Lost King by Piper Lennox (moboreader txt) 📗

I find the cooled sweat across his chest.

He touches my stomach. I rest my hand overtop his.

“We still haven’t decided on a boy name,” I remind him. At the top of our girls’ list sit classics like Ava, Emma, and Gracie, but neither of us can decide if a normal boy’s name is the way to go, or if we should continue the Durham tradition.

“Here.” Theo rolls away from me and flicks on his lamp, then digs through the nightstand. He sits up against the headboard and shows me.

It’s a coin.

“If it’s heads, we use a normal name,” I say.

He nods. “Tails: tradition.”

With a dramatic breath, he flips the coin into the air. It lands in the pool of blankets between us, hidden.

“Care to do the honors?” he asks.

I push up on my elbow and feel through the covers until I find it. Theo shuts his eyes and sinks back into his pillows, hands behind his head, while he waits for the verdict.

I lean forward and look.

“Dig out the family records,” I laugh.

Theo grins, eyes still shut. “Good. I’ve already got a bunch written on a receipt in my drawer.” He holds out his hand. “Pass me the coin. We’ll narrow them down gauntlet-style.”

For the next half-hour, we pit names head-to-head, cross the losers off the list, and follow this game of fate until we’re left with only one.

“Ashcroft,” he announces, circling the winner in the center of his scribbled bracket. “Nickname, Ash.”

I admire it a moment. Strange, yes—but something about it feels right. “Whose maiden name was that?” I ask him, tucking my head against his shoulder.

He slips his arm behind me and draws me closer, then tosses the list aside. The bedroom goes dark when he clicks his lamp back off, nothing but midsummer moonlight and the glow of his alarm clock across the room.

“Margaret Mae Ashcroft,” he says. “My great-great aunt, give or take a generation. She was a flapper.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep. Apparently she’d party in the city all night, then purposely show up to church late the next morning looking exhausted, smelling like smoke and alcohol, just to piss off her deacon father. Very scandalous.”

I crack up. “Okay, yeah, that’s definitely a winning name, then. And honestly…I’m liking ‘Mae’ for a girl.”

“Yeah?” He glances at me; I nod. “All right, then. No matter what we get, Great-Great-Maybe-Another-Great-In-There Aunt Margaret Mae will be the namesake.”

We slip deeper under the covers together, back to touching and light kisses. He caresses my stomach again. He whispers our child’s names to himself, cementing them even deeper in my memory. Making me love them, and this baby, and himself, even more.

“Are you scared?” I ask.

“Yes. But that’s how I know it’s going to be the best thing we’ve ever done.”

I smile as he kisses me. He’s right.

It’s just like moving to a new city, meeting new people, or accepting a proposal. Changing a home, or your name, or your entire life.

Learning to trust someone, or learning to forgive.

They’re all terrifying. Probably the most nerve-wracking things we can do in this life, in fact. But the most worthwhile.

“I love you,” he whispers.

I say it back, losing myself in the sweet kiss he places on my forehead. He keeps his mouth there, even after I’m sure he’s fallen asleep.

That, I realize, might be the scariest thing any of us ever do: love someone else. Nothing else can break you faster or more thoroughly, if it goes wrong.

But, when it finally goes right...there’s nothing else like it.

Also by Piper Lennox

Durham Boys

Fake Halo

Seven Sins

Lost King

Now Entering Hillford

The Midwife’s Playlist

The Carpenter’s Wedding

The Poet’s Cookbook

The Bartender’s Countdown

The Hawthorne’s Girl

The Fairfields

Darling, All at Once

Honey, When It Ends

Baby, Be My Last

Love in Kona

Pull Me Under

Crash Around Me

When We Break

Standalones

All Mine

Teach Me

The Road to You

Think I Wanna Marry You (Subscriber Exclusive)

About the Author

Piper Lennox is the author of the Amazon Top 100 Bestseller Darling, All at Once, the Now Entering Hillford series, All Mine, and more. Her favorite heroes are sexy and broken; her favorite heroines are feisty (and, usually, also a little broken). Lost King is her eighteenth novel.

Piper lives in Virginia with her husband, their children, and a Siberian Husky too smart for his own good.  Before she spent her days writing about life and love, she wrote copy for insurance companies.  She will never, ever go back.

www.piperlennox.com