THIS FEELS LIKE HEAVEN.
I’m wrapped in cotton. Warm. Secure. Safe. The lyrics of an old hymn are written on the walls around me.
It is well with my soul.
Mama used to sing it while she made biscuits. Sometimes she would cry. I couldn’t tell from pain or pleasure, but it was a beautiful sound. Mama used to say some of the best songs came from pain.
He gives us beauty for ashes, Kai Anne.
Her voice in my head is as rich and real as when she was alive, her Southern drawl slowing every word, inviting you to sit a spell.
“You brought the baby with you.”
I look up, startled by the familiar voice I thought I’d never hear again and by the baby I just now realize I’m holding.
“Mama?” Shock and joy ricochet through me like a Mexican jumping bean, so happy and frantic I almost drop the baby. My mother stands there, as beautiful as she was when I was a little girl.
“Here, let me take her.” Mama cuddles the baby girl in her arms, her expression soft and awed. “She’s so beautiful, Kai Anne.”
I step closer to see for myself, and breathe in Mama’s scent of cinnamon and pears. Her soft hair brushes against my arm. It
is
her. The hair hangs almost to her elbows like a long, dark night. The beautiful face I grew up with is unlined by pain, and the eyes she lifts to my face are alive and alert, slanting and exotic. She looks nothing like the last time I saw her when she lay in her bed dying before dawn.
“Are you even looking at her?” Mama laughs and shakes her head, shifting the baby so I can see. “She looks just like you did when you were a baby.”
And she does. The same dark, downy hair curling around her face. The same pink bow mouth. And those are my winged brows in flight over the slightly tilted eyes. But when she looks back at me, as sweet as baby’s breath, they aren’t my eyes. They’re quicksilver. They’re storm clouds heralding rain. She has her father’s eyes.
“Where’s Rhys, Mama?” I roll the panic out of my voice like lumps from dough. I knead out the fear that would rise in my chest. “Is he here? Is he with us?”
It’s like Mama doesn’t hear me. She’s stroking the baby’s chubby fingers and singing the tune that warmed our small kitchen on cold mornings.
“When peace like a river attendeth my way,” she croons, looking up at me, a gentle smile curling around the words. “When sorrows like sea billows roll.”
Those lyrics have always calmed my fears, eased my worries, but not now. There is only one thing that could.
“Rhyson, Mama. Where is he?” Distress spikes my voice to a higher octave. “I want him. Where is he?”
“It is well with my soul,” she keeps singing.
“Rhyson.” My heart is torn between staying here with Mama and this beautiful baby girl and seeking out the other half of my soul. I don’t want to leave them, but Rhyson is the distant music my ears strain to hear. If I could just get closer. I have to go. I have to—
“Pep.”
A gentle shake at my shoulder startles me, jerking a sharp breath through my mouth and inflating my chest. I blink a few times until my eyes adjust to the semi-dark of the room, adjust to the time and space I’ve landed in. I’m not in that dream that felt like Heaven. I’m not in that hospital room, a year ago today, wrenched back to life after flat-lining. I’m in our home. In a dimly lit room with the man for whom I defied death.
A shadowy outline of broad shoulders blocks the moonlight the blinds allow through the window. There’s a click and then soft light from a lamp nearby.
“I knew I was the man of your dreams,” Rhyson says, a slight smile playing around his full lips. “I just didn’t realize it was so literal.”
“What?” I glance up at him, still orienting myself to the here and now.
“You were saying my name in your sleep.” His smug smile would usually have me rolling my eyes, but that dream felt so real, even his smugness is welcome. I can’t shake it off. I can’t laugh it off. I just look back at him, eating up every beautiful inch of him with my eyes. I stare until his smugness slips, and concern takes its place.
“Pep, what’s wrong?” He leans down to kiss my forehead. “Let me take her.”
I glance down at the peaceful bundle swaddled in my arms. Our daughter Aria blinks back at me with her daddy’s eyes. A wide yawn stretches her little mouth and squints her silvery eyes closed. Her lips are still shiny with milk. My silk kimono flops off my shoulder, exposing one breast. I must have fallen asleep feeding her again.
“You’re probably working too hard.” Rhyson leans down to take Aria, his eyes dropping to the naked nipple tipped with a drop of milk. “Aria is one lucky girl.”
