House of Payne: Steele (35 page)

“Angel’s got a doctor’s appointment as well, so I guess that’s the thing to do. Oh, and a house,” she said suddenly, putting a hand to her brow as the giddy euphoria faded to a level where practicality could at last bob to the surface. “I can’t keep living where I’m living and have a baby there as well. I need a place to live that’s big enough for the two of us.” A baby. Oh God, a freaking
baby
.

Steele went still. “The
two
of you?”

“The signing bonus I won along with the House Of Payne contract is really going to come in handy,” she went on, barely hearing him “I was going to look for a place with enough room to work somewhere in the city later this week, but now I don’t know. My brother’s moved out into the boonies, not exactly my thing, but when you have a kid like I’m going to—”

“Like
we’re
going to have.”

She blinked and focused back on him. “Sorry?”

“
We
are having this kid, Estella. Not
you
. You didn’t make him by yourself, so you’re sure as hell not going to have him and raise him by yourself. You hear me?”

She blinked again. “I hear you.”

He scowled as he studied her face before he jerked to his feet. “I don’t think you do. In fact, I don’t think you’ve been hearing me the entire time we’ve been here. So let me say how things are going to go right now so there’s no fucking confusion. I’m going to be a full-time father to this kid, so don’t even think about cutting me out of this.”

“I… wasn’t.” But that wasn’t precisely true, and she had the grace to feel a flash of guilt over how she’d just sort of assumed this baby was going to be all hers. She should have known better; Steele wasn’t the kind of man to walk away from responsibility. Far from it. He knew what it was to be abandoned, so the last thing he’d want to do was deal that same blow to his own child. “I just know you’ve always insisted on condoms, even when I told you my getting pregnant was a near-impossibility…” Another wave of joyous laughter almost overtook her, and she had to deep-breathe for a few seconds before getting a handle on it. “I know you didn’t plan this.”

“So the hell what? You didn’t plan it either, but you’re happy about it and ready to step up to the plate. Why the hell would I be any different?”

“I don’t know. I just thought—”

“I know what you thought,” came the blistering reply. “You thought that once you had everything you ever wanted, you were going to cut me out of the picture, am I right? You don’t need me anymore.”

“You cut yourself out,” she shot back with brutal honesty. “You let me know in no uncertain terms that you weren’t with me for white picket fences and happily ever after—your words, not mine. I’m just letting you know that since I’m headed exactly in the direction of picket fences and happily ever after, the door is wide open for you to leave.”

“
I don’t want to leave
,” he roared, before he dragged his hands through his hair and began to pace in front of her. “Damn it, why does fate hate me so fucking much? Why does it hand me a woman I was stupid enough to think was perfect, only to have that bitch hit me so hard it blinded me to a woman who actually is perfect for me?”

“I’m not perfect,” Essie muttered, but he kept going as if she hadn’t spoken.

“But that’s bullshit, blaming fate like that. This is all my fault for being so…
fucking
… stupid. Maybe this is my penance for being the Devil’s spawn my old man said I was. Maybe this is my punishment—being given a glimpse of what my personal heaven would be like before it’s snatched away from me.”

“Steele—”

“But even that’s weak. I’m not going to blame fate and I’m not going to blame what my old man said I was. Truth is, I fucked things up with you, and that’s no one’s fault but my own. I made you doubt me. I made you feel unloved. Careless bastard that I am, I even made you feel like you weren’t worth the effort to love. You gave me every dream come true when you gave yourself to me, and how do I repay you? I gave you pain. God, oh
God
, no wonder you’re trying so hard to shove me out that fucking door. If I were you, I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of me, either.”

“Don’t.” She came to sit on the edge of her seat, stopping herself at the last minute from going to him, his pain was so obvious. “I love the sight of you, just as I love everything about you. That’s why that door is open. I love you enough to let you out of a life you don’t want.”

“You love me enough to do that, but not enough to forgive me, is that it?”

“It’s not about forgiving you. It’s about being smart enough to not settle for something that can never work. No relationship can ever go the distance when there isn’t love on both sides. I’d be ground into nothing, don’t you see that?”

“Essie.” His agitated pacing stopped as abruptly as it started before he again dropped to his knees in front of her to clamp his hands over hers. “Love comes so easily to you.
From
you. I’ve met your family and I see where all that comes from. You’ve been loved your whole life. You’re comfortable with it. My background…shit. I’ve told you what it was. So it’s not like that with me.”

“I know.”

