“No, I’d never hurt you.”

I laugh softly. “It won’t be your choice. You’ll take me with you because I will go where you go. You’re going to be the end of me, Remington Tate, but that’s the way I want to go.”

His face twists with pain as he drags the backs of his knuckles along my jaw. “No, Brooke. I will protect you even from me.”

We stare at each other for a moment, and the determination in his eyes to protect me only reassures me that, whatever happens, my life will always be intertwined with his, come good or bad. I will walk by his side, run, fight, cling, and chase his dreams, which have now become mine. “Like you said, I’ll love you if it kills us,” I whisper as I stroke his face. “We all die. I’d rather die loving the hell out of you.”

“Baby, I’m the one who’ll love the hell out of you,” he says thickly, squeezing me, making me laugh in complete and total happiness. “Remy . . . where are we going to have the baby?”

He straightens up and lifts me in his arms, with my legs still locked around his hips as we cross the ring. “Wherever you want to have it. It’ll be off season. I can take you anywhere you like.”

“I was thinking I could keep my apartment. At first, I wasn’t going to renew. But it might be smart to have somewhere to touch base. And I have a spare bedroom I used to do yoga in and could turn into a nursery. Melanie’s all for decorating it. . . .”

He sits us down on the stool at the corner of the ring, where a basket of towels and drinks awaits us. He grabs a towel and eases me onto his lap as he slowly starts cleaning me up, his profile calm and relaxed. “I’ll ask Pete to renew your lease for another year while we look for something else,” he tells me. “You can use the card I gave you to charge anything you’d like.”

I wind an arm around his neck and poke a hidden dimple. “So I’m to be your kept girlfriend and employee? Officially?”

He grabs the back of my head, angles my face up almost to the ceiling, and licks a path from under my chin right up to my mouth, where he roughly engulfs my mouth with his. “Officially, you’re Mine.”

“WILL WE GO through the usual route for vaccinations, or will we find a doctor who works with us a different schedule? There’s so much evidence vaccines could be the cause of autism,” I tell Remington one night.

I’m eating tons of vegetables. I’ve read that different-color vegetables provide different antioxidants. Green veggies provide different ones than purple and orange ones, so I’m eating a rainbow every morning, noon, and evening. The best for Remington’s baby.

Also, pineapple is the fruit of the moment. It is all I want to eat. As soon as we reach every location, Remington orders Diane to bring all the organic pineapples she can find. I blend them with bananas to make smoothies. I eat them with cayenne pepper. Diane sautés them for me with little bits of turkey. I am a pineapple freak and Remington is amused like hell because of it.

“I’d say it’s a girl,” Diane told me yesterday, “because you’re craving sweets. But you look too good. When you have a girl—at least, when I had my girls, I looked like shit.”

“Why?”

“Girls steal your beauty. And your man’s love.” Her lips curl as she studies my stomach with narrowed, curious eyes. “But I wouldn’t trade my girls for anything. Have you done the string thing with a ring?”

“No,” I say and she explains how you wrap a string around a ring and hold it over your belly and watch it do either circles for a boy or lines for a girl. It sounded silly, but, of course, now I lie naked in bed and hold the ring I borrowed from Diane over my tummy. Remington is playing chess on his iPad, the backs of our heads pressing as he does his thing and I do mine. We’re going to Austin in a few weeks, and I know it’s starting to make him restless, because he’s not getting a lot of sleep.

I really marvel at the way he uses chess to center himself. All those nights he would be restless before and grab his iPad, resting it on me, I had no idea he played chess.

Now, I tie the ring onto a thread as he tells me, “We’ll get a doctor we like and have him work with us on our vaccination schedule,” and I nod as I finally hang the ring over my stomach and watch it move. “Is it a circle or a line?” I ask.

He stops playing and sets the iPad aside, turning to watch. I think it’s a boy because I’m carrying low and sleep on my left side, and my hair is full-bodied and shiny, but I’m not sure how true those old wives’ tales are.

“It’s doing both,” I answer myself of the damn ring, laughing. “What failure!” I squeak when he grabs me by the underarms and drags me to him.

“What do you want it to be?” he asks, spreading out over me and brushing a loose tendril behind my ear.

“Anything. I’m just so curious to know.”

“You can know,” he tells me, kissing the tip of my nose. “I’ll take you to a doctor so you can know, but I don’t want to know.”

“Why don’t you?” I slide my arms around his and stare into his blue eyes. “Are you afraid of loving it too much, too hard, before you even meet it?”

“Whatever they say, it won’t be real until we hold it.” He drops to his back and pulls me to his side; then he cups the back of my head and sets my face against his neck in my special crook, and I close my eyes and lightly lick him like he’s taught me he likes. He is so big, he loves so hard, he fights so hard. I’m giving him what he has never, ever had and never even probably knew he wanted. He’s afraid to hope. . . .

