Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(81)
The doctor chuckled. “Never met a baby yet who wasn’t pissed off about being shoved out into the world. Welcome to the world, little girl.”
A girl.
Her girl.
Their girl.
Happiness flooded her as she looked up at the wiggling baby the doctor held. She looked over at Cole, who looked dumbstruck, with his jaw hanging open.
“You want to cut your little girl’s cord?” the doctor asked Cole.
He gulped and nodded, walked over near the baby, reached for the scissors, and fainted, falling back and collapsing into a nearby chair.
Tess shot straight up into a sitting position, the beeps on the heart monitor going nuts. “Cole!”
“Don’t worry,” one of the nurses said, hustling over to him. “He’s not the first. Daddies tend to get a little overwhelmed. There’s a reason why that chair is positioned exactly where it is.”
Cole blinked his eyes open and was back almost as quickly as he went out. “What happened?”
“Parenthood,” the doctor said as he snipped the umbilical cord. “And this is just the beginning.”
He handed the baby to the nurse, who cleaned her up and took measurements before wrapping her up and bringing her back to the bed and placing her on Tess’s chest. Everything in her entire body seemed to still. She counted ten fingers and ten toes. The baby’s bald round head was covered with a little blue, pink, and white cap and she stared up at Tess like she was the entire world. The happiest tears she’d ever cried wet her cheeks as she looked over at Cole. He was gazing at her and the baby with the exact same expression, as if nothing outside of their little bubble existed, as if the universe had granted every one of his wishes and this was the result.
“Feeling okay, Dad?” the nurse asked. “Can I get you anything?”
Cole shook his head. “Everything I could ever want is already in this room.” He glanced down at their girl, a perma-grin on his face. “So what are we going to name her?”
They’d been talking names for the past month, but picking one without meeting their baby didn’t sit right with her, so they’d waited. Now, looking down at the baby’s long-limbed body and sweet, gentle face, the perfect name popped into Tess’s head.
“What do you think about Willow?” She smiled down at the baby, unable to imagine how she’d gotten so lucky, become so wanted. “It’s a tree known for its flexibility and resilience.”
Cole nodded, running his palm over Willow’s cap, his face soft with awe. “Sounds like the perfect mix of the new me and the always amazing you.” He turned his focus to Tess, his eyes a little watery with emotion. “I love you.”
Her head didn’t fill with random factoids, and only the truth came out. “I love you, too.”
And with their little girl’s finger wrapped around hers, Tess leaned over and brushed her lips across Cole’s in a soft kiss, absolutely certain for the first time in her life that she’d truly found her forever family and her always home.
Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next book in the Ice Knights series, Loud Mouth!
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Loud Mouth
Chapter One
Shelby Blanton was never going to sleep again.
She should have known better than to watch a double feature about possessed houses while staying alone in a rented cabin out in the middle of the snowdrift-covered nowhere. Yeah, that had definitely been mistake number one. The other big, bad move had been her after-dinner espresso. She was a green tea drinker, but the cabin came with an espresso maker and it seemed fancy and fun and oh my God she could practically hear her heart beating from all the caffeine in her system and her eyes were all, “Blinking? It’s for the weak!”
So now here she was, starfished on a king-size bed, practically vibrating from caffeine, and wondering if every creak and groan of the cabin in the dark was actually a malevolent force waiting for her to fall asleep so it could steal her soul. The tick, tick had to be the huge grandfather clock—complete with antlers—in the living room. The intermittent hum was the heat kicking on and going off. The shuffle of steps had to be— Shelby jackknifed into a sitting position, one corner of the thick down comforter clutched to her chest, and told herself it wasn’t an ax murderer.
Steps? It was her imagination. Or the wind. Or the pipes. Or—holy fuckballs, there it was again.
The noise was coming from downstairs. All of a sudden, the back-to-nature thrill of being in a cell phone dead zone without a landline became a cold blanket of dread that covered her from her chin to the little hairs on her toes. Focus glued to the bedroom door that was open—of course—she reached over to her purse on the nightstand and fished around in it until her fingers brushed by the cool metal of her flashlight stun gun. It wasn’t a rock salt safety circle and a blowtorch, but it would at least give her a running start as long as the intruder was human and not a one-eyed ghoul with a grudge.
Okay, she knew the whole haunted thing was just in her head, but tell that to the lizard part of her brain that was doing the ultimate freak-out right now. That was it. She was never watching another scary movie again. Ever.
Slipping out of the bed, stun gun in her tight grip, she held her breath, straining to hear something over the sound of blood rushing in her ears as she tiptoed to the door. Taking up a spot just to the left of the open door, she flattened her back against the wall.