“I wasn’t sure. I just ... I wasn’t going to go. But then I heard Magnolia yelling ...”
I already know what Temperance is going to say. “You heard your brother’s name.”
She nods, her eyes filling with tears again. “I still don’t understand how he could’ve ...”
“Shh ... Don’t. That could be why you’re making yourself sick.”
She bites down on her lip and pulls herself together. “We need to make a run to the pharmacy.”
56
Temperance
Inever knew two minutes could be so damn long.Never.
“Thirty seconds,” Kane says, squeezing my hand.
His words definitely calmed some of my concerns about the possibility of me being pregnant, especially the part where he said he was done with this part of his life.
I meet that icy blue gaze I’ve come to adore more than life itself. “No matter what, it’s you and me against the world. Deal?”
Kane’s lips stretch in a smile. “No matter what. I love you, Temperance.”
“Not more than I love you.”
He pulls me against his side, and together we walk toward the counter where the test lays.
Holy shit.
It’s positive.
Epilogue
Kane
Eighteen months later
When we drive through town, the first thing I notice is that the Giles name has been removed from all the buildings it used to grace. I suppose Mount arranging for Giles’s body to be found with a boatload of evidence of his involvement with human trafficking will motivate a city to forget the family name.
Still hard to believe we’re here.
“You sure this is where you want to live? We could go anywhere.”
My wife—my beautiful, incredible wife—looks over at me from the passenger seat of the SUV.
“I already bought the house. There’s no changing my mind now.” Temperance glances up in the rearview mirror to look in the backseat at our sleeping twin girls. “They’re going to love it here.”
At the stop sign, I look over my shoulder. Just like every time I see them, I can’t help but smile.We did that.
Fucking miracles.
I also married their mama before they were born, and because we were on an island in the middle of the South Pacific, I was able to give her my name.
When we came back, we learned that Temperance’s girl Ariel had wiped much of the history of my death off the internet, but it still doesn’t wipe people’s minds clean. I’m Ken Sax, an avid day trader to the rest of the world, because it will never be safe for me to live as Kane Savage. It doesn’t bother me, though, because I have a life I could never have dreamed of the day I adopted my alias.
I don’t know how I let Temperance talk me into moving into a house out on acreage just one town over from where I grew up.Oh, wait. Yes, I do. She was naked.All joking aside, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give any of my girls.
“Turn up here. It’s down about a mile, on the right.”