The next day, I hang around the sidelines, watching him pound the heavy bag. Hit. Hit. Hit. I’m doing some yoga stretches when I feel a definite bump coming from inside me. I stop breathing. I feel it again and I go utterly still, and it comes once more. It’s not a bubble. I feel as if something inside me is punching me, just like Daddy is punching the heavy bag.

My heart leaps and I leap just as hard to my feet.

“Remington. Remy! Remington fucking Tate!”

He swings around and stops the swinging bag with one hand.

“Feel this!” I take his glove off with shaky hands and toss it aside and put his hand on my stomach, my heart racing. Come on, little baby. . . .

Remington frowns in puzzlement. It kicks.

He narrows his eyes and presses his big hand closer, his eyes flicking up to mine. “Is that . . . ?”

I nod.

All of a sudden, he flashes me a white, arresting smile, his dimples as deep as I’ve ever seen them, his eyes bluer than the sea in Tahiti as he ducks his head as if ready to talk to the baby. “Tell her to do it again,” he whispers.

“She pays no attention to me.” My lips tip up in a smile as I nudge him playfully. “And it’s a he. Because my hair is shiny and I’m carrying low, I think. And he’s got quite a punch. Maybe if you ask him nicely, he’ll show you more of his moves.”

“Kick for Papa and let’s move it!” Coach yells from the other side of the heavy bag.

Remy smirks at me and Riley comes over, all lazy surfer-boy swagger.

“He moved? Jesus, I have to feel this,” he reaches out.

“Don’t touch,” Remington growls, slapping his hand aside.

“Dude, she’s like a sister—”

“Hands off, Riley,” he warns, shoving him aside with one arm.

Riley releases a great peal of laughter, while Remington grabs me closer with one hand and keeps the other spread on my abdomen, our gazes holding as we wait like two dodos for the baby to move.

When the baby kicks again, and he bursts out laughing, I’m so full of love, I hug him. “Is that real enough for you?” I breathe, a smile dancing on my lips as I tip my head up at him, my nostrils catching the delicious scent of his soap and sweat clinging to his skin.

“That felt fucking surreal,” he whispers, his eyes alive with joy, and, as if it were a contest for speed, he kisses my forehead, my nose, my cheeks, and my chin; then he grabs me by the waist and flings me in the air, a squeak of alarm leaving me as he catches me.

“Remington Tate, you’re the only man who flings his pregnant girlfriend in the air like that!”

“She’s a little firecracker and she loves it!” He flings me up again.

That night, for the first time, we play baby his first song. Remy puts his headphones on my stomach and plays Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open.”

The song tells the baby how he’ll show him the world and receive him “with arms wide open,” and I swear I can feel the baby’s comfort while his sexy, beautiful father stretches out beside me and starts kissing me.

“Has she got my hook?” he asks thickly, between those soft, drugging kisses as we hear the music trail into my tummy.

“He has definitely got your hook, because of course it’s all about you,” I softly tease, cupping his jaw.

He laughs. “All about me?”

“All of it. Everything. My whole life,” I say with a dramatic flair that makes it obvious I’m exaggerating, but his smile is so dazzling and huge, his big lion’s ego so grand in the room, I pat his jaw and laugh, and for some reason, I just have to say it again, if only to keep looking at that big wide grin on his face. “Yes, Remy, it’s really all about you.”

SIXTEEN

AUSTIN AWAITS

“So it’s all over the headlines that Riptide’s girlfriend is pregnant,” Pete says as we fly to Austin.

Now Josephine flies with us too, and today she sits with Pete, Riley, and Remington in one of the living room sections, while Coach is on the bench, and Diane and I occupy one of the other living room sections. Remy and the men seem to be discussing my security for the two Austin fights. Apparently, we’re approaching semifinals, so Scorpion will now be fighting on the same evenings as Remington.

A part of me is anxious to see if we’ll bump into Nora at the fights, while another part of me dreads the outcome of such an encounter.

Remy is in a gruff, overprotective bad mood. The fact that his fucked-up parents live in Austin and that he sold the house where we usually stay undoubtedly annoys him. Pete rented another house to keep us away from the media, but Remington is not appeased. I know he doesn’t like the thought of me being in the same state as Scorpion, much less the same zip code.

While I show Diane the pictures Melanie sent me of color schemes for the baby’s room, I hear Remington’s voice, low, as if he doesn’t want me to hear, but authoritative. “Anyone approaches her or so much as looks wrongly at her, you take care of it immediately.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see how Pete nods somberly and smoothes a hand down his black tie. “Don’t worry, Rem, I’ll protect her as if she were mine.”

“She’s not yours, dipshit. She’s MINE.”

“Mister Tate,” Josephine interjects, “I’ll be on standby making sure she’s not in any way threatened or inconvenienced.”

“I really love this blue-and-green scheme,” Diane tells me, disconnecting me from the conversation on the other side of the plane.