Delivering His Gifts (Mountain Men of Liberty #10)- K.C. Crowne Page 0,46

sleep. But she repeated herself. “Mommy? Is that you?”

I poked my head inside. “Yes, sweetie. Please go back to sleep.”

“Is Mason here?” she asked, yawning.

“Not anymore. He just stopped by for a minute,” I said softly, opening the door a bit wider so I could step inside. It was clear she wasn’t falling back asleep right away. I might need to read her another story.

Zeus lifted his head as I entered, but once he saw it was me, he went right back to sleep, his head resting on Skyler’s side.

“I like Mason. He’s nice,” she said.

I sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair. “Yeah, he is nice, Sky.”

My heart ached at her words. I knew she already had ideas about us, and those ideas were bad. They were dangerous.

“Honey, please don’t talk to your daddy about Mason. I need to be the one to tell him about the baby and everything.”

Skyler adjusted in bed, moving to her back, to Zeus’s dismay. She stared up at me with wider eyes now. “Is Mason the daddy?”

I knew my little girl didn’t know the depth of her question. She knew that babies usually had mommies and daddies, at least in her limited experience. She had a mom and a dad, and all her friends had moms and dads. Not all of them were together; some were split up like us. She didn’t know all the details about how babies were made and how someone became a mommy or a daddy, or what it might mean in the grand scheme of things.

“Yes, honey, he is,” I said slowly. “But just like your mommy and daddy aren’t together, Mason and I aren’t going to be together either.”

I thought she might have questions about this, but to my surprise, she seemed to shrug it off. Likely because to her, that’s all she’d ever known. I’d left Greg when she was too young to remember.

“Am I having a brother or a sister?” she asked me, changing the subject to something more interesting to her. She grinned at me, and it was the cutest thing.

“We don’t know yet,” I said. “It’s too early. We should find out in a couple months, however.”

“I want to know now.” She pouted.

“I know, but does it really matter if it’s a boy or a girl? We’ll love him or her either way.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “But I would like a sister and a brother.”

I laughed. “Well honey, I think you’re only getting one or the other this time. I’m sorry.”

“Why can’t I have both?”

“Maybe one day,” I said wistfully. I’d always wanted at least three kids, if not four. I was an only child and had wished for brothers and sisters all my life, especially after my parents died. I never wanted my children to feel alone, as I had, and siblings meant family.

“Yay!” she said, obviously taking my maybe as a yes.

“Honey, I can’t promise that I’ll have more babies, but we’ll just have to see what the future holds, okay?”

“Okay.” She was quiet for a few moments, and I thought she might be asleep, but then she asked, “If it’s a girl, can we name her Daisy?”

“Daisy?” I asked with a chuckle. “Why Daisy?”

“I like that name a lot,” she said. Her eyes lit up as if she had a brilliant idea. “Ooh or maybe Dora, like Dora the Explorer.”

“We’ll have to see, honey,” I said.

“Please, Mommy, let me name the baby. Pretty please?”

“We can pick a name together. Mason might have some thoughts on the name too.”

She frowned. “Daddies don’t name babies.”

“Oh? Where did you hear that?” I chuckled.

“Daddy said he wanted you to name me after Grandma, but you wouldn’t do it.”

“Would you want to be named Henrietta instead?”

“No, I like my name,” she said.

I didn’t want to tell her the real reason I was opposed to Henrietta. It was nothing about the name being bad - I was fond of older names, in fact. Greg’s mother had been an absolute monster from the day I met her. I shuddered just thinking about how she’d turned her nose up at me and would rarely speak to me at family gatherings. She knew I came from a lower-class family and despised me for it, preferring her precious son marry some Stanford or Yale graduate instead of little old me. And when she’d found out I was pregnant, that was another story. She’d had the gall to ask if Greg was sure the baby was