Page 58 of Secret Daddies

She scrambled onto my shoulders, hooking her legs over my arms and balancing for dear life as she reached the paintbrush up to do the detail work. I held on to her knees, making sure she didn’t go toppling over all of a sudden. I had to admit, she had a steadier hand than I did for all of this. Everything I painted tended to end up looking a little wobbly, but she worked slowlyand carefully, her eyes narrowed, her tongue sticking out of her mouth slightly as she kept her focus.

“There! You can let me down now!”

“Phew, thank goodness,” I joked. “I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold you.”

“You did a great job, Martha!” Maya remarked as she inspected her work. “That part is hard to reach. Thank you!”

She held up her hand, and Maya slapped it with a high five. I grinned. I loved seeing the two of them interacting, my girls. Maya had taken Martha under her wing right away, as if she’d been her own daughter all along. In some ways, I wished she had been, but hey, you couldn’t change the past. All I could do was look to the future, and trust that it was going to be better than anything that had come before.

We continued painting the room, all of us pitching in to get it finished—and, in an hour or so, the whole place was a beautiful, bright yellow, the streetlights outside casting a warm glow over the room. It already felt so peaceful, a perfect place for a baby to rest, and I knew it would be even nicer once we’d had a chance to do it up properly with decorations and furniture.

“Well, team, I think we did a pretty good job,” Lee remarked as he stepped back and admired our handiwork.

“Agreed,” Devon replied. “I think we deserve a reward for that. Pizza, anyone?”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before Martha and Matty were both shrieking their agreement. The two of them dragged Lee out of the room so he could help them pick a moviewe could watch over dinner, and Devon headed to make the order, leaving Maya and me alone in the room together.

I stepped toward her, wrapping my arms around her waist and letting my hands rest on her belly. I loved feeling her little bump there, our baby girl growing just under my fingertips.

“You like how it came out?” I asked her, brushing my mouth over her ear gently.

She nodded. “I love it,” she replied. I noticed, all of a sudden, that her eyes were a little teary. I pulled back at once, frowning and concerned.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, more than fine,” she replied, turning to me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. “I just…I can’t help but think about what it was like at this stage when I was pregnant with Matty. It all felt so…so different then. I really didn’t know how I was going to be able to get through any of it, I felt so alone in the world, I couldn’t even imagine being a mom, let alone a single one. And…”

She gestured around.

“This time, it feels so right,” she finished up. “I’m here with you guys. And Martha and Matty. And I know we’re going to have the most perfect family ready for this baby when they come along?—”

“This girl,” I corrected her playfully.

She laughed. “You’re really stuck on the idea that it’s a girl, huh?”

“Look, I know when I’m right about something, and I’m right about this,” I replied, squeezing her close. “Trust me. It’s a girl.”

“Bet me your pizza crusts from our next movie night?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. I whistled through my teeth.

“Damn, that’s a hell of a wager. But I guess I can put them on the line.”

“You really are confident, then.”

“You bet I am.”

I planted my lips against hers, just softly—it wasn’t often we got time alone together, and I always wanted to make the most of it. In some ways, it still felt like we were in the honeymoon period, though I wouldn’t change a damn thing about it.

“I love you,” I whispered to her. The words didn’t seem big enough to capture the full extent of my feelings for her and everything she had brought to my life, but they were something. A start.

“I love you too,” she replied. And just as she went to kiss me again, we heard voices from the living room—Matty and Martha disagreeing over something. I groaned and pulled back from her, heading for the door.

“Guess we should go deal with that drama,” I remarked, rolling my eyes skyward. She laughed and followed me, slipping her hand into mine.

“Guess we should.”

And with that, the two of us headed out to join the rest of the family in the living room.

EPILOGUE

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