Page 79 of His Vivacious Angel
Forest winces. “You know what I mean. One more, and you’ll be done.”
Bailey helps him support my back with the next contraction, and I let out the world’s greatest sigh of relief when our daughter is finally out.
When I collapse backward, Forest lies halfway across the bed to cup my face and kiss me all over. “You did it, angel! I knew you could. I love you so much. So dang much.”
Finding just enough strength to lift my limp arms and cup his face, I pale at the awful things I said to him. “I love you, I love you! I’m so sorry I broke off our engagement!”
“When did you do that?” he asks, taken aback.
“Like an hour ago, but we’re back together now. Just don’t ever piss me off like this again, okay?”
Forest laughs. “I won’t, believe me. I’d be just as pissed and scared as you if we switched places.”
“That’s the only way I’d ever agree to have more, and we’d have to win the lottery and hire ten nannies.” My family laughs, though I’m not joking. Seriously, fuck this.
He kisses me again after helping me to more water, only moving away when the nurse nudges him aside to place our daughter, Madelyn, on my chest. An hour later, absolutelyenamored by our bald-headed beauty, who was worth every second of misery and pain I experienced over the past nine months, I tell Forest, “I’m not taking any chances. You’re getting a vasectomy before we leave this hospital.” I look every single person in the room in the eye. “And to anyone who thinks I’ve changed my mind about the tubal—nope!” I tell Dr. Bautista, “Fry ‘em and yank ‘em out of me, doc. I’m done.”
Epilogue - Part One
Autumn - 1 year later
“Now that she’s one and you’re out of the newborn trenches, do you wish you hadn’t gotten the tubal?” Shayla asks from beside me in the pool at the neighborhood pavilion, where we’re having Madelyn’s first birthday party. Shayla’s only joking, the corners of her eyes crinkling with her smile, because she knows the answer.
I snort as I spin slow circles with Madelyn in her floaty, making my gorgeous, light brown-eyed little girl laugh. It’s one of those full-belly, adorable baby-laughs that Shayla says gives her baby fever. “Not in the least,” I answer. “Mommy would lose her mind and run screaming if she had another cutie-patootie like you, isn’t that right, Maddy?” I pull her close and lift her sun hat to kiss her chubby cheek.
“I would too,” Bailey says from the side, sitting on the edge of the pool with her feet dipped in the water. “Thank god and modern medicine for vasectomies.”
She looks across at her husband, who is lounging on a picnic blanket in the grass with their triplets. Dad, who hasmade a full recovery and lost an impressive fifty pounds since overhauling his diet and starting an exercise routine, lounges with them. The men are probably having the most boring conversation about the disc golf tournament they’ve both entered. My husband, as of three weeks ago when we tied the knot in Mexico, unsurprisingly, didn’t make the cut.
Shayla pokes Bailey in the side. “Imagine if he hadn’t gotten the snip and you ended up with another round of triplets.”
Bailey cringes. “Don’t jinx me. We still don’t know how we survived the first year.” She nods to Forest, who is treading water with the boys in their life jackets. “What about him? Any regrets?”
“Nope.” I lower my voice when I drift closer. “The man wouldn’t touch me until exactly four months after his procedure, and even then, he kept his dick to himself until after two follow-up appointments to make sure he was shooting blanks.” His excuse? The sheer inability to pull out. That night before I went into active labor was the one-and-only time he was able to do so.
“We really picked the good ones, didn’t we?” Shayla asks, gazing at her husband as James takes turns doing back flips off the diving board with the older kids.
“‘Pick’ is the wrong word,” Bailey says. “It was more like…they were destined to be ‘the one’, and there was no use fighting our feelings for them. We had no choice.”
Shayla grins. “Neither did they, or at least poor Isaiah didn’t.”
Bailey crosses her arms over her stomach, laughing, though her cheeks grow bright red. I might be headstrong and driven in my pursuit of accomplishing my goals, but Bailey is relentless and has me beat by a mile. “He really didn’t, did he?” she asks.
“Nope. Isaiah didn’t stand a chance against you,” I say. “Iknow I teased you to death about your obsession with him, but I was secretly rooting for you all along.” Several of us had caught Bailey and Isaiah together in bed the morning after they got together, and we got a full-frontal view of what he’s packing. His dick gives Forest’s a run for his money—not that I ever wanted to know. I waggle my brows. “Way to go, sis.”
“Thanks,” Bailey says softly when she rises with a sigh, floating on air, it seems, as she makes her way to her family.
Isaiah pulls his wife down onto the blanket, his arm wound around her. He’s as obsessed with her as she is with him, just as Mom and Dad, Shayla and James, and Forest and I are with each other. We might have had our trials, setbacks, and upsets along the way, but it was all worth it in the end. Lord help us, though, when the kids are grown, and it’s their turn to date. If they give us as much hell as my sisters and I gave Dad… I shudder to think of it.
“Cake time!” Mom calls out, and we all lumber out of the water, gathering around one of the picnic tables where Mom has set a smash cake on the decorated high chair we brought for Madelyn.
When we start singing the birthday song, I have to catch Sebastian and drag him back to stop him from blowing out Madelyn’s candle.
“But Mooooooom,” he whines, and it’s one of the sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard. “I wanted to do it!”
“You have to wait for your birthday, buddy,” I tell him as I heft him onto my hip. Only a few more months, and we’ll be right back here to celebrate his fourth.
When my son’s grumpiness doesn’t make me give in and relight Madelyn’s candle so he can blow it out, he kicks to be let down and runs to Forest. “Daaaaaad, I wanna blow out the candle!”
