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  Both of us.

  Epilogue Two

  Zara

  Ten years later

  I had a headache, and it didn’t help that the kids were running around screaming, one of them sounding like they were taking a sledgehammer to the walls.

  “Finn, Scarlett, can you guys take it outside, please?” I heard a scream then, followed by a laugh. “Max, can you wrestle the kids outside for like half an hour so I can finish this?”

  It sounded like a stampede of elephants running through the house. “Sorry, baby,” Max called out. “Heading them out now.”

  I chuckled softly, and there was a moment when it sounded like a tornado was tearing through, but then there was quiet. I exhaled and looked back at the paperwork in front of me, the blueprints for a new Portuguese-inspired restaurant already screaming a success.

  Over the last ten years, we’d continued to grow, not just with Max’s bakeries, but in our family as well. After we had Finn, we planned on waiting a couple years for another baby, but Scarlett decided she wanted to be born just a year after her big brother.

  I no longer worked for anyone and was the CEO of Bakers Art and Concept Directives, a small business that focused on the food industry. We were tiny in the grand scheme of things, but we were respected and known in our small circle.

  Branching off and creating my own business hadn’t been easy. There’d been a lot of ups and downs, big decisions that had to be made, but in the end, it had been the best thing for not only me, but for my family as well.

  I spent the next twenty minutes finishing up the paperwork, and then I leaned back in the chair and willed the tension headache to go away. I could hear the kids out back and opened my eyes. I looked out the window and smiled, seeing Finn and Scarlett playing in the swing set, and saw Max working on the raised garden bed he’d recently become obsessed with.

  We’d moved out of the city for the kids, relocating to a suburb that was about a twenty-minute drive from the hustle and bustle of city life, skyscrapers, and concrete. And although living in the center of it all—the thick of it would have been easier for us workwise—we wanted the kids to have a backyard. We wanted them to not wake up to the sound of horns blaring or the idea of grass only feasible at the park.

  I got up from the chair and walked toward the window, watching them and smiling. After all these years, I still got butterflies in my belly when I looked at Max. I still felt like I was holding my babies for the first time in that hospital room after I delivered them.

  My whole world was right outside that window.

  My heart was outside my body.

  Max stood and wiped the dirt from his knees, and God, I felt arousal lick over me. Even all this time later, I was so in love with him he had my heart racing. It also didn’t hurt that the sex was as incredible as it had been from day one.

  He turned and watched the kids for a second before making his way toward the patio. But he caught sight of me watching him, and a small smile spread across his face. His smile started off as sweet, almost innocent, but the longer we stared at each other, the more that familiar heat spread across my body.

  I could hear the kids shouting for Max’s attention, and soon they came running up to him. Their voices were muffled through the window, but I watched as they ran across the backyard and into the neighbor’s house, where Charlotte, the mother of the kids Finn and Scarlett played with nearly every day, stood on her porch smiling and waving at Max.

  Looked like the kids would be occupied for the next hour at least.

  And when Max glanced back at me, I could see that realization on his face too.

  He grinned at me, gave me a sexy little wink, and mouthed, You. Me. The bedroom. And then he was heading inside.

  I knew what was about to happen, and what sane girl wouldn’t get excited about her husband giving her one hell of an afternoon experience?

  Nothing better than a nooner, right?

  About the Author

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