I was still pissed.
Sam, of all people, should get it.
Why didn’t he get it?
I jabbed through the website I’d been cruising and considered buying a baby crib that cost eight thousand dollars, just to teach him.
The problem with that was, Sam was loaded. He was a high school football coach, but he’d been an NFL superstar and then did other stuff that I was glad he no longer did, but it had paid well, so he was rich as sin. He wouldn’t blink at an eight-thousand-dollar crib. He didn’t blink at anything I bought. If I wanted it and didn’t get it, but he heard I wanted it, he got it for me.
I wasn’t exactly broke either, seeing as I was married to him, and Sam was definitely a “what’s mine is yours” type of guy, even if he wasn’t exactly a “what’s yours is mine” type of guy. And this was not because he didn’t need what was mine, but the buckets of cash I had were from a life insurance policy my dead first husband took out on himself incidentally while he was also insuring me due to his plan to have me murdered.
Yes.
Things had been a little crazy,
Fortunately, life had evened out.
Not to mention, Sam was insanely excited I was having his baby, in his badass, ex-professional football player, ex-special forces, ex-mercenary kind of way, of course. We got an Amazon package just yesterday that had three baby books of names.
Just names.
He had a legal pad in his office upstairs that had four whole pages of names written on them (three for boys, one for girls, the boy thing was perplexing him, it was cute, that was, it was cute yesterday, when I wasn’t ticked at him—we’d find out the sex soon so at least he could pare that down).
So if I bought an eight-thousand-dollar crib, he might click through the site and ask why I didn’t buy the twelve-thousand-dollar one.
He was baby crazy.
Which kind of shocked me he was fighting with me, because for the last few months he’d acted like I was the first woman to successfully conceive a child in the last millennium. It was a wonder he didn’t carry me everywhere and have the entire house padded so I didn’t bump into anything and get a bruise.
I guessed that meant he was pretty displeased Hap was going for it with Luci.
But really, we were all adults, including Hap and Luci, so I did not get why Sam thought he had a say.
I mean, I knew he was as close as a brother to Gordo, even if I’d never met Gordo. I also knew Gordo had died in Sam’s arms. It broke my heart and I hated that for my husband (really hated it), but Gordo’s death nearly broke Luci, and her healing enough to try to find love again was something to celebrate.
Dammit.
I was deciding the crib really was cute when Sam stalked into the kitchen wearing a sweater and faded jeans, the former looked nice on him, the latter made me want to jump his bones, even pissed (yep, the jeans were that good, or more to the point, Sam’s ass was that good).
“I’m buying an eight-thousand-dollar crib for Carly,” I announced as he swiped his keys off the counter.
“She’s not gonna be named Carly,” he growled.
“I like Carly.”
He stopped in order to blast me with his stare.
And again, I wanted to jump his bones.
What could I say? My hubby was hot, even pissed. I thought that before I’d met him, when he was my celebrity crush. I definitely thought that now, after I thoroughly enjoyed him knocking me up, and all the other times he’d done naughty things to me.
“She’s gonna have a name like Kia. A pretty one. An unusual one. One that not half the other girls in her class have,” he declared.
That was sweet.
I didn’t share that sentiment partly because I was gearing up to get on him again about Hap and Luci but mostly because the door to the deck slammed open and I was forced to jump in shock and twist in my seat.
Skip was there.
And he looked mad.
Uh-oh.
“Skip, whatever it is, I don’t wanna hear it,” Sam stated.
“Well, you’re gonna hear it,” Skip stated, slamming the door shut behind him and marching in.
“You wanna not slam our fuckin’ door?” Sam somewhat suggested (the “somewhat” part being that it was actually a demand).
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes since Sam did that same thing to our bedroom door not fifteen minutes ago.
It was then I saw Skip had a white envelope and he was digging in it.
He stopped by me and slapped a photograph on the counter by my laptop.
“Joey. Joe. Joseph Patrick McShane.”
I studied the picture.
Joey, Joe, Joseph Patrick McShane was a good-looking, dark-headed man in navy whites.
And beside him in that picture was another man in navy whites, that man being a much younger Skip.
Both of them were smiling.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Skip smiling.
At least not like that.
I held my breath.
Another picture was slapped beside it and in it Joey, Joe, Joseph Patrick McShane was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt and had his arm wrapped around a very beautiful dark-haired woman wearing a very pretty flowered sundress.
Oh no.
“She was Rebecca. Becky,” Skip said. “Rebecca Dolores Skerritt McShane.”
He knew all her names.
Oh God.
“He was my boy,” Skip told Sam, his eyes glued to my husband. All of a sudden he pounded his chest with his fist and I jumped again, then tensed. “My boy. My brother. My Gordo to your Sam.”
“Skip,” I whispered, not surprised but still not liking the past tense.
Sam said nothing.
“She was his,” Skip went on. “They started dating before he joined the Navy. She was sixteen. He was seventeen. She was that girl. That girl who was all girl but who was also one of the boys. That girl who laughed easy and loved hard and stayed true no matter what.”
As lovely as all that sounded, I didn’t like where this was going.
My eyes slid to Sam to see his face set in granite.
It was clear he didn’t like it either.
Skip’s voice lowered. “Loved her, Joey did. We all did, but she was his moon and stars and sky and breath. She loved him back the same. I don’t talk about it, so I never told you about it. Tried to bury it so deep, even lied by omission, not mentioning it when shit went down in the next generation. But here it is. Never seen a love like that, until I saw Gordo with Luci. Never seen a love like that, until I saw you,” he jabbed a weather-beaten finger at Sam, “and Kia.” He jabbed his finger at me.
Sam kept silent, but Skip did not.
“He didn’t die in the line of duty. Nope.” He shook his head. “He got cancer. You know, my sister had ALS. And after what happened with Joey, I never thought I’d think this, even after I lost my sis the way I lost my sis. Never thought I’d say this out loud, but true to Christ, I wish she’d gotten his cancer. I wish she was just her one day and feeling weird and went to the doc and was told she had two months to live and then that was it for her. She’d get weak and endure immense pain and waste away and then there was nothing. I wished that, Sam. After watching what that disease did to her, I wished that for her. I wished it was fast instead of being so goddamned slow.”
I slid off my seat to my feet and Skip’s head turned my way.
“Please don’t touch me, sweetheart. Please,” he whispered.
God, he was killing me.
“Okay, Skip,” I whispered back, but stayed on my feet at the ready.