Series: Like Us Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
I frown a little. I also can’t visualize my life without Donnelly. And I feel supremely committed to him already. Like I’d donate a kidney and eyeball if he needed it. I just can’t see how tying the knot would intensify these feelings when everything we’ve been through is a greater declaration of undying love to me.
Moffy burps Cassidy against his shoulder. Soft pats on her back. “Before anyone comes in here, I wanted to talk to you about what you told Farrow in December, I think it was?”
I instantly smile. Ah, I’ve been awaiting Moffy to broach this topic. Which means my little seedling I planted inside Farrow actually sprouted! “About me donating my eggs?”
“Yeah. That was…that is a really big, generous thing, sis.”
“Are you crying?” Oh my heart. “Captain America doesn’t cry.” I’ve never seen Moffy tear up like this—or actually, I have. I’ve been remembering chunks of the day he married one of my favorite people on planet Earth, and Maximoff Hale definitely shed happy tears, even if the rain slipped them away.
“There must be an onion around here.” He sniffs.
“Onion-cutting bandits at play,” I nod, my eyes glassing too. I’m choked up.
“We love you so damn much,” he expresses. “Farrow really wants to see my resemblance in a kid, but I’d rather our next child have Farrow as the biological dad like Cassidy. It just makes more sense if…” He looks deeper at me. “If the Hale part comes from you.”
My chin quivers. It’s one of the most validating feelings in the world. To be the chosen DNA for their future baby because they love me. Because I am a Hale. Because there should be more Hales thriving in this universe and the next.
I hug my brother so tight, careful of Cassidy in his arms.
He squeezes me back with the brotherly toughness of our youth, and when we pull apart, I ask, “How many kids do you want? Because I’m willing to donate as many eggs for the Marrow lineage.”
Moffy laughs and rubs circles on Cassidy’s back. She’s a smiley baby. “We’re happy if we just have one more, but I think we’ll try to have four total. It wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I smile brighter at him. Being a child of four? “I can’t imagine a life without them.” Without Kinney and Xander. And like I’ve summoned our younger siblings, they barrel into the penthouse kitchen with our massive, furry dogs in tow.
The entire Newfie litter has been together tonight, and Orion has pounced on Erebor, Salem, and Arkham like he hasn’t said hello to them in forever. When he lives with Arkham and sees him every single day. All their tails wag, and I’m just happy my siblings’ dogs seem to accept and love Orion’s hyper behavior.
“Did you see it?” Kinney waves Xander’s phone at us.
He slides on a leather barstool and grabs a bowl of pizza bites I microwaved ten minutes ago. “Tell Kinney I don’t care what a bunch of Fizzle employees think about me being anti-social.”
“It’s bullshit,” Kinney curses. “Xander ‘showed a lack of initiative’—he was there. On a smelly, man-musky, stenchy bus crammed with the one person in the family he doesn’t get along with.”
“You did well, Summers,” Moffy says with love.
Xander almost smiles. “Yeah, but not for third place. My goal isn’t to be ranked high or low. I’m just trying to finish the thing without quitting.”
Kinney huffs beside me. Crossing her arms, she tells me, “You should be higher too.”
I smile big, and I swear her lips rise. “Thanks, Kinney.”
She leans a little into me, and my heart mushrooms beyond human comprehension. Which must mean I’m in a celestial plane. I’ve felt a revived relationship with my little sister this year. She’s called me a few times a week to chat about an astronomy club she joined at school and the basketball games she’s sat through to support her JV cheerleader best friend Audrey.
And I haven’t closed off to her. She knows all about the comic book Donnelly and I are creating for fun. The one we just conceptualized a week ago on the bus. Kinney insisted the character based off her should be named Princess Amethyst.
Nowhere can I remember feeling this close to my sister, so maybe it isn’t revived exactly. More like, it’s born for the first time.
“What I don’t get,” Kinney says to me, hoisting the email between us, “is why Uncle Stokes used the first person ‘I’ when giving you feedback and no one else.”
Huuuh? I peer closer, surprised I missed that. He wrote, I loved your spunk and outside-the-box thinking regarding the buttons. “He didn’t say the board loved them,” I realize.
“Getting Uncle Stokes in your corner is still big,” Moffy tells me. “He’s the CEO. He has some sway.”
“He just feels sorry for me,” I mumble.