If We Dare - J.H. Croix Page 0,75

her.

I thought—silly me—that we might have a few stolen moments. We got maybe two. But they were the best moments. With Jade warm and soft as she rested against me, her skin dewy from our rushed coupling, all felt perfectly right with the world.

But then, it always did when I was with Jade like this—our defenses gone, and nothing but the deep intimacy that bound us tighter and tighter together over time. For a man who once wasn’t so sure that I’d ever fall in love, Jade had turned me into the worst sap of all.

My breath was just returning to normal when a thin cry came through the baby monitor on the nightstand beside our bed. Jade laughed softly against my shoulder, the feel of her breath tickling my skin slightly.

“Well, that took longer than I thought,” she said when she lifted her head, resting her chin on her hand directly above my heart.

I felt my lips kick into a smile. I lifted my hand to smooth it over her hair. “That might’ve been almost two whole minutes.”

There was another cry. “There goes Dave” she commented.

Our twins were a handful. When Jade first got pregnant three months after we got married, I’d been a bundle of anxiety. Then, we found out we were having twins. Everything felt heightened when there were two. While twins were more work, logistically speaking, we’d learned they often comforted each other. That was a secret parents of twins often didn’t share. We waited, both of us turning to look at the monitor. Another cry from Dave came before Rachel made a cooing sound, and then they were giggling. At nine months old, they were a handful, but I wouldn’t change anything for a second. We’d named our boy after my friend Dave. I had faith our Dave would live up to Dave’s memory.

Jade smiled. I squeezed her bottom. At that moment, my stomach let out a growl. Jade eyed me. “We forgot to have dinner first.”

I shrugged. “The twins were asleep.” That explained everything.

Sleep became more valuable than platinum when you had two babies under the age of one. I’d been warned by my friends who had kids that I should be prepared to live on only a few hours of sleep until at least the age of three and potentially later.

Shifting upward, I propped myself against the headboard, not quite ready to give up this moment with Jade. “How was your day?”

With the sounds of our twins mumbling to each other in garbled speech as background noise through the baby monitor, Jade told me just how her day went.

After feeling like she was floundering with what to do, she’d finally started her own landscaping business as she’d originally wanted years before. She loved working outside and loved flowers. With Valentina’s help, she got all the business and accounting details lined out.

Meanwhile, I was still on the first responder crew and still working at the lodge, and it suited me. When I had free time, I was working on building our new house. We still lived in the house I’d inherited from my grandmother, but we needed more space.

My stomach growled again, and Jade rose up. “You’re starving. Now that the twins are awake, let’s go eat.”

An hour or so later, Jade was leaning down to pick up the bits of granola that had fallen on the floor, thrown off by Rachel from her high chair tray. I’d just made a pot of coffee and took a sip and watched her.

My heart clenched. Each beat felt like a burst of joy. Jade stood and tossed the granola in the compost bin under the sink before resting her hips against the counter beside me. I looked down at her messy hair and simply smiled.

“What?” she asked.

“You’re beautiful.”

“With applesauce on my face,” she said, gesturing to the streak on her cheek and then pointing to more on her collarbone, both spread there by Rachel, who was a messy eater.

Dave squealed in the background, his feet thumping against the high chair legs. The cacophony of twins was the backdrop of our life, and I loved every minute of it with Jade.

“Yes, applesauce and all.”

Her eyes widened slightly, a slow smile unfurling. “Well, you look amazing with this.” She lifted a hand to trail it over my chin. I reached up to feel a dried smear there. “Should we have a moratorium on applesauce?” she teased.

“I don’t care about messes with you,” I murmured right before dipping my