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  Her hands raked compulsively down my chest. I was still inside her, and I’d just come—but how long had we lain together in panting, delicate silence, gasping, wrapped up in each other, clenching together, refusing to relinquish the moment?

  “I could promise you that,” I said, and paused just for effect. “But…”

  She froze. “But what, Ram?”

  “It wouldn’t be enough.”

  Izzy flopped forward against me, laughing. “You bastard. You had me for a second.”

  “I’ve got you forever,” I said.

  “Swear?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Because promises can be broken. This? You and me? It’s so much more than that. It can’t ever be broken.”

  She sat on me, stared down at me, and let me play with her breasts, and she raked her fingernails down my chest and over my abs. “God, Ramsey. You really do have a way with words, you know that?”

  “It’s just the truth, Izz.”

  She leaned forward, bracing a palm on my chest, and reached back behind herself, finding my tender, tingling balls, and began massaging them in her palm. I was inside her, still, and she clutched the base of me and my sac together in her hand, slowly caressing and stroking. Her eyes stayed on mine, love now open in her expression.

  “I need you again,” she murmured.

  “Keep doing that,” I said.

  She grinned hungrily. “Oh, I am. I feel you growing inside me.”

  As I hardened, she let the sliding strokes of her hand cease and began a subtle roll of her hips, and then I was thickening inside her tight slick core and my physical heart was slamming fit to burst, and my metaphorical heart was exploding with love, and I couldn’t breathe for how it felt to be like this with her, to know this was real with this woman, so imperfectly perfect for me.

  How long, then? I stopped keeping track of the seconds, the minutes, the hours. I cupped her breasts and she rode me, rising and falling with unhurried lazy love. And then, when I touched her clit, she cried out and began to ride me faster as I touched her, and she was grinding on me so hard her breasts were shaking and jouncing and our bodies collided with resounding claps and she screamed and cried and I roared—

  And we came in the exact same moment, our voices and bodies merged. Her fingers interlaced with mine, pressing down so all of her weight was on my hands as she helplessly writhed on me, whimpering and wailing, and I supported her with shaking arms while driving up into her clenching core.

  We never got tired of saying those three little words. We said them a million times that day, just to hear them, just to say them, knowing that whatever lay ahead, our love for one another would always be enough.

  Epilogue

  Izzy

  It was Thanksgiving. Six in the evening.

  We were on a boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, sailing along the channels between Ketchikan and Vancouver. When I say boat, though, that’s somewhat misleading. This thing is…well, it’s almost as big as the cruise ships that ply these waters.

  It belonged to Xavier Badd and his wife, Harlow Grace; she still goes by the surname Grace professionally, but she did legally change her name to Badd when they married, and she’s been slowly transitioning professionally to Xavier’s last name. A credit here and there, listing it as Harlow Badd in press releases and things like that. She invited all of us onto their ridiculously massive superyacht for a Badd Clan Thanksgiving.

  And by all of us, I do mean ALL:

  Sebastian and Dru, Zane and Mara, Brock and Claire, Bax and Evangeline, Canaan and Aerie, Corin and Tate, Lucian and Joss, obviously Xavier and Low, Roman and Kitty, Remington and Juneau, and Ramsey and me. Plus Zane and Mara’s two kids, and Tate and Cor’s set of twins plus their three-month-old girl. Dru was four months pregnant, Eva was six months pregnant, and Brock and Claire were in the process of adopting a baby.

  So, the boat was full.

  Badd’s Bar and Grille now featured three locations across Ketchikan—the original bar on the wharf, Badd Kitty Saloon, plus a third recently opened location evenly co-owned by Bast, Zane, and Rome, called The Badd Night Bar, which was built around a theater-in-the-round concept, where Canaan, Corin, Aerie, and Tate all performed together three nights a week as a quartet, complete with dueling electric guitar performances by the boys, Tate and Aerie on cello and piano, and Canaan and Aerie doing songs from their triple platinum, Grammy-winning Canary albums, as well as up-and-coming local acts scouted by the boys’ homegrown label.

  I was three years into my pursuit of a medical degree—I’d discovered an aptitude for schoolwork that had surprised me, so after a couple toes-in-the-water semesters, I’d thrown myself in headlong, taking fourteen to sixteen credit hours per semester, plus summers, so I was already nearing my initial degree.

