How To Have Surprise Quadruplets (How To... Book 2) Read online

  She took a deep breath, squeezed my hand, and then dove in. “I’m through being a model. At least for now. No one’s going to want to sign someone who’s pregnant with four babies. And that gives me the perfect excuse to do something I’ve been planning for the last couple of years. I’m going to school. For photography. I want to be the woman behind the camera, not the one in front of it.”

  The words dropped into absolute stillness, and I held my breath. This part—the part where she was in school and I was working on getting my next step together—was the part we hadn’t really talked about. The part where we let our old careers go.

  The part where we didn’t have any money coming in.

  I had plenty of my own savings from my years of success in the music industry, but my main priority for that money was to buy a nice house for the six of us outright so we wouldn’t have to worry about a mortgage. I could support us for a while, but four babies would get very expensive very quickly. And I wanted them—and Alexis, of course—to want for nothing. I wanted to take them travelling around the world. I wanted to show our children the place where we’d met in China. And there were other important life events that would need a fair bit of money too, like weddings…

  Alvaro broke the silence, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Good for you,” he said kindly. Then, he pulled out a stack of papers. “Now, according to the spreadsheets you asked me to get…”

  As it turned out, Alexis had been saving. For a long time. She had more than enough for us to live on until our new careers started up, and then some.

  It also turned out that companies did want Alexis to model when pregnant—for their maternity wear lines. Print ads instead of runways so it would be less taxing. Reps had already been calling to set up contracts after reading about Alexis in the tabloids. Hannah advised that it would be good for Alexis to ease out of modeling with those shoots. Keep her name out there while she took her photography courses. And Alexis and I agreed.

  Hannah was laughing and joking by the end of the meeting, already making lists of contacts for Alexis to pursue once she was ready to start her career in photography. And Alexis had relaxed, taken off her mask, and allowed herself to start smiling as well. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

  I walked out of that office feeling freer than I’d felt in years—free enough that I thought I could fly if I needed to. And I only had one person to thank for that.

  So, as soon as we were through the door, I turned in front of her and dropped to one knee.

  “Alexis, from the moment I saw you, wandering around by yourself in the jungle, I knew you were something special,” I said, reaching down into my pocket. “I know it took you a little bit longer to realize that I was, too. Maybe it’s because it just took exactly the right guy to figure out how to get you to let your guard down.”

  I held up the box, exposing the three-karat diamond vintage 1920s ring I’d found for her. The perfect ring. The ring that would make it all real.

  “Tell me you’ll let me be your hero for the rest of our lives. Because now that I’ve found you, I don’t want to consider what the world would be like without you.”

  She reached down, cupped my chin, and lifted me up until we were eye to eye again.

  “I don’t want to imagine the world without you, either,” she whispered through quickly swelling tears. “Yes. Of course I’ll marry you, my heroic knight.”

  Epilogue

  Rian

  One Year Later

  I walked into the kitchen from the garage and went immediately to the sink to wash my hands. It was great having the garage on the lot next to the house—made it a whole lot easier to work on the three jobs I already had going—but I could feel myself starting to drag. Rebuilding cars was a lot more challenging than I’d expected, and though I was good at it, and was getting a good reputation for my design choices, I was ready for a break.

  The moment I walked into the bedroom, though, I felt as though I was going to float away. All my fatigue fell from my body and I felt nothing but lucky.

  My wife was laying there, and she had my four daughters all wrapped around her, in one way or another. She was just as beautiful as the day I’d met her—more so, if I was honest, given the glow motherhood had given her. She also looked blissfully happy. The girls were all dead asleep around her, two brunette and two blond heads resting on her, and she had her eyes closed.

  I tiptoed past her, thinking that I’d change clothes without waking her up, but as usual, she beat me to the punch.

  “I’m not asleep, and I can smell the grease on you from here,” she said with a smile. “How’s the new one coming?”

  “Beautifully,” I said, sliding gently into bed with her. I’d be getting grease all over the sheets, I knew, and I’d have to change them, but it was worth it to lay there with my girls and inhale the joy of being so near them. “I’d love for you to come out and take some pictures. Before and after, here’s the process, that sort of thing. Maybe some shots of me actually working on the car. Then again, you’re the expert. Maybe I should be letting you tell me what you want to shoot.”

  She perked right up at that, her eyes opening and that adorable wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows.

  “When are you doing the paint?”

  “Next week,” I said, confused. “Why?”

  “That’s what we’ll photograph,” she confirmed. “That color will be so brilliant, such a stark difference, that it will make for the best effect.” She turned her face to me for a kiss. “And I only want the best for my wonderfully talented husband.”

  “You give me the best every day,” I told her, planting kiss after kiss on her face. “There is nothing better than you.”

  “There is nothing better than us,” she murmured, her tone telling me that she was close to falling asleep again. It happened quickly, even now with the babies several months old.

  It happened partly because we weren’t getting to sleep full nights. Not yet. The girls woke up at all hours, and we both woke up with them. Four babies were too many for one person to take care of alone, and they always managed to wake up together. Still, once they were back asleep, it left Alexis and me awake together. In the darkness. Without anything else to sidetrack us.

  We’d been taking advantage of those stolen moments together. Talking. Planning. Making love.

  I laid my head down next to her and let my eyes travel over the room. A room in our own house, in a relatively small town outside of New York City. Where I had my shop and she had her studio. A room that was covered with her photographs—some of them of cars I had rebuilt, some of them of me onstage, performing at small clubs in my newly minted solo career, some of them shots of our girls who were now sleeping, blissfully unaware of how close their parents had come to messing it all up, and how hard they had worked to build their real-life fairytale together.

  “There is nothing better than us,” I repeated, knowing that it was absolutely, positively the truth.

  The End

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