Her Billionaires_ Boxed Set(138)

“Sure,” she squeaked.

He looked at Dylan. “I need to say this to you, too.” Dylan looked askance, uncertain and a bit worried, mirroring Laura’s own internal state.

Mike sighed. “I love you both.” He bent down and touched Laura’s belly. “And I love her, too. We have lots of words we could utter and exchange, decode and expunge, but none of those words matter as much as these: I’m sorry.” He looked deeply into her eyes, then Dylan’s. “I love you.” Again, at both, careful and measured, meted out equally. “I love this. I’ve missed this.”

His hands swept over the table, gesturing at the room, trying to capture the love and laughter and comfort in his hands. Laura knew he couldn’t, because it wasn’t a thing. It was something the three of them created when they were together, an alchemy they couldn’t force. It just was. “I want it all, for the rest of my life.” He bowed his head, releasing Laura’s swell. “I don’t have any better words.”

“There aren’t any.” Dylan’s voice was thick with emotion as he stood. He and Mike moved to Laura, who volleyed between them, head bouncing left and right to take this all in. With one on each side of her, she struggled to understand what was going on as they both knelt down.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted. And she didn’t. Nearly five months of wants and needs and luscious thoughts poured into her now, less from passion and more from a knowing love. A place of goodness and completion, of welcomed desire, of being treasured and assured not by words or by touch but by presence.

“Say you’ll stay. Say you’ll let us take care of you.” Dylan touched her belly. “Both of you.”

She frowned. “Take care of?”

“We have more money than we can spend in ten lifetimes. Quit your job. Be a full-time mom. Start a business or a charity or whatever your heart desires, Laura. Hang with us. Help me run the ski resort. Become a gym bunny. Open a bakery. Hell, buy Jeddy’s and fire Madge,” Mike laughed, his face wide and open, body tense but eyes serene and raw all at once.

“In other words, let us take care of you, because we need you to take care of us,” Dylan said, getting to the point.

Oh, guys, she thought. Her heart should be racing, temples pounding, face flushing and heart swelling, right? Instead, all she could feel was a diffuse calm. An acceptance. An understanding.

And the baby did a somersault right then, her little foot practically poking a hole in Laura’s belly. “Holy shit!” Mike shouted. “I could see the outline of her toes on your shirt!” She’d chosen a fairly tight, “slimming” light pink maternity shirt, with a little spandex, and it was pulled snugly over her belly.

“I saw it, too!” Dylan joined in.

“Maybe she was answering for me?”

“Was she?” they asked in unison. Laura closed her eyes, shoulders dropping, her breath even and mature. Yes. Yes yes yes yes.

In later years Laura would try to remember the exact moment she leaned down and took Mike’s face into her hands, kissing him gently and with great passion, but try as she might she could never pinpoint it, would never find her recollection precise enough to discern when she made the decision. Like so many other moments in her years with Dylan and Mike it just was, a delicious shift of molecules and energy that moved her body, compelling her toward what her heart wanted.

Regardless, Mike’s response was keen and matched, lips connecting, arms wrapping about her waist, sliding up her back as he stood, pulling her to standing, the belly making an awkward chaperone that separated them. Dylan stood back and watched, smiling. He wasn’t left out for long, as Laura pulled back from Mike, breathless, and reached out.

The little, doubting voice inside her, the one that whispered insecure comments in her ear at inappropriate times, the saboteur of all that was good and whole in her life, tried desperately to wiggle its way to the surface as Dylan’s arms wrapped around her, as his lips touched hers, as his mouth explored hungrily and apologized with little movements and sighs, hands saying “I’m sorry” in ways words and looks could never convey. Laura found herself not only not caring what that voice said, not actively pushing it away, but instead just not listening. Tuning it out like static, like traffic, like the sound of something so insignificant it becomes white noise after a while. You know it’s there but it blends in with the rest of the world and takes its rightful place as something you don’t need to attend to.

What she needed to give her attention was, in fact, right here, standing before her, both men here, now, for her. And she was here for them, all three together and hopeful and trying to find their way to a new truth. A new honesty. A new vow.