Doin' a Dime by Vale, Lynn (learn to read activity book .txt) 📕

Son of a bitch.

“Daddy!” Jester yelled. “Oh, God! It’s crawling up my back!”

“Uhhh,” the state trooper said. “Is everything okay here?”

Jester, my bright and shining star, said, “Does it sound like everything is okay here? I just had Mexican food and I’m literally unable to keep the squirts from catapulting out of me! The only thing saving my mom’s truck right now is the fact that I’m in a car seat!”

My other son, Bastian, squealed in toddler delight. “Squirts!”

The state trooper took one look at the back seat full of kids, looked at me, then said, “Head home, sir. I’m sorry.”

Then he walked back to the cruiser behind us. Laughing.

I waited until the trooper was in his car before slowly putting my truck into gear and starting off.

The moment the trooper couldn’t hear us anymore, Jester stopped.

“What…” I paused, trying to contain my laughter, as I looked in my rearview mirror at my son. “In the hell was that?”

“That was me saving your ass,” Jester said. “After you got pulled over that last time, I looked up ways to get out of tickets. That was one of the suggestions.”

My son was so smart, that sometimes he sounded more intelligent than an adult.

It was disheartening at times how smart he was.

Ten minutes later, I wasn’t laughing anymore.

I walked through the door, and her eyes narrowed on me.

“Why,” Wyett said quietly, “did I just get a call from my best friend telling me about some hilarious story spreading around the station about a man in a truck with his four-year-old screaming ‘I have to take a shit’ and ‘it’s coming out of my ass?’” she paused. “And why do I feel like that might have something to do with why my fries are cold?”

I frowned. “Why was Six at the police station?”

She rolled her eyes. “Bailing out Bruno. Apparently, he got into a bar fight.”

I snorted. “Over what?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” she admitted. “I was too upset thinking about how you got pulled over. Again.”

I pulled out my phone and texted Bruno, then thought better of it and just looked up his arrest record by breaking into the local precincts data base.

“It was because someone tried to run over his dog,” he said. “Or, at least, I think that’s what I’m reading.”

“Regardless.” Wyett waved that off. “How about you tell me the entire story?”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. “It wasn’t like what you’re thinking,” I explained. “I didn’t tell Jester to say it.”

“What did he say?” she asked.

So I explained everything, ending with how worried I was about getting her French fries to her hot.

She started to laugh, holding her belly as she did.

“Oh, God.” She wheezed. “How the hell did we get a kid like him?”

I asked myself that every day.

Then again, I asked myself how I got so lucky as to have been blessed with all of them.

I was one lucky man.

Laughing, she only walked away, letting me off quite a bit easier than I ever expected.

I walked into the kitchen an hour later, twenty minutes after putting the ice cream to ‘freeze’ in the ice cream maker, when I saw my four-year-old, the one that’d bailed me out today, standing by the mixer.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

My child whirled around, Barbie in hand, and stared at me warily.

That’s when I saw the milky substance dripping off of the Barbie’s feet.

How could this kid be so smart with computers, yet so weird when it came to everything else?

“Where is my Barbie?” I heard Wyett ask. “I swear I just had it on my bed.”

I raised a brow at my kid, and he tossed it in my direction and took off running.

Rolling my eyes, I washed the Barbie’s legs off, then took it to my wife who had, while on bed rest, taken it upon herself to start making Barbie clothes and making a damn killing off of it on Etsy.

I tossed it onto the bed, then went ahead and crawled up the length of my wife’s body.

She stopped what she was doing—sewing what looked like a dress—and stared at me warily.

We hadn’t had sex in five months.

And it’d been five months too long.

I couldn’t wait until this newest baby was here, and I wasn’t even going to lie and say it was because I was excited about adding a third baby to our household.

I was excited.

Only, I found that I missed my wife’s…

“What are you thinking?” Wyett asked, her breath fanning my lips.

I looked down into her eyes.

“Thinking about how much I miss this beautiful body of yours,” I admitted.

Her lips twitched. “I…”

“Hey, your kid is busy dipping what looks like a celery stalk into your ice cream on the counter. You might want to go deal with that,” Six said as she came into the room, took up a spot on the bed next to my wife beside her fabric, Barbie dresses, and romance novels. “By the way, way to go today. You’re the talk of the station.”

I rolled my eyes, left with a quick kiss on my wife’s lips, and then went to find my son.

Only later, when the house was quiet, the dogs were in their respective places in front of my kids’ doors, and my wife was snuggled deep in my arms, did I tell her.

“I thank whatever fates there are every day that sent me to that prison. Because without that shitty three and a half years, I would’ve never had these five beautiful ones with you.”

She answered me with a snore.

The baby in her belly, however, rolled against my side.

And that was enough for now.

• • •

I hope you enjoyed Hunt and Weytt’s story. Next up is Sin and Blasie in Kitty Kitty!

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What’s Next?

PROLOGUE

Drill Sergeants: they will kick your ass and look sexy doing it the entire time.

-Blaise’s secret thoughts

BLAISE

Six years ago

Oh. My. God.

“Holy shit,” the girl beside me breathed as she got a load of the male drill sergeants.

I