“But you
don’t
know, because…” He took a deep breath, his expression tight with a tension so profound it bordered on pain. “I do love you. So much it freaks me the fuck out, because love has never worked out for me. Not once. Not ever.”

Her heart stopped. Any minute she was going to die, but at least she’d have this moment. “What?”

“It’s not easy for me to say it. I haven’t had that phrase a lot in my life, so it honestly doesn’t have a lot of meaning for me. And whenever it does enter my world, shit always seems to blow it right back in my face. This kind of thing… it just doesn’t work out for me.”

In that moment, as she began to understand what was going on inside him, she hated how the world had treated him from the moment he was brought into the world. “It’s important to me to hear the words, Steele, I’ll admit it. But it’s even more important to me that you
feel
it.”

“Oh, I feel it. That’s why I said you brought my heart back to life. Nothing but loving you could’ve done that,” he grated roughly, and the self-directed anger and regret in his tone was so bitter it stung her just to hear it. “Believe me, Essie, please. Believe
in
me. You’ll never have cause to regret it, I swear.”

“I just don’t ever want you to regret being with me.”

“
Never
. That you could even have that thought in your head tears me up inside.” He brought one of her hands to his chest and pressed it flat against the powerful beat of his heart. “You feel that?”

She looked into his stormy eyes. “Yes.”

“My heart beating like this is because of
you
. If you shut me out, like I know I deserve, it’ll die again, and this time it won’t be coming back. You and our kid—Jesus, our
kid
—are my life, my world, my
everything
. I’ll die if you shut me out of my everything, so don’t do that, please. Don’t shut me out.”

Tears finally spilled out as the miraculous, impassioned words filled her with so much sweet promise it was almost an anguish to bear. “If you can love me even a little, we can make this work.”

“A
little
? Fuck, woman, haven’t you been listening to me?” With gentle savagery he pulled her to him, his arms like iron bands around her while he buried his face in her neck. “You’re such a fighter baby, but I’ve already told you that you’ve won. Stop fighting to let me go, okay? I’ll do anything,
be
anything you want, if you’ll just fight to hold onto me now. Please, Sweetness,
please
… don’t let me go.”

At last she wound her arms around his neck and let herself melt into his embrace. Maybe Joey was right. Maybe life could be awesome if she just let go of the expectation of
perfect
. “Okay, Steele. I promise.”

Epilogue

(Eight months later)

“This isn’t how it was supposed to go.” Gritting her teeth, Carla laid on the horn as yet another car nudged in front of her. “Goddamn it… move it, asshole!”

Beside her, Essie tried to concentrate on her breathing. “Game… must’ve… ended.”

“Stupid opening day,” Carla muttered, knuckles showing white as she gripped the steering wheel. Stupid Chicago Cubs. Stupid everything. Wait. I see an opening. Hold on.”

“Carla… shit, that’s not an opening, that’s the breakdown lane!”

Too late.

The minivan punched forward just as another contraction hit. Essie groaned and tried to breathe through it, not even bothering to look at her watch this time around. The contractions were almost on top of each other now, so there was no point.

Clearly, the babies had decided today would be the perfect date to have their birthday.

Carla was right; it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The twins’ due date was next week, and everyone in the family had been preparing for it. Her mother had begun to make and freeze meals so Essie wouldn’t have to cook right out of the hospital. Her father had been bouncing back and forth between Twist’s place and hers, helping assemble cribs and figuring out how to install car seats, as Angel gave birth via C-section less than a month earlier.

The birth of Angel’s and Twist’s baby hadn’t gone according to plan, either. It had been a harrowing ordeal with the baby refusing to get its head down where it belonged. When the fetal heart monitor warned of a slowing heart rate, the medical team decided to take the baby then and there. Tiny, delicate Angel gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy that had the Santiago golden skin and thick black hair, but such vivid blue eyes just a shade off from Angel’s that Essie was convinced they wouldn’t change with time. Cade Edward Santiago was the herald of what her mother was happily calling the “baby season.”

She and Steele had also made plans. He had asked for a month off from work starting tomorrow, so that he could be there whenever she went into labor. For the past month, PSI had also assigned him to local jobs, ensuring that he wouldn’t be out of town should anything unexpected happen. At the moment, he was heading a security team at Field Museum across town to prepare for an international exhibit of Cartier’s greatest pieces, including a priceless emerald the size of a saltine cracker and three times as thick.

