but you.”
“Can I tell you the truth?” Connor leaned back slightly, meeting Forest’s gaze. His lilt was thick, spurred on by the emotions running through them both. “Every day I wake up and I think, I just can’t love him any more than I do today, and every night when I go to sleep, I discover I’m wrong. You, a ghra, are my universe. You hold every bit of stars, suns, and life in you, and until I found you, I was stumbling around in the dark. So remember that when we go downstairs. Today’s just the day we tell them down there that we’ve found one another and shall stand strong against it all.”
“Yeah,” Forest said with a grin. “Remember that when we have kids and they’re eating nacho cheese out of those big damned cans you keep buying.”
“I like orange gloop on my chips,” Con teased. “I can’t wait to have kids with you, Forest Morgan-Ackerman, and I sure as hell can’t wait to spend the rest of my life dancing in the kitchen with you too.”
Dancing After the Cake
IT WAS nearly midnight by the time the last of the Morgan children left. The ones still at home were either in bed or upstairs in the attic loft playing video games, saving the world from an apocalypse filled with zombies. Donal waited until he heard the last car leave their driveway before turning off the porch light and locking the front door. Going through the living room, he turned off the rest of the lights and picked up the last of the dishes left behind after Connor’s birthday party. The air still held the slight scent of chocolate cake and sugar with a healthy dose of whiskey, probably from the splash Ian spilled on the rug as he toasted his eldest brother.
The soft glow from the kitchen was enough for Donal to see his way through the house. And all the years they’d lived there, the furniture seemed to be nomadic, driven into different configurations by his restless bride. The swish of the dishwasher greeted him as he came through the door, and he held up the stack of plates and glasses he’d brought with him for Brigid to see.
Despite the horde of Morgans and their significant others who’d descended like locusts and brought with them a flurry of chaos, the kitchen was nearly spotless. Another round of trash would probably have to go out in the morning, and there was a small stack of plates on the counter next to the pantry, but all things considered, the place was fairly clean. Brigid was wiping down a chopping board with a tea towel, her hips swaying gently as she rolled them in time to a song playing on the stereo.
“These will be going in the next batch, then,” he rumbled at her in Gaelic, heading toward the sink. They often fell into the language they’d been born to, its rolling musical lilt as much of a comfort as the old house they’d settled in. “And don’t ye be thinking ye can open that up and we could fit them in, because I have no intention of spending the next hour mopping up soapsuds from the floor.”
“I’ve only done that once,” his wife replied, pushing her curly red hair from her face and tilting her chin up at him.
“Once?” he prodded.
“At the most three. Anything beyond that, I’m denying.” She sniffed imperiously, taking the dishes from him. “Get out the box from the back of the fridge and I’ll get these soaking.”
Donal stood there, leaning against the island in the middle of the kitchen, and watched the woman he’d married so many years before fill the sink with water and soap. They’d met in their teens, her flirting striking him mute and her boldness making him bashful. He’d come from a long line of stoic, stalwart men and women with stern personalities and hard manners, so Brigid Finnegan was the closest thing to playing with fire he could imagine.
He’d ignored her, politely sidestepping her when she approached him at school. He’d done everything he could to ignore the firebrand determined to crack him open, until one day he turned around to look down at the copper-haired pixie dogging his steps and asked her if she was insane.
Back then, he’d thought her to be spoiled, a girl raised in riches with little thought to anyone but herself. Brigid Finnegan was no one’s spoiled little girl. Her family worked for a