Page 6 of Quadruple Daddy

Gabe

Bella’s stuff had arrived, and she would follow shortly. I knew she couldn’t be too far behind the movers. She’d denied my offer of a driver, saying that she was still fine to drive. I knew she was right, but I couldn’t help but worry about her.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” I muttered to myself as I stared at the empty nursery. The walls were bare and white, I had no idea what color to paint the room. We still weren’t sure of the babies’ gender yet. Like Bella had said though, there was a chance we’d have both. The odds were pretty good for that.

“How you’re going to do what?” Ava’s voice surprised me.

I turned to find my sister in the doorway to the nursery, leaning against the doorframe.

“Four babies… I had planned to have one, maybe two, total. But now I’m going to be a single dad to four babies.”

Ava walked into the room and stood beside me, staring at me while I continued looking at the blank wall.

“Well, Dad managed to raise the four of us after Mom died.”

“Dad? You’re really going to bring up Dad as an example of stellar fatherhood?” I side-eyed my sister.

She shrugged. “I mean, he did what he could.”

I scoffed at the very idea that he’d done the best he could.

“He could have done without getting involved with the Mob, that would have made our lives so much less complicated.”

“Yeah… I really can’t argue with you there, but you know you’re not going to do this alone, right? You have me.”

“Thanks, sis,” I said. It was hard to believe my little sister was all grown up sometimes. I was ten years older than her, so I remembered her being a baby. I remembered her first day of kindergarten. I practically helped raise her at times after our mom died, since Dad struggled with grief and threw himself into his work. Another reason I wasn’t too keen to think of our father as doing his best to raise all four of us; he hardly had anything to do with Ava’s upbringing. It was my brothers and me that raised her.

My heart sank at the thought of Dante and Roman.

How long had it been since we’d talked? I couldn’t even remember.

Ava, however, was always by my side. We’d always had each other. The two black sheep of a family of criminals because we both decided to live a straight and narrow life. Well, not always in my case, but I came around. Ava, however, was always good, and she had inspired me to be good too.

She seemed to sense my train of thought. “Have you even told Dad or our brothers about the babies?”

I shook my head.

“Do you plan to?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. My first instinct was to say no, I didn’t want anything to do with them, and since we’d gone this long without talking, I figured it would be easy. But part of me yearned to share the news with my family.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to answer. Ava’s phone alerted and she said, “Bella’s here!”

She took off out of the room, and I was right behind her, down the stairs and out the front door where Ava was already embracing Bella. I noticed a few boxes in Bella’s car, so I walked over and grabbed them from the backseat.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t carry those,” Bella said. “My roomie did all the work; I didn’t carry anything.”

“Good,” I said. I had offered to drive up to Chicago and personally help with the moving, but Bella declined. I almost went anyway, but Ava told me that I needed to respect her boundaries and trust Bella, which I did, 100% or else I wouldn’t have asked her to carry my children. But I wanted to help her too.

I lifted the two boxes and headed back toward the house. “Your things are already placed in your room,” I told her.

She was following behind me, she and Ava chatting away excitedly as we walked toward Bella’s room. Ava opened the door and I stepped inside, placing the boxes next to the ones the movers had brought earlier. She didn’t really have a lot of stuff; I could have handled it all on my own had she let me.

“Thanks, Gabe,” Bella said, beaming back at me.

Her strawberry blonde hair fell in ringlets over her shoulders, and it made me wonder if one of our kids might inherit the red hair gene. I knew it was unlikely, but I smiled at the thought of it. Unlikely, but not impossible, considering that neither of Bella’s parents were redheads.

Her eyes were blueish green and reminded me of the sea. Again, unlikely that the babies would inherit her light-colored eyes over my dark brown ones, but a guy could hope. I didn’t tell Bella that one of the reasons I was happy to have her as a surrogate was because she was gorgeous and I hoped my babies might have some of her features, but it was true.

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