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Marriage: a fancy way of saying ‘I’ll put up with you forever.’

— Written note from Posy to Searcy

SEARCY

The house we finally settled on building was fan-freakin’-tastic.

It was also going to take us a year to build it.

In the meantime, we were living in a triple-wide.

That’s right.

A triple-wide.

I hadn’t even known that they made triple-wide mobile homes, but there I was, living in one.

We’d put the triple-wide at the front of the hundred and six acres we’d bought—and we did buy it. With the sale of the cattle ranch, Scottie and Posy had brought in a million two and split it evenly.

With his half of the money, Posy bought the land, and I’d bought the mobile home.

We owned the property together, free and clear, officially, as of yesterday.

Today?

We were getting married in our pole barn.

I was dressed, and ready to be walked down the aisle by Kent, who was standing next to the front door waiting on me.

Calliope, dressed to the nines beside me, was fiddling with my hair.

Scottie was fixing my train, and Anders was standing in front of me with her iPad pulled up and Koda on the screen witnessing it all from halfway across the world.

“Are you ready?” Kent asked impatiently. “They’ve been out there waiting for forever.”

I grinned.

Kent had taken a liking to the Truth Tellers MC, and Posy in particular.

He loved Koda and all, but the Truth Tellers had become something he aspired to be one day.

He wasn’t too impressed with Koda’s inability to get home for something so important as his sister’s wedding, so he’d switched his life focus to other things.

Other, more dangerous things.

“I’m ready,” I stated firmly. “Okay, enough, enough. You two head out there.”

Calliope and Scottie hooked elbows and walked out, giggling.

Scottie had invited Calliope to come down to College Station to go to school with her, and Calliope had accepted—though only after she’d gotten her acceptance letter.

Turns out she was doing a hell of a lot better than I expected her to do, and she’d graduated with a 3.8 GPA.

With my lottery winnings being enough to put her through all four years without a scholarship if needed, she’d been granted acceptance and she started there in two weeks.

Koda still had six more years of deployment, but had admitted he had no immediate plans of getting out like he had when he’d first left.

With Mom out of the picture, off living her life somewhere far away from us, and enough money in the bank to cover us for life, he’d become far less guilty about being gone.

“Good god,” Kent sighed. “You’re so lost in your head today. What is your issue?”

I pinched his cheeks before saying, “Just thinking about how different life is.”

I wasn’t lying.

“Tony just got here.” Kent pulled away.

Speaking of Tony, his son, Taryn, had taken a job in Alaska.

He’d left four months ago, with no plans to ever come back.

Tony had been happier, and so had I.

“Oh, and that lady with the baby is here. She’s sitting next to one of the Truth Tellers,” he said.

I’d seen Baker with Copper a lot lately.

But I hadn’t asked questions.

I was just happy she was around.

Fiona had also been hanging around a lot lately, too.

I’d become good friends with both women and was happy that they’d followed me from Decatur to Rockwall.

“Your husband-to-be has gotten impatient,” Kent reported.

“How do you know?” I questioned.

That’s when I heard the stomp of feet.

I looked up in time to see the screen door swing open, and Posy fill the doorway.

“What are you doing?” I asked, a smile on my lips.

“Gettin’ real tired of waitin’, princess,” he said. “Now, come on.”

Before I could say “okay,” he was throwing me over his shoulder.

I laughed my way down the aisle.

Hours later, I finally got to find out why Cakes got his name.

And everyone was right.

Cakes’s namesake fit him perfectly.

But it was only the second-best part of the night.

The first was when Posy leaned me over his arm in the middle of a filled barn and kissed the breath out of me.

4 months later

“No, no, no. This is all wrong,” I said as I took in the yellow paint. “This was supposed to be a more pastel yellow. This looks like the sunshine fell into a paint bucket and blew up all over our room.”

“This is seriously the same color you chose at Home Depot,” Posy pointed out.

I scrunched my nose up at him. “It can’t be.”

He pulled out the color swatch from his pocket and held it up to show me.

“Well.” I hesitated. “I think I want a different color.”

He grinned. “It’ll cost.”

“Fuck it, I’m rich,” I teased.

He snorted. “You won’t stay rich if you continue to blow it.”

If by ‘blowing it’ he meant ‘spending it on building a house, putting Calliope through college, paying for Kent to do travel baseball, and Anders to be put into a fancy-ass nerd school,’ then I was definitely blowing it.

“Gotta spend it on something,” I bantered.

We still drove the same cars—both him and me.

It looked hilarious driving out of our big ass gate, down our fancy-ass concrete driveway, and up to a triple-wide mobile home that looked fancy enough to house the king.

We weren’t spending our money all willy-nilly.

We both still worked—me on my own still, designing book covers. Him at the fire station in town.

Every morning that he worked he dropped Kent and Anders off at different schools ten minutes apart.

I still picked them up, laughing my way through the pickup line when both schools gave my car a disgusted wave.

We still ate at fast-food restaurants and cooked meals at home.

Honestly, those family meals were my favorite times of the day.

I was sad that I didn’t get Scottie and Calliope at home as much as I wanted.

Soon, Kent would be following in their wake.

He only had a year and a half left of school, and there were already multiple colleges looking into him.

It didn’t hurt that Kent had Gunner Penn guiding his way.

Kent had fan-girled over Gunner once he finally made the connection.

And now Gunner was at our place nearly every night that Kent was home playing with him.

Both of them had the time of their lives.

Hell, even Anders had requested to go do a study abroad.

Something I hadn’t even realized was a thing until her new school had brought it up to us as a possibility for alternate study.

I was still on the fence about that one, but Anders and Posy were slowly whittling me down.

I had a feeling that I’d give her what she wanted.

Though, I’d already told Posy that he better be ready to go visit Germany whenever I felt like it.

There was no way in hell that I wasn’t finding out where she’d be going first and making sure that it was safe.

“Baby,” Posy said as he picked me up and pulled me to him. “You’re being extra. What’s the big deal here?”

I grimaced. “It’s supposed to be paler.”

“Why?”

I grinned then. “Because it has to be neutral. And it can’t blind our baby when I finally get around to getting pregnant.”

“You already said that we wouldn’t be having any babies any time soon. By that point, we can just repaint.”

I shrugged. “I don’t want to repaint it.”

He picked me up, then walked me out the door.

When my back hit the bed in our bedroom, I stopped arguing.

When he was finished, I decided to stay with the over-the-top yellow.

He was right.

When the time came, and it was time to extend our family, I could repaint.

I could do anything as long as Posy was at my side, guiding my way.

“Love you, Posy,” I said into his chest hair.

He sifted his hands up into the back of my hair, hit a snag, and pulled it free, causing my scalp to smart. “Ow.”

“I love you, too, you crazy little psycho princess.”

I pinched his nipple, causing him to laugh and pull away.

I lay face down in the bed long enough that my eyes started to get sleepy.

I was jolted right awake when he said, “Come on. Time for a different kind of riding lesson.”

An hour later, we were at the top of the hill overlooking where our future home sat.

The barn was a few hundred feet from the back door, and the stall that held ol’ Sweet Baby Ray was just beyond that.

Ray bawled, and I rode right up to him, handing him a little molasses to make sure he kept loving me and only me.

“I can’t believe you talked me into saving that damn bull.”

I batted my eyes at him over my shoulder. “You know you’d do absolutely anything for me.”

His eyes took in my ass before they returned to my face as he spoke with fervor, “I’d kill, fight, steal and lie for a single night with you. A lifetime? I’d give up my entire soul.”