By the gods, I’d meet her?
I’d meet a woman who was pressing her not-exactly-but-still stepsons to give her grandchildren, Noc being one of those stepsons?
Dear goddess!
“My mom was named Amara.”
My panicked thoughts vanished at his tone and my gaze immediately turned to him.
“Only thing I got of her is pictures but she was beautiful, Frannie. Most beautiful woman I ever saw, until I met you.”
I felt it again, as I’d felt it several times with some of the things he’d said when he’d stopped his vehicle and gave his words to me before dinner.
My eyes starting to sting.
“If I have a baby girl, first one I have, I’m naming her Amara,” he declared.
It was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard.
I swallowed in an effort not to expose the emotion I was feeling before I shared, “I think that’s lovely, Noc, and your mother’s name is even more so.”
His thumb stopped absently stroking and his hand tightened around mine, pulling them further up his thigh where he’d been resting them.
He did this as he murmured, “Good you’re on board with that.”
“On board?” I asked.
“You agree,” he explained.
I turned to face forward again, feeling the alarming sensation of my heart swelling.
A beautiful baby girl with Noc’s unusual blue eyes named Amara.
My word, did anything sound sweeter?
“You want kids?” he asked quietly.
“That was not my future,” I answered in the same vein.
“How’s that?”
“Anyone I loved was in danger.”
His thumb started stroking my wrist again as he reminded me, “That’s not the case anymore, Frannie.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“Then I’ll repeat, you want kids?”
I wanted a little girl with beautiful blue eyes and black hair named Amara.
And this desire, the like I’d never allowed myself to have, bubbled up my throat. A throat having been ravaged by emotion that night, that feeling grew, built and blocked it so it wasn’t my choice not to speak.
It was an impossibility.
“Frannie?” he called.
It took effort to clear the blockage.
I did it, but even so, my voice was not as I’d ever heard it when I replied, “It’s just occurred to me how much my life has changed since that night in the buttery.” I felt my fingers curl deep into his, not at my direction, but automatically as I continued speaking. “How free I actually am. How my life and my future are truly, for the first time, my own.”
“I’m hopin’ that’s a good thing, baby, and it doesn’t freak you, because it is a good thing and you should rejoice in it,” he advised.
I looked to his handsome profile and announced suddenly and with not a small amount of fervor, “I want children, Noc. Girls. Boys. As many of them as I can have, stopping only when I feel like I cannot give them the love and attention they deserve if I had another.”
He again stopped stroking my wrist so his hand could clasp mine, but this time it did it fiercely, causing a twinge of pain.
“Good to hear,” he murmured.
That was his wish as well.
My.
It would seem I had to pull myself together or I’d be crawling all over him in this vehicle, and if I did such it would mean certain death.
Therefore, I demanded, “We must cease talking about this or I fear the results would be calamitous.”
“And why’s that?”
“I wish to kiss you,” I shared, but didn’t stop at that. “And do other things to you, and you may have demonstrated you can concentrate on more than operating this contraption, however, I would hope my crawling into your lap to deliver a kiss would not be such a thing.”
“You’re right,” he replied with humor. “You crawled into my lap and kissed me while I was driving, sugarlips, it’s likely the results would be calamitous.”
“Then let us get to your home and swiftly, Noc,” I ordered. “For I have need of a digestif, your lovemaking and a soft pillow. I’m afraid after the events of the last two days, I’m quite fatigued.”
“Your wish is my command, gorgeous,” he muttered.
I looked forward, murmuring myself. “What a lovely thing to say.”
More muttering from Noc. “Fuck, you’re cute.”
I made no reply. I no longer had qualms that he thought that of me. Indeed, it pleased me.
We spoke of nothing earth-shattering, and fortunately our journey wasn’t much longer before Noc executed an alarming maneuver of stopping in the street then going backwards at a disquieting angle in order to park very close to the edge of the pavement.
I did hope he was correct and I’d grow accustomed to his, as he called it, “SUV.”
Though I suspected I would (I was still Franka Drakkar), I also suspected it would take some time.
“We’re here, babe,” he said as I felt the vehicle’s engine cease running, and then I heard him open his door.
But I looked beyond the pavement to “here.”
I heard Noc’s door slam as I whispered, “Oh my.”
It was a home unlike any I’d seen before. There was dim light coming from the inside that I could see vaguely through the front windows of the house and the window over the door. The night hid the color his home was painted, but I could see that the woodwork was white. And there was a lovely, black, wrought iron fence before it spiking up proudly from the edge of the small lawn.
There was also a vast amount of intricate millwork along the portico and railing.