Okay, right.

I might only have had two bites but next time, I’d do better. Definitely.

And I liked this pizzookie crazy family.

Seriously.

* * * * *

“What’d I say?”

This was Creed, on his back in his bed, me straddling him, his hands on my bare ass, his c**k still inside me and we’d just spent several minutes, hands groping, faces nuzzling, post-orgasm.

I stopped licking his neck and lifted my head to look down at him.

After pizzookie and some Diamondbacks baseball, I’d left under enthusiastic, heartwarmingly authentic, “See you later, Sylvies,” from Kara and Brand. Then, three hours later, I came back to have sex and sleep with Creed.

Now he was asking me a question and I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What?” I asked.

His hands slid from my ass, up my back, out over my ribs then up, up, up to frame my face. “The kids. They like you.”

“Not enough to give me a clear go at the pizzookie.”

Creed grinned.

I kept talking but quieter.

“Kids tend to like thirty-four year old women who go all out in a squirt gun fight and don’t mind looking stupid and accidentally running into the pelican that shoots water out of its mouth.”

One of his hands moved down to curl around my neck. The other one slid into my hair at the side, through it and down the back where his arm ended curling around me as he replied, “Yeah, they do. Being a big goof goes down good with kids but it was more than that, baby. They just like you.”

I hoped his latter words were true but I was stuck on his earlier words.

“I’m not a big goof. I’m a badass even with a squirt gun. I totally kicked both their asses.”

“Baby, you ran into that pelican and they nailed you,” he reminded me.

“Sure, but I recovered and rallied huge.”

His grin came back. “Yeah, and that’s when I nailed you.”

My eyes narrowed, “Creed, hot stuff, you didn’t nail me until ten minutes ago.”

His grin got bigger. “I nailed you then, too.”

I disagreed. “It was totally a tie in the squirt gun fight.”

He disagreed with me disagreeing. “I kicked your ass. You were drenched.”

“You did not, the pelican kicked my ass,” I shot back.

His body started shaking under mine as he asked, “Seriously? You’re okay with the fake pelican squirting water out of its mouth kicking your ass and you’re not okay with me doing it?”

Absolutely.

Seeing as this could go on all night, I decided to put a stop to it by announcing, “Paintball tiebreaker when we get back to Denver.”

“Beautiful, I don’t play at business unless I got swim trunks on and my kids with me.”

The breath went out of me at his calling me “beautiful”. Something he hadn’t done in sixteen years. Something I loved back then. Something I missed. Something I loved having back so much, it hurt.

“Sylvie?” he called.

I focused through the exquisite pain and saw the amusement had faded from his face and his eyes were intent on me.

I didn’t share.

I just whispered, “Then, baby, you’re missing out. Business is business and fun is fun and paintball is a freaking blast.”

He ignored me and asked, “Where were you?”

I knew what he was asking but I didn’t answer. Instead, I told him, “I’m right here, with you.”

“Five seconds ago, you were somewhere else.”

“Creed –”

His hand at my neck slid back into my hair and his arm around me gave me a squeeze while he prompted gently, “Sylvie, asked you a question.”

I pressed my lips together then slid my hands up his chest, one stopped at his neck, the other one I wrapped around his jaw and watched as my thumb traced the edge of his lower lip.

When my thumb was retracing its path, I looked into his eyes and whispered, “I missed you calling me ’beautiful’.”

“I missed havin’ you close so I could call you that,” he whispered back.

I shifted off his c**k but moved down his body so I could lay my cheek on his chest and both his arms went around me.

“It’ll never stop hitting us,” I said softly.

“Don’t ’spect so,” Creed said softly back.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like winning when that sucker punch comes and we’re reminded of how much we lost,” I told him then felt, weirdly, his body shaking under mine like he was laughing.

I lifted up and looked down at him.

Yes, laughing.

“This is funny?” I asked quietly.

His hands came back to frame my face and he replied just as quietly through his waning laughter, “Baby, I hauled you into my house last night, kissed you at the door. I made love to you in my bed. I woke up to you. I spent the day with you and my kids. I watched you go down over the pizzookie. You barely got your spoon in there. And, ten minutes ago, I watched you ride my c**k hard and make yourself come before you made me do the same. No way, after what they took from us, no way am I gonna let them make me feel that isn’t anything but what it is. Us winning.”

Shit, he was right.

He also wasn’t done.

“Wish I was a better man,” he said quietly. “Dad’d be pissed at me, he knew I was even thinkin’ this but, I get the chance, I’ll spit on your father’s grave, what he did to you, what he did to me. But, if I don’t get that chance,” his hands at my face pressed in and his voice dipped low, the smooth sliding clean out of it, his expression shifting to intense, “I’ll take this. I’ll take this every day and every day I’ll know in the end I beat that bastard. He might not have been alive to see it, but I beat his goddamned, motherfucking ass.”

Seriously, he was hot when he was being all vengeful badass.

Thinking that, it hit me.

I loved the Creed that was and he was still in there, with his kids, with me.

But without what happened to us, this Creed would never have been.

And I loved this Creed in a way that maybe time had dulled the feeling I had before even though it didn’t feel that way. Because I loved the man under me in a way that wasn’t just meant to be. It wasn’t a way we were born to be. It was in a way that needed to be.

With sudden clarity it hit me that I was always a bit of this Sylvie. I liked clothes and I gossiped with my girls and I put on makeup, even now. But I was not the daughter my father wanted, who adored ballet and wore ribbons in her hair and didn’t beg him to let me go fishing with him every time he went out with his buddies.