Rhyson chuckles when my cheeks heat up as I pull the kimono closed over my nakedness. I had just taken a shower after an exhausting day of shooting when I heard Aria’s distinct hungry cry from the nursery. Guess I was more tired than I realized. The choreography for my first video is demanding, but I love it. It’s what I originally envisioned my debut video would be. I’m not sure how he got my new cell number, but Dub texted me with a simple message.
Use the tunnels.
The routine may not be what it would have been when Dub and I first brainstormed it. Who knows what we could have done as a team? I don’t regret walking away from him, though. I plan to spend the rest of my life showing Rhyson he is the most important thing to me. A dance routine seems a small sacrifice.
I stand from the ancient rocking chair Aunt Ruthie brought from the attic back in Glory Falls. She said when I was a baby, it used to put me out like a light. It still does. I often fall asleep before Aria.
Rhyson is doing that subtle baby bounce, his lips to her ear. Sometimes he sings her to sleep. Sometimes he whispers to her until she gives in and drifts off. Whatever he does, he’s better at getting her to sleep than anyone else. Even Aunt Ruthie.
“Is Aunt Ruthie home?” I tighten the silk knot at my waist.
“Not yet.” Rhyson grins over Aria’s dusky hair. “She went to a movie with one of the ladies from her yoga group.”
Aunt Ruthie has definitely adapted to LA life. After the shooting, we had to be so careful with my long recovery while I was pregnant. Aunt Ruthie insisted she come stay for a while. “A while” turned into selling Glory Bee and moving in with us. It’s awesome having her here, and she’ll be invaluable when our little family goes on the road for my tour.
“So we’re home alone, huh?” I lean up to take Rhyson’s earlobe between my teeth, pressing my breast into his arm. “How long do you think it’ll take you to get her to sleep?”
Our eyes collide and kindle in the nursery’s dim lamplight, igniting the small space separating us. Between long hours in the studio finalizing my album, the shoot for my first video, and all Rhyson’s been doing for Prodigy, we’ve been missing each other. Add an infant not yet sleeping through the night, and it’s been a week since we made love.
“She’s almost out now.” Rhyson’s voice roughens with need. “Go wait for me. I’ll be there soon.”
I relish the fire building inside me as I walk down the hall to our bedroom. Anticipation licks across my skin and burns away the last vestiges of the dream. It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of Mama since Aria was born. There must be some part of me that so badly wants Aria to meet her grandma that I make it happen in my dreams sometimes.
My loyalty to Mama continues to complicate the relationship with my father. Forgiving him, trying with him, still sometimes feels like I’m betraying Mama; like I’m forgetting how he hurt her. How he hurt us. Maybe it took half his life and most of mine to make peace with his demons, but I think he has. Now he wants to make peace with me. We’ve spoken a few times by phone since Vegas. He flew in to see Aria when she was born, and seemed to fall in love with her instantly like any other grandpa would. Aria probably wouldn’t have made it if he and Cassie hadn’t been at the hospital that night. Having enough of the blood I needed so quickly to transfuse most likely saved Aria’s life. It probably saved mine. That alone makes me feel better about trying, so I do.
I walk over to the large window overlooking the hills just behind our house and sigh at the hard road behind and ahead of my father and me. Things have improved some because Cassie and I talk regularly. She’s a good kid, and I’ve encouraged her love of dance and performing as much as I have time to. I can’t blame her for the actions our father and her mother took all those years ago that splintered my family.
Warm hands span my waist and pull me back into a wall of muscle. I send my fingers up over the firm line of Rhyson’s neck to burrow in his hair.
“She’s asleep?” I ask.
“Hopefully for the night,” he says, voice husky against my neck.
His fingers deftly untie the knot sealing my kimono and he pushes my hair aside so his tongue can explore the cove behind my ear. He tugs at the shoulders of the robe until it slides down my body in a gasp of silk, hitting the floor around my ankles. I drop my head forward, and he lavishes the line of my shoulder with open-mouthed kisses. He dips to lick between my shoulder blades, and one wide palm reaches around to tug and twist my nipple.
“Rhys.” My voice is an inconsequential thing under the weight of this passion. It can’t hold. “That feels . . .”
His tongue wanders over to my right shoulder and he pauses over the scar interrupting the smooth plane of my back. He rests his forehead there for a few seconds, his breath growing labored behind me.
“I live you, Pep.” He kisses that small spot that almost cost my life. That almost cost Aria hers.
