Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
Hazel might be a strangely calm and quiet infant, but evidently, she was a biter. Before I’d put my foot down, I’d seen my wife literally get tears in her eyes when Hazel fed from her. The doctor said it was normal, but I wasn’t having it. With or without teeth, that shit had to hurt. So, a couple meals a day came from a bottle, even when Elise was home.
“I wanna be on my feet,” she responded. “Yesterday at work, I got tired after a freaking hour. I had to sit down and catch my breath.”
“You must be the most impatient Quinn,” I said, shaking my head. “You just gave birth, baby. Give it time. Rest.”
She waved me off.
Sometimes, I felt like I was married to two versions of Elise. There was Elise Becker, mother and wife, my amazing Pipsqueak, who applied logic and reason to everything. Then there was the business owner who honored the name given to her by her parents; she ran Treats by Elise Quinn, and she couldn’t take it easy worth a damn. Logic flew out the window if she had a deadline to keep.
I supposed it was good, though. It’d taken me years to discover that she had flaws. I could stop checking her for halos, because goddamn if the woman didn’t drive me fucking crazy with her incessant need to be at the very top of her game. It was inhuman not to allow for errors, particularly with a business that was still fairly new.
I dropped my gaze to Hazel instead, who was happily drinking from the bottle and not torturing Pipsqueak’s nipples.
“Your mother would freak out on me if I’d waved her off like that, wouldn’t she? Yes, she would.”
Hazel blinked slowly.
Elise sighed heavily. “I hate it when you’re right, Mister.”
I smiled to myself, satisfied, and reached for the radio in the window behind me. We weren’t radio people; to be honest, it felt like an archaic technology outside the car. But when Finn landed a job at the local radio station, we’d bought one.
He delivered the traffic report four times a day and had his own, albeit very brief, weekly show about what was new in town.
“Grace!” Elise called. “You can turn off the cartoons now. Breakfast is ready.”
Conveniently when Hazel was finished eating hers. I set down the bottle and adjusted the towel over my shoulder, because some of the milk would make a reappearance soon.
“This was such a good idea,” Elise groaned. “If only I didn’t get so damn tired.”
I did notice she became winded quicker, and I suspected one of the reasons she’d wanted to push Hazel’s stroller was so she could lean a bit on the handle. Meanwhile, Hazel was tucked away in the basket, awning up, windscreen up, surrounded by blankets, and fast asleep.
“If only you didn’t push yourself too hard,” I replied with a smirk.
She was adorable every time she scowled, but add rosy cheeks from the cold, a knitted beanie that matched the one Grace wore, and mittens, and it was impossible to keep from grinning at her.
“Daddy, look! There’s still snow here!”
I glanced over at Grace, who’d found the remnants of a snow pile that someone had shoveled from their driveway.
“What you did with our snow pile was much cooler,” I commented.
She smiled widely. “I made so many snowmen.”
A village of them, even.
Slowly but surely, we made our way through the district, bypassing the small town center, and took a brief break when we reached Mary and James’s house so Pipsqueak could go to the bathroom.
When we finally reached the marina, we were all starving, and my wife was just a tad cranky.
A tad, she agreed to. I wouldn’t dare speak against her.
I could count on Darius, thankfully. He had no such qualms. As soon as we’d greeted each other at the bar, he turned to his sister.
“The fuck are you even doing running around?” he asked, frowning. “It’s bad enough that you couldn’t go on a real maternity leave.”
“Not you, too!” she complained.
“Thank you,” I mouthed to him.
“The fuck!” Grace laughed.
Fuck!
Darius and I winced, predicting Elise’s pointed glare before it appeared. She already blamed us for Grace’s language. Sometimes a “damn” or “shit” slipped out. This was her first time saying fuck.
“That’s not a Grace word, trooper,” Darius told our girl. “You leave that to the adults, ya hear?”
“I think it’s best I talk to her,” Elise replied with her best fuck-you smile. It was a sight. “Is our usual table ready?”
Darius had one of those smiles too, and he deployed it with practiced ease. “That one doesn’t fly with me, sunshine. Yeah, your table is ready. And yeah, you need to fucking unclench. You get unhappy when you try to control everything.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Perhaps when I tried to tell her the same thing, I wrapped it up too nicely. I needed to be more blunt like her brothers sometimes.