My Bad
Page 42

 Lani Lynn Vale

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I looked down at her bare finger. “I didn’t give you your ring.”
She picked her head up out of my neck and stared at me with excitement lighting her eyes.
“Ring?”
I grinned.
When I landed, Bayou had been waiting for me with my truck. I’d also asked him to do me one more favor and pick a ring up for me that I’d picked out online—and let me just tell you something, ring shopping is hard as fuck online. Plus, I had to get Bayou to ask Phoebe to get Pru’s ring size. Everything was so much harder than it should have been.
But after seeing the ring that he’d placed into my hand—that had also cost me a whack seeing as I hadn’t skimped on the diamond size or the metal in the band—I’d realized it was perfect.
Setting her down on her feet, I made sure she was steady before I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ring.
Her breath stalled in her chest, and her hand came up to cover her mouth.
“Will you…”
“Fuck me!” one of the birds said from behind me.
I paused, grinning wickedly. “That, too. But I was going to say ‘will you marry me’ first. The ‘will you fuck me’ was going to come second.”
She held her hand out to me and replied, “I agree to both.”
I grinned like a goddamn lunatic.
Then I slipped the ring that cost me nearly twenty grand onto her finger and…it didn’t fit.
I stared at it, dumbfounded.
She started to laugh, taking the ring from me and working it on her finger until it was finally in place.
“So I might or might not have put on twenty-six pounds since you last saw me,” she mentioned.
I let my eyes slowly trail down her body, starting at her mouth.
Her breasts were bigger—that was a given. Oh, and her belly—which was cute as fuck.
That was the only thing that I could really see that was different about her.
But I’d have to do a more thorough inspection.
Naked.
And she must’ve seen that written in my eyes because she grinned and started walking toward me.
It was only four steps, but each step she took seemed to feel like it took her an entire year.
The moment she was close—her belly the only thing touching me—she leaned up and kissed me on the corner of my lips.
“Take me to bed, Hoax.”
I grinned. “No bed just yet,” I denied her request. “I need a shower something fierce. I haven’t had a good one since I left, and I’m fairly sure I have sand and dirt in the creases of my balls. But once I’m clean, then I’ll take you there.”
She snickered. “I guess I could help you get clean.”
Then she turned and stepped over first the pig, then the dog, neither of which had bothered to get up when we’d walked into her house.
I followed shortly behind her, making it into her room just as she was stripping her scrub top off and tossing it to the floor.
The things in her pocket—alcohol wipes, saline flushes, and Band-Aids—fluttered to the floor as she did, but she didn’t stop to pick them up.
She looked over her shoulder instead to make sure I was there, then wiggled her ass at me. “Will you start the shower?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because I want to watch you finish undressing,” I admitted.
And I did.
As she slowly lost the bra, pants, and panties—all with her back to me—I watched with avid fascination.
Then she turned, giving me my first unencumbered view of her belly in all its glory.
It was absolutely, positively, the cutest thing I’d ever seen.
It was a rounded little ball—the perfect pregnant bump—where a previously flat tummy used to reside. Our children were resting there, perfectly content.
And God, her breasts were bigger—and so were her nipples.
I wanted to knead those fleshy globes and suck those darker nipples into my mouth and feast on her body until she begged me to stop.
My dick tented up the front of my cargo pants.
I swallowed and started to unload my pockets.
I couldn’t just let mine fall to the floor like she’d done hers.
No, I had to empty them, or they might dent her hardwood floor.
Multiple magazines for the gun I was carrying at my kidney. My wallet. Coins. Flashlight. Knife. A pen. Then my gun.
More and more filled up the table beside me.
She watched me empty every single pocket, her mouth going wider and wider with a smile with each thing I pulled out of my cargo pockets.
“One of these times you’re going to pull out a small one-bedroom apartment,” she teased.
I huffed out a laugh. “Trust me, if I could fit that into these pockets, I’d have done it by now.”
Finally, they all were empty and I was left feeling a hundred pounds lighter.
I hadn’t felt empty pockets like that in quite a long time.
The next thing to go was my belt, then my boots. Followed shortly by my t-shirt that hadn’t been washed in two weeks, finally followed up by my pants.
“Your tighty whities aren’t really all that white anymore,” she observed.
I snorted. “You can say that again.”
“Your tighty whities…”
I picked her up into my arms, ignoring her squeal to put her down, and walked us into the bathroom where I closed the door.
I’d closed the bedroom door, too, but if there was an animal on this earth that could get through a closed door, it would be her pig.
And I had too many things that I wanted to do to Pru to worry about her pig getting into the shower with us and getting in my way.
I set her down on her feet beside the shower and reached in, flipping the shower controls up to hot.
The water started to pour out of the showerhead, and I turned to look at Pru expectantly.
“What?” she asked.
“I want to hear you say it again,” I said.
She looked confused. “Say what?”
“That you’ll be mine,” I repeated.
Her eyes softened, and the confused look slid off of her face. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
The confirmation for a second time was enough to make me breathe a little easier.
“I was worried you’d say no,” I admitted. “I was worried that you’d think it was too fast.”
She held her hand out to test the water temperature.
“Everything we did was fast,” she said, gesturing to my underwear with a flick of her hand. “Take those off and get in.”
I took the underwear off and got in, grinning at the look on her face when she got a look at my angry, hard cock.
“Your balls don’t look dirty,” she licked her lips.
I snorted and held out my hand, asking her silently to come inside.
She took it and stepped over the lip of the shower, walking straight into my arms.
“Trust me when I say I need to wash,” I told her.
She sighed and moved so that the spray was covering both of us instead of mainly her.
I closed my eyes and sighed at the blissful heat.
“I think the worst part of being over there is the shower situation,” I murmured, loving the way it felt with her surrounding me, and the heat of the water pouring over my back and shoulders. “Cold showers fucking suck.”
“You’re trying to tell me not taking a hot shower was worse than not seeing me?” she teased.
She knew exactly what I’d meant, and I liked that she teased me about it.
But I gave her a serious answer nonetheless.
“Not taking a hot shower is sucky,” I expounded. “Not having you there to talk to, to hold, or to feel? That was debilitating. I felt like I lost a piece of my soul when I got onto that plane, and I’d only known you for a few weeks. What do you think it’ll be like after we have our babies and we’re married? It’s going to ruin me.”
I’d thought long and hard about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I still hadn’t quite figured out the best answer.
I could quit and transition back into civilian life. I could get a job with the police department. It wouldn’t be too hard. But, I had a feeling that I would hate it. I’d despise not being able to do something that I loved to do—something that challenged me.