“I live you too.”
Tears collect at the corners of my eyes, and I’m so grateful to still be here with him. That night and the weeks that followed will always haunt us at least a little. How close we came to losing each other. But it only makes our days, our nights together that much richer. It only makes us that much more grateful.
His mouth is on the move again, and I feel the smallest rush of air when he squats behind me and palms my thighs. His lips whisper across the rounded cheeks of my bottom. His open mouth hot and hungry, nibbles at my curves.
“I love your ass,” he whispers over the heated skin.
“Baby, please.” My legs are ribbons. I can barely stand as he journeys down my legs, and suckles the vulnerable skin behind my knees. “I can’t take this.”
He stands, coming around to face me, twining our fingers and then walking backward to our bed, his eyes set on mine. He stops at the foot of the bed and releases my fingers. I immediately grab the hem of his t-shirt and push it over the powerful chest and shoulders until he’s bare. My lips fall to his nipples where I suck and bite until his panting breath fills my ears. All the while, I grip his lean hips and persuade the sleep pants down and over his legs until he’s as naked as I am.
He sits down, pulling me to straddle his thighs. Our tongues wrestle in each other’s mouths. His fingers twist my hair, tugging my head back, forcing my mouth open wider for him to pillage. I’m so caught up in the desperate intimacy of this kiss, of our bodies flush and moving against each other, seeking friction, I barely notice that he’s lain back and taken me with him. He pushes at my hips, sliding me up until my legs bracket his lean waist. He urges me up a few more inches until I’m spread over his chest. And a few more until I hover over his mouth.
“God, yes.” His breath whistles across the part of me that needs him most. His fingers press tight into my hips when he brings me down the last few inches to his lips. The first tender licks into my pussy drive my hands to the headboard. He hums against me, opening his mouth over me to devour. We war, him holding my hips still for his feast, and me bucking into his lips and tongue, the need to move overwhelming. I release the headboard, finding my breasts heavy and bobbing with the desperate motion of my body. I twist my nipples and riot over his face, lost in the need to blow the dam holding me back.
“Ahhhh, Rhys!”
The cry rips from my throat as I come, my head tipping until my hair brushes the small of my back. He drinks of me, greedily slurping at the juices painting the insides of my thighs and running his nose up and down my divide.
I’m limp when he lifts me and lays me down. He gives me no time to recover, his lips taking my nipples, his hands stroking inside my thighs. I want to protest, to stop him because my body can’t withstand another wave, but it feels too good, and before I know it, my hips are churning again, seeking him, hungry for him to fill me.
“Baby, now,” I plead, opening my eyes to find him staring at me.
“You’re so damn beautiful when you want me,” he whispers.
“I want you all the time.” I latch on to his cock, hard and ready between us, so close to where I need it to be. “I want you now.”
“Wait.” He presses his lips to mine. “You’ve gotta taste this.”
His tongue forays between my lips, and my own scent crowds my senses as he feeds the sweetness to me. It’s honey. It’s caramel. It’s crusted with confection because it’s my taste on his tongue. It’s the blend of him and me that soaks the lining of my mouth and slides down my throat. I moan into the kiss, spreading my legs under him as wide as I can, tempting him into my void.
“Please,” I beg with jagged breath. “Now.”
He nods, pushing my knees back as far as they’ll go before sinking in.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The words fall from his lips and land against my neck as that first moment of oneness consumes us both. “I dream about this pussy. I think about it all day.”
“It’s yours,” I gasp as our hips kiss and part, mimicking each other’s motions perfectly. I hook my ankles above the muscled curve of his ass, urging him as deep as he can go. He slams into me, knocking the air from my chest. I arch up, my neck curving an invitation for his lips. He sucks the skin, deliberately marking me as his. He rocks into me harder than he ever has, deeper than he ever has. I grip him more tightly than I ever have, scoring his back, trying to claw through skin and drill through bone until I reach soul.
The headboard knocks a sex-charged rhythm against the wall. Rhyson presses up to capture my eyes with his, the muscles of his arms strained, his hands fisted on the pillow beside my head as he plunders me. I could get lost in these eyes that possess me from above. I could get lost in this room, in this love that swallows up every fear and every doubt, and leaves me absolutely certain my life is here. My life is his. And as he comes inside me strangling a groan in his throat and slamming a fist into the tufted headboard, I know his life is mine.