  Ram was climbing the ranks in the National Park Service, having started as a ranger in the Tongass National Forest, but he was well on his way to taking charge of the entire region.

  Rem, Juneau, and Ink’s tattoo parlor had become such a success they’d had to expand and hire new talent, and had wait lists a year long each—Remington had been featured in a couple magazines for his work on a handful of A-list celebrities. While Juneau hadn’t reached that caliber of public exposure, her work was, in a way, more meaningful—she traveled the world, teaching others how to apply modern technology to ancient tattooing methods; she’d traveled to Indonesia, Hawaii, Siberia, Greenland, and all over Canada—wherever indigenous peoples had histories of ritual, cultural skin-marking. Her work had been featured in both academic and pop culture magazines, and in a three-part documentary.

  Xavier’s work in robotics was transforming public opinion of what robotics was and could become, and his academic work was in that field, specifically as it related to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and artificial intelligence. Harlow was still one of the most popular leading ladies in film, and her popularity was only growing with each film she did.

  Brock’s air taxi service had expanded into a small airline, and he was in talks to sell a minority stake to Virgin Airlines. Claire…well, I wasn’t sure what Claire did, exactly, only that it involved computers and a lot of private video conferences. She called it White Hat hacking, and had tried to explain it to me, but I’d gotten bored by her explanation after thirty seconds.

  Dru was one of Ketchikan’s premier realtors; Mara had opened a corporate consulting firm and was rapidly expanding.

  Joss and Luce owned a chain of coffee shops-slash-bakeries across the city, each one with its own unique feel and theme.

  Evangeline’s artwork had been recently chosen for display at top-tier galleries in Manhattan, Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney, with eye-watering price tags and international buzz surrounding her work.

  Zane, Bast, and Rome had garnered the least amount of attention of the entire clan, but they liked it that way—they ran their bars, slung drinks, and made plans for new locations.

  We were all sitting around in the cavernous but somehow cozy living room of the yacht—which Xavier called “the saloon.” There was a fire flickering inside a glass case in the center of the room, crackling merrily and giving out heat. A giant eighty-inch TV on one wall was playing a classic Disney movie, which the older kids were watching while playing with a bucket of Xavier’s famous line of toy robots—called Magneti-Bots: they were a game and a puzzle and a toy all in one, and had sold millions within the first year. The adults were sitting in little clusters at tables and on couches, playing cards and chatting. Cane and Cor had brought a bunch of instruments, obviously, and Corin was teaching his youngest son how to play the guitar—the boy was barely one and half, so he spent more time keeping the kid’s mouth off the strings than anything, but they both seemed to enjoy it. Canaan was actually playing, serenading his wife with a song that sounded happy and cute and fun, but was actually rather salaciously worded if one were to pay attention.

  I marveled at all this, at all these people gathered together. This family had built its
elf, through love and determination and hard work, through loyalty, fearlessness, sacrifice, and humor. We all fit—we all belonged.

  Bast was sitting on a couch, his arm around his wife, who was rubbing her belly and wincing now and then as the baby did intrauterine gymnastics; I watched as Bast locked eyes with Zane who was sitting across from him—the pair looked around at the gathered clan, nodded, grinned…and bumped fists, laughing at some inside joke.

  But I think I got it.

  In a matter of five or six years, they’d gone from a failing little bar being half-heartedly kept alive by Bast alone. The brothers had been scattered across the globe, the triplets jumping into wildfires, all of us women living our own isolated, separate, lonely lives.

  And now, a handful of years later, we were together, a real family, all of us successful beyond our wildest dreams—and, most importantly, we had each found love, and the meaning it gave our lives, the unity it provided through this extended family, was immeasurable.

  I, a single child, an orphan, now had ten brothers and ten sisters and, well, a lot of nieces and nephews, with more to come.

  I nuzzled back into Ram’s arm, kissed his bearded jaw, and settled in to watch the kids play, the adults mingle, and the stars twinkle to life out over the rippling ocean.

  Was it possible to get any happier than this?

  Probably.

  But right now, this was more than enough.

  * * *

  The End

  Also by Jasinda Wilder

  Visit me at my website: www.jasindawilder.com

  Email me: [email protected]

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