When Essie had called him from across town to tell him that her water broke while she and Carla were picking out leather for a new half-glove project for the House, he’d simply said, “Oh my God.” Then there was a lot of yelling and craziness, and since things were starting to seriously hurt at that point, she hadn’t paid a lot of attention. The only thing on her mind at that point had been to get to Prentice Women’s Hospital, where she’d reserved a private room and where her OB-GYN had privileges.

But traffic had been horrendous, and with her labor coming on like a freight train, Carla made an executive decision and headed for the nearest hospital, which was Mercy.

Perfect.

Another contraction hit just as Carla veered through two lanes to shoot onto an off-ramp, the big, blocky hospital looming within sight. “We’re almost there,” she announced the obvious amidst a chorus of honking horns, profanity and a flock of middle-fingered birds. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to cross your legs at this point? Oh, wait. I’m about nine months too late for that, aren’t I?”

“Very funny—
ugh
.”

“Don’t you
dare
push, girlie. Patrick just got the momster-mobile detailed.”

“Then stop being funny!”

“Right. From this point on, I’ll be like that politician. You know, what’s his name? Fuck it, never mind. They’re all not funny.”

“
Carla
!”

“Sorry, sorry, I can’t help that I’m awesome when I’m stressed. That’s the cross I must bear in life.” She bounced into the emergency room parking lot, popped a curb that made Essie suspect her friend was trying to jolt a kid right out of her, and screeched to a stop beside an ambulance with its crew hanging out around the back.

“Help!” Carla zapped the momster-mobile’s window down to yell at the surprised EMTs. “Super-preggo lady delivering twins like,
now
!”

It was heartening to see how quickly that got everyone moving.

It was a funny thing, labor pains. They had a magic that wiped out every other problem. She was wheeled into a private room, where fetal heart monitors were wrapped around her belly. Someone assured her that while her doctor didn’t have privileges at Mercy, they had a great baby doc on call, and she was currently the only mother-to-be in active labor. She didn’t care. Just as long as someone was there to help her babies get the hell out of her body and safely into the world, she didn’t care who it was.

Then some dude with a baseball-print surgical cap came in and called her “slugger.” After that, he kept making jokes about getting his catcher’s mitt to catch her babies and asking her if she was trying to create her own team. When he deemed her to be fully dilated, he told her it was time to step up to the plate and “swing for the fences.”

That was when she discovered that not even labor pains could erase irrational dislike. They did, however, fuel fantasies of her foot slipping “accidentally” out of the stirrup to kick this guy in his baseball-covered head.

Her sports-mad doc announced she was crowning—thankfully without any more ridiculous analogies—when she became aware of a kerfuffle beyond the room’s door.

“…don’t care that I can’t go into every room looking for her.
Essie
!”

“
Here
!” She screamed it along with an almighty push, giving it just the right amount of shivery, horror-movie punch. The door flung open and Steele was suddenly there, with Luke hovering in the doorway. She had gotten to know Luke quite well over the past several months, enough to get past the weird discomfort of wondering if he was reading every thought in her head by the way she folded her napkin or cleared her throat. He was a nice guy with a crazy sense of humor, and she liked him. But she sure as hell wasn’t ready to have him all up in her business, cracking jokes with her pinch-hitting doctor.

Oh, great. Now she was doing it.

“Sweetness. Baby.” Steele rushed to take Carla’s place as official hand-holder, only to wince when she bore down as another contraction racked her body with pain. “You’re doing great, baby. I’m so proud of you.”

The sports fan posing as a doctor looked up. “Whoa there, slugger. You’re out of uniform. We need you suited up, so why don’t you—”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up and get busy doing your job.” Steele turned back to her and kissed her sweaty brow. “Everything’s going to be fine, sweetness.”

“It is now that you’re… here.” Crap, holding a conversation while giving birth was totally a no-go. She leaned forward with the effort of straining, then dug deep for another push when she felt something give. And another. One more…

“And at the top of the batting order, we have… a little girl!”

Girl.

A
girl
.

Oh God, thank you so much…

A shuddering sob escaped Essie. She looked up at her squalling, red-faced daughter with a head full of black hair, and she knew that it would be a memory she’d treasure forever. She hadn’t wanted to know the gender of the twins, waiting until the moment of truth to make their birth even more special, if that was possible.

Looking at her tiny miracle—her
daughter
—she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Then another labor pain stabbed deep and she was back to the job of becoming a mother.

Six minutes later, their son came into the world, crying even louder than his sister.

“They’re perfect. You’re perfect.” The bustling activity around her faded as Steele wiped the damp hair away from her face, laughing and kissing her all at the same time. “My God, my
God
, you, the twins, my life…
everything
is so damn miraculous because of you.”

