Page 66 of Rulebreaker

“Out!” Aspen points in the direction from which he came. “This is girl talk. Love you, but you need to go.”

“I was just checking on–” he begins.

“Banks. Not now.” Aspen gives him an exasperated look and he grimaces.

“Yes, dear.”

He slips back outside and the five of us roar with laughter.

TWENTY-THREE

Atlas

Lily with Maisyin her arms…

It takes a single heartbeat of seeing her smiling down at the baby, gently rocking the tiny human…and Iwant.

Want that.

Want it to not be Maisy cradled so carefully against Lily’s chest, butourbaby.

Despite our previous conversation about kids not being in either of our immediate futures, I want…

To say fuck all to protection, fuck all to logic and sanity…

And I want tofuckLily until she’s carrying our child.

So we would have that beauty, the flawed pieces of us coming together to create something so perfect and innocent that I would stand in front of a bullet for that innocence, lay the world at her feet.

Or his.

I still, the image of a son with Lily’s beautiful blue eyes, adaughter with her smile and my eyes so arresting that I’m not paying attention to where I’m going.

And I run into the doorframe.

“Fuck,” I grind out, pain ricocheting down my arm, through my shoulder.

Unfortunately, I do it loud enough to draw the attention of the five women in the room.

Lily’s eyes come to mine, twinkling with mirth—and seriously, why am I always running into doors around this woman?

But before she–or the rest of them–can give me a hard time, Maisy decides she’s had enough of sleeping.

Banks sweeps by me and scoops up his crying daughter from Lily’s arms, bringing Maisy against his shoulder and rocking her, crooning in an instinctive way that I wouldn’t have thought my friend capable of a year ago.

He’d been isolated, shut down.

We all were–the baggage of losing Colt, of trying to rebuild our lives without him.

And now…

We’re more. We’re, if not whole, we’re getting there. And we…

My eyes connect with Lily’s.

We’re more than I ever thought possible.

“Oh, fuck!”she cries, throwing her head back, nearly braining herself on the shower wall.