Locke was, though, and I found my very own giant on the stairs, an iPad in his big hands, lost in thought as he swiped the screen.
“Whatcha doing there, handsome?”
“Murdering my soul.” Locke shifted, making room for me, but honestly, he had no chance. He was a big man and I was the size of a bungalow.
Conceding, he moved up a step and patted the one in front of him.
I perched between his legs, enjoying the cage of his strong thighs, optimistic heat pulsing in my blood. We hadn’t fucked in forever—not conventionally, anyway. Nash made me come with his devilish mouth whenever I asked him to, and Locke... Lord, what that man couldn’t do with his fingers wasn’t worth having. But missing the intimacy of real sex was the only thing I truly disliked about being this pregnant.
All right. Maybe not the only thing. My stomach tightened hard enough to take my breath away. I squirmed and grabbed Locke’s ankle for support, focusing on the warmth of his big hand as he squeezed my shoulder. “I literally just peed. Why do these things make me feel like I’m going to wet myself?”
“Sounds like someone’s sitting on your bladder.”
“Little bastard.”
“Might be the big one.”
Big. A term I’d come to learn was relative when it came to the tiny humans in my belly. We didn’t know the sex of either baby. Just that one was bigger than the other and both were smaller than we wanted them to be.
Small doesn’t mean weak.
I shifted my attention to the iPad in Locke’s hands as he draped his arms over my shoulders, the tablet so pristine and shiny it had to be Alexei’s.
The flash drive Viktor had gifted Locke was plugged into the bottom. “You’re looking at the photos?”
Locke took a shaky inhale. “I was going to wait. Then I came out to try FaceTiming Lo again, and now I’m here.”
“Your heart needed to see them.”
“My heart is a fuckin’ fool.”
The iPad screen had darkened since I’d interrupted him. At his nod, I activated it again and an image of a younger Willow filled the screen, skinny and blonde, her feet buried in the sand at the beach.
I swiped the screen.
More Willow. Nicky. Logan. Locke and Logan in their twenties. In their thirties, where it was easy to see the periods in time when they’d lived vastly different lives.
There was no chronological order to the pictures, as if whoever had collated them, Viktor or Jakov, hadn’t wanted to look too closely.
I swiped through more pictures, landing on one of the Halliwell brothers in full firefighter gear, their faces smeared with soot, grime, and blood. An old photo, grainy and blurred. For the first time ever, I couldn’t tell them apart. “Which one is you?”
Locke leaned over me, his chest skimming my hair. “I don’t know.”
“I thought it was just me.”
“Nah, if it’s this ancient, I haven’t got a fuckin’ clue either.”
“Is it weird to not know your own face?”
“Maybe, but I was used to it from when we were kids. Logan’s hair didn’t get that dark until we were pretty much grown.”
The photo entranced me. I stared and stared at it, trying to figure it out, but I couldn’t. All I knew was that I loved them.
Another Braxton Hicks contraction hit my stomach, lashing my back with wrenching discomfort, forcing me from my ample rear with Locke’s helping hands at my back, bearing most of my gargantuan weight.
I still clutched the iPad and something I couldn’t quite decipher compelled me to swipe the screen again, to face another grainy image from a past I could hardly stand to imagine.
Little hands.