ceiling. The bed had also been removed, for which I was grateful because I certainly didn’t want to lie where strangers had.

That was something that always weirded me out about hotels. How did you really know they changed the bedding every time after somebody had slept on it? You didn’t, and that was skeevy.

The floor was covered in blankets and pillows that looked soft and inviting. I wanted to crawl into the center of them and surround myself with all the hard, hot bodies of my men.

It almost looked like a fancy fort in here. I had never been in a fort of any kind before, but I had read about them in books.

I cleared the emotion from my throat. “Where did the bed go?”

“Next door, but you don’t need to concern yourself with that.”