Page 151 of The Protective Gryphen

“Baby, I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes with his fingers to soothe him.

“No, I just didn’t think…”

“What? That I’d be a good father?” he asked, feeling his own emotions rising.

“No, you’d be amazing. I see you with Dolly, and I know. You’re so protective and caring. I just figured you didn’t want to take that route with me. I didn’t think you wanted to have kids with me, Gryph.”

Gryphen was confused.

“Why not?”

He shrugged.

“I just assumed this was it. We’d have sex, get married, and that was all. I didn’t expect you to want to have kids with me.”

“Well, I do. You’ll be a good father, Ian. You’re smart, and going to have to do the math homework. I’m not a math kind of a guy. Look at how sweet you are. You’re gentle, and patient. You’re always willing to do whatever it takes to heal someone’s heart. You’d be a damn good father.”

“Really?” Ian asked, his heart so full. “You want kids with me?”

He kept asking that because he really was shocked.

Gryphen nodded.

“I say we do one, and see how bad we are at it. Then, we decide if we want more. I once heard Elizabeth say that once you got to three, it didn’t matter how many more you had. It was chaos all the way around all the time. I like chaos.”

Yeah, he’d come a long way to be able to say that.

“I could do that, but if we do a surrogate, we should probably use my sperm and not yours,” Ian said.

That caught Gryphen off guard.

So much so that he paused.

“Oh. Okay.”

Ian heard the tone.

“Why are you upset?” Ian asked. “Your face changed. What did I say?”

The hurt overwhelmed Gryphen.

“No, I get it. I’m a bad bet genetically. My parents bailed, and you think I might too.”

What?

The?

Hell?

That was the line he drew.

Ian shoved him backward, and he landed on his ass like he had earlier in the snow when Gryphen shoved him.

“Absolutely not! You’re not going to talk about yourself like that, Gryphen! I’m going to kick your ass if you say shit like that ever again.”

Gryphen stared at him.

Did he just shove him?

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