Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46132 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
“These were made for it,” he smiles. “But don’t think this is going to stop me from taking you. I’m going to take what’s mine as long as I can. Understand?”
“Yes,” I moan, grabbing him tightly. “I love you. I’m so glad I found you.”
“That’s funny,” he laughs.
“What?”
He smiles warmly, a smile I’m still getting used to. It’s the smile of Damian the soon-to-be husband, the gym owner, the family man.
It’s the smile of my soulmate.
“I was just going to say the same thing,” he says, leaning down for another sweet kiss.
Extended Epilogue
One Year Later
Damian
I clutch Harmony and feel her heartbeat against my chest. We stand in the sound-proofed manager’s booth looking down onto the concert venue.
The crowd is packed out for the main act, but Harmony and I are here for the supporting act, the debut of up and coming singer Dakota Drake, my woman, my wife, my life, the mother of this beautiful child softly sleeping against my chest.
“She’s almost on, little princess,” I whisper, softly stroking my daughter’s cheeks.
She makes a cute baby noise and huffs her way back to dreamland. I turn to Sparky, curled up in the corner of the room, smiling widely.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, little soldier,” I say.
His tail wags and then he, too, returns to his own personal dreamland.
I look down across the darkened crowd – marked here and there with the harsh white of a phone light – to the spotlighted stage. Finally, my queen emerges, wearing an elegant long dress, obsidian-black but inlaid with jewels like stars sparkling in a night sky.
I fight the urge to search the crowd for men ogling her because the last thing I need right now is to let out the beast within me. It’s hard enough holding it back when I see the way her dress drapes over those hips. Her body is even more curvaceous and prone to creaming and weeping her delicious juices since the pregnancy, as though motherhood has made her even hornier and more eager for my cock.
I push it down and focus on my love, singing, pride blooming in my chest.
“There was a songbird,” she sings, slow and shy at first but then louder, with more sweet confidence. “And its name was the truth. There was a swan song, and baby, baby, this one’s for you … A songbird, a songbird, and yet inside my soul—baby, a songbird, a songbird, but your heart is still black as coal.”
She looks up and I know she’s thinking of that first time I ever heard her sing, in the connecting motel rooms, her voice making me even more ironclad certain that I had to have her.
“And then I met my man, oh, oh, oh,” she sings. “I met my man and I couldn’t say no, oh, no ...”
A tear glistens in her eye as she brings her hands to her chest, and then spreads them up toward us, where she knows we wait in the darkness of the crowd.
Harmony moans happily and Sparky gives his tail another wag.
“I know,” I whisper, voice choked with emotion. “She sounds incredible.”
Extended Epilogue
Ten Years Later
Dakota
Harmony sits on the porch, the setting sun dappling at her feet as she rocks back and forth in the chair.
It’s one of Felix’s old rocking chairs, recovered from storage a few months after we moved into the farmhouse, a few months after we learned we were pregnant with Harmony.
Now four of my children are in the living room, making happy family noises that drift over to me. But as usual, my beloved Harmony has sneaked away to be with her guitar and her voice.
She sings into the air, a musical wave drifting and dancing and hypnotizing.
Then she suddenly stops.
“Mom?” she says, turning as I walk out onto the porch, hitting the creaky floorboard, just one part of the home that’s made it seem like something alive to me.
“That was beautiful,” I tell her.
My daughter blushes, pulling her dark hair across her eyes.
“Yeah okay, Mom,” she laughs.
“I mean it,” I tell her. “Even if I didn’t know you were my daughter, I’d think you sound amazing.”
“You should listen to her,” Damian says, striding into the doorway behind me.
I turn to find him standing there with Max clinging to his neck and our other little terror, Felix, clinging onto his leg. Behind him in the hallway Maddison smiles and, beyond her, Alexis shakes her head, as if a mature eight year old is far too grownup for all this silliness. Sparky lies at Alexis’s feet, happy to hang and snooze with my oh-so-cool daughter.