“I feel the same way, sweetheart.” Tired, crying with a happiness she never knew existed, she nuzzled her face against his. “You’ve made my life complete.”

“You’ve done the same for me, sweetness. Except for one thing.”

Her brilliant euphoria dimmed. “What?”

“You have to marry me, Es. I’m not fucking around with this anymore. You. Are. Marrying me.”

She sighed. This again. “Steele, now’s not the time—”

“You’re right. I should’ve dragged your pregnant ass to the altar months ago—and mark my words, the kids are going to throw us not being hitched when they were born in our faces when they think they’re old enough to know better.”

The kids
. That sounded so good she almost lost it entirely. “I just want to make sure you’re happy with the life we have before we make that commitment.”

“Commitment? Jesus, Essie, we’ve been living together for almost a
year
. Your clothes have taken over the closet to the point where I’m building what amounts to be an entire room that’s gonna be your closet, and I’m doing it happily, because it makes
you
happy. I fit your crazy, hot-tempered family and they fit me. I just traded in my truck for a bigger, safer SUV because I want to be sure there’s enough room for us and the kids whenever we decide to pile in and hit the road for some fun. Oh, and yeah, there’s the small fact that we have two kids together. Trust me, sweetness, I’m
committed
. You’re the one who’s holding back.”

“I need for you to be sure you’re always going to be happy with this life we have.”

“I love you.” It flowed out of him so forcefully, so naturally, it stunned her into absolute stillness. He’d only said those words to her once before, when they’d discovered she was pregnant. She knew that phrase didn’t come to him naturally. Which was all right; Steele went out of his way to show his love for her in countless other ways. Long ago she’d accepted that this was how it was with him.

But deep down, she missed those words. That, more than anything, was what had held her back from taking that final step. She would do anything for him, God knew.
Anything
. But she wouldn’t trap him. If he didn’t love her as much as she loved him, she left that door open so he could walk away. She knew he loved her, cared for her. But hearing those words solidified that knowledge in her heart, as well as her mind.

It took most of her remaining strength to lift her hand to his cheek. “Say it again.”

“I love you. I can’t remember what life was like to not love you. I can’t imagine what life would be like without loving you. You want a guarantee that I’m always going to be happy every single second from this point on? I can’t give you that. No one can. But even if we have moments when we’re not flying around on a fucking cloud of happy, I’ll still love you with everything I’ve got, and that’s something I
can
guarantee. So say yes, sweetness. Just say yes.”

The docent and a nurse came up with two tightly wrapped bundles of squirming, crying life. “Are you two ready to hold your daughter and son?”

“Yes,” Essie said, looking right into Steele’s eyes. And when she saw understanding flare in their pale depths, immediately followed by a crushing hug that made her groan, she knew he got the message. Now that she fully understood he loved her, she had gotten the message, too. “Yes. I’m finally ready.”

(Six months later)

They should have eloped.

The thought rambled through Essie’s head yet again while a stylist worked on taming her coils of thick hair around a crystal and seed-pearl encrusted tiara-style hair band she wore in lieu of a veil, while a makeup artist did God knew what to her face. She put up with the enforced primping by focusing her attention out the window at an increasingly jam-packed parking lot outside the Strand Mansion.

Somehow, the quiet ceremony Essie had envisioned with just Steele and their children, along with a few friends and family, had grown like a radiation-fed Godzilla monster-baby.

In retrospect, she had no one to blame but herself. When she had told her parents she was planning on a civil ceremony down at the courthouse, her mother had wailed that her only daughter was not going to cheat her out of the princess wedding she’d always dreamed of. Considering that at one point, the entire Santiago family believed Essie wouldn’t live to even see a wedding day, the very least Essie could do was allow her mother to put together a wedding that would show the world her daughter had triumphed in every possible way.

Back then it had seemed like such an understandable request. Touching, even.

Then the madness began.

Her mother had brought in every facet of the wedding process that she could think of. It wasn’t just a matter of saying “I do.” Oh, no. When Lynette Santiago was involved, it meant the guest list, seating arrangement, flower preferences, venues with valet parking and liquor licenses, color schemes, catering menus, cake taste-testing, live bands versus a DJ for the reception, bridesmaids and groomsmen, gifts for the bridesmaids and groomsmen, wedding guest favors, an official father-daughter dance, an official song that she and Steele would dance to, photographers versus videographers, makeup artists and professional stylists… it went on and on.