Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 76846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
“I mean, if they’ve been alive for three hundred years, hopefully they’ve learned how to lay some pipe, right, Elian?” she asked, making me turn to see him frozen in the living room, brows raised.
“I’m… early,” he decided, starting to slow walk backward.
“No, no. I have to go hit the bookstore before I make dinner,” Lore said, lifting the heavy book off of the table and cradling it to her chest. “Do you want to come, Saff?” she asked.
“Ah, no,” Saff said, suddenly seeming a little more shut down. “I, ah, have plans,” she added, making Lore and I share a confused look. But we knew better than to try to pry things out of Saff.
Besides, she was grabbing her book, and rushing past Elian already.
“Did I interrupt?” Elian asked as he watched Lore follow Saff out. “I know you look forward to this,” he added as he brought his bag over to the island and started pulling out ingredients for dinner.
We shared that task now, though he definitely had more recipes in his arsenal than I did, so he tended to cook more often than I did.
Though I’ll go ahead and toot my own horn and say I found I had a skilled hand with baked goods, where Elian was still pretty hopeless with that task.
“No, we were pretty much done,” I said, eyeing the heavy cream and block of parmesan. It looked like Alfredo was in my future. My stomach let out a hearty growl at the idea.
I placed my hand there, seeing the gorgeous marquise-cut diamond sitting on my left ring finger, a promise of a future we’d been working toward ever since I’d officially moved into this condo, and wondering how long it would be until my belly started to go round. I was hoping it at least stayed flat for another two weeks, or my seamstress was going to have a fit since I’d already had my final fitting.
I never imagined myself having a large wedding. Mostly because I didn’t have any family that I was close to any more.
But, I guess, now I did.
Elian’s blood and extended family was now mine to share. And they were more than enough to fill up the church.
“You okay? Nauseated?” Elian asked, watching me with worried eyes.
We’d suffered through about nine weeks of absolute hell. Throwing up, migraines that I couldn’t control with my usual meds, just complete misery for me, and by extension, him.
But for the past five or six days, the nausea had disappeared, leaving ravenous hunger in its wake.
“Just starving,” I admitted, watching as he reached into the bag to push those almond biscotti things at me.
“You think of everything,” I said as I opened the package.
A loud sawing sound had Elian’s gaze sliding toward the hallway. “Were they doing that all through bookclub?” he asked.
The never-ending construction was a bone of contention with Elian, who was promised this project would have been done almost two months ago. Which, in city construction timelines, was practically on track.
Though, yeah, we were still a ways away. Including the worst part of the project that would have them cutting the wall open in the living room to open up the condos into one giant one.
I was just hoping they’d be done before the baby got here.
“It was background noise,” I said, shrugging. “Just think how nice it is going to be to have one, big home to bring the baby to,” I said, running my hands up his chest to wrap around his neck. “It’ll all be worth it in the end. And we already have the nursery,” I reminded him.
“Did you get the girls’ input on the wallpaper?” he asked. We’d been hopelessly deadlocked about the decision since we started looking at all the options online.
We wanted to go neutral, not because we weren’t going to learn the gender of the baby, but because we decided this would be the first of several, and we wanted it to be able to work for all of the babies moving forward.
“Lore liked the one with the castles.”
“And Saff?”
“Thought that the leaves look like pot leaves. And now I can’t see anything else,” I admitted.
“Back to the drawing board then, it seems,” he said, leaning his forehead to mine. “Expecting someone?” he asked when there was a knock at the door.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, but Islah was dropping by a lot since she learned she was about to be an auntie. Sometimes, it was with cute stuffies she saw in a shop window. Other times, it was with ginger lozenges for my nausea. We already had a small stack of books to read to the baby.
Elian moved away from me, striding over to open the door.
And there was Serano, gaze expectant.
“Saw you with the groceries,” he said, glancing toward the kitchen.