Breathe (His Command Book 5) Read online

  He glanced at Marshall.

  Well, almost anything. There was at least one thing he loved an equal amount, even if that thing had put him in a situation where he’d had to suffer through hours and hours of labor.

  “You did so well,” Marshall whispered. He kissed the top of Oli’s head—a courageous feat, based on the current sweaty state of his hair. “I’m so proud of you. They’re beautiful.”

  “They are,” Oli said, swelling with pride. Maybe being a father wasn’t all that bad. “Happy birthday, Aaron. Happy birthday, Caleb. I’m really glad you decided to join us. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

  “Can you imagine the Dad jokes?” Marshall asked, and Oli had to laugh. He cuddled both boys close, then met Marshall’s gaze.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being strong enough to be here with me today.” Oli’s smile wavered, and he started to cry all over again. “I can’t imagine doing it without you. Thank you.”

  Marshall sank down onto the bed next to Oli and held him, and it was all Oli needed. He wept against Marshall’s shoulder as the doctor and all his nurses swarmed around them. It didn’t matter. The scope of his universe didn’t include anything beyond the tiny hospital bed he shared with Marshall and the twins.

  “I love you, Oliver,” Marshall whispered. “You showed me meaning when there was confusion, and love when there was emptiness. I’ll be strong a thousand times over if it means that I get to stay here a little bit longer with you.”

  It was the pregnancy hormones, Oli told himself a second before he started bawling. It definitely wasn’t the fact that he’d married the man who’d given him purpose and hope in an otherwise desolate time, and whose affection continued to make Oli feel like he was the luckiest man alive. All of it felt like a dream—one of the ones that was so good, he wished he’d never have to wake up from it.

  But it was no dream. He’d stepped from the shadows of his past into the light of the future at long last. It wasn’t the path he’d imagined he’d take, but he’d arrived regardless, happy, healthy, and alive. If he ever did manage to invent that time machine, he’d let it go unused. His struggles were as much a part of his happiness as his successes, and he wouldn’t change a single one. The future, it turned out, was more perfect than he could have ever imagined.

  If his life was a joke, its punchline had never come—and with his twins snuggled in his arms and Marshall at his side, Oli didn’t think it ever would.

  Epilogue

  Marshall

  “Excuse me, Mr. Alcrest,” Lilian, Sterling and Adrian’s daughter, said. Marshall stopped washing dishes to turn and give her his full attention. They stood in the kitchen of the house Marshall and Oliver had bought last year, a spacious split-level with a pool in the backyard. The older children were out there playing while Owen and Crawford supervised, and Oliver was with them with the twins, floating them in the shallow end of the pool. Lilian, however, had come inside. She was wearing her beach towel like a cape, and she’d wrapped either end tightly around her body. Her blond hair was saturated with water and clung to her head, and small puddles of chlorinated water marked her passage from the back door to the kitchen.

  “Yes, Lilian? What can I help you with?” Marshall asked.

  “May I please have a pitcher of water to bring to everyone?” Lilian asked. She looked up at Marshall and held his gaze, unafraid. Out of all the children, she was undoubtedly the boldest. Even Crawford and Owen’s boys—Carter and Logan—were shy around the other adults, but Lilian held her own. With parents like Sterling and Adrian, Marshall couldn’t say that he was surprised.

  “Of course. Do you want to stay outside, or would you like to invite everyone back in so that we can have cake?”

  Lilian frowned like the question was an affront. “If we have cake, can we still have something to drink?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll tell everyone to come inside for cake. Thank you, Mr. Alcrest.”

  “You’re welcome, Lilian.”

  She turned and headed for the back door, her bare feet slapping the kitchen tile. Marshall watched her until she was gone, then chuckled to himself and turned back to the sink to finish the dishes. It was Oliver’s thirtieth birthday, and the gang had reassembled. There’d once been a time when Marshall had thought that his disease would have claimed his life before he got to see his friends again, but now, they met up regularly. With nine children between them and more on the way, there was always an excuse to see each other.

  Marshall rinsed the last dish and set it in the dish rack to dry. It had been a long day, but to see Oliver so happy made Marshall happy, and he didn’t regret how hard he’d worked to make sure the party was a success. From the kitchen window, he watched as Lilian skipped back to the poolside and announced that there was cake to be had. Carter and Logan clambered out of the pool and shook themselves off like wet dogs, splashing Lilian. She danced back and fanned her towel at them, and they took off running for the house. Oliver, who was in the pool with Aaron and Caleb, was suddenly burdened with two toddlers who’d decided that floating on their backs while Dad ferried them around wasn’t going to cut it anymore. They squirmed and splashed, and Oliver had his work cut out for him getting them back to the poolside.

  The promise of cake was strong. Marshall snickered.

  “Cake!” Logan exclaimed as the side door slid open. He jumped into the doorway, saw Marshall drying his hands, and came to a total stop. Marshall lifted a brow. “H-Hello, Mr. Alcrest.”

  “Hello, Logan,” Marshall said.

  “I, um, is it okay if we go sit for cake?” Logan asked shyly. He ducked his gaze. “Lily said... there was cake.”

  “She was right.” Marshall held back a grin. “Would you like to go sit in the dining room? Make sure you lay dry towels down on the chairs before you sit—all of you are wet.”

  “Yes, Mr. Alcrest. We will.” Logan gave him a small smile, then hurried from the doorway to settle in the dining room. As he ran, Marshall heard him call out to his brother and Lilian. “We’ve gotta go find our dads and get dry towels, guys! Mr. Alcrest wants us to sit at the table but he wants to make sure we sit on dry towels!”

  There was a mad scramble of feet as the oldest kids went to set up in the dining room, then footsteps on the stairs from the lower floor as Cedric, Gabriel, Marcus, and Lucian came up to see what was going on. Undoubtedly, the rapid thumping footsteps overhead had alerted them to a change in activity.

  “Everything okay?” Marcus asked. He had his newborn daughter, Jean, cradled to his chest, while Lucian had their older son, Brandon, settled on his hip. “We heard what may have been an elephant stomp through here.”

  “Lilian, Logan, and Carter are setting up for cake,” Marshall replied. “Do you mind grabbing the paper plates on top of the fridge? We’ll get everyone settled and places set before I bring the cake out.”

  “Smart.” Lucian smiled at him. “I’ll supervise the dining room. Are the older kids dry?”

  “They’re getting dry towels to sit on.”

  “Great.”

  “Do you know where Sterling and Adrian went?” Cedric asked. He climbed the stairs more slowly, staying by Gabriel’s side. They each held their toddler son’s hand, and with every step, they lifted him up and swung him like a bell as he laughed. “Did they follow Oliver out to the pool when Aaron and Caleb decided they wanted to go swimming?”

  “I’m not sure,” Marshall admitted. “Go get settled in the dining room and I’ll go find them.”

  The group dispersed, and Marshall left the kitchen to find his old friend. He headed down the hall to the front door, glancing into each room he passed. He’d only meant to see if Adrian’s Lexus was still parked on the curb, but he ended up finding his friends sitting on the stoop while their youngest daughter, Stella, clung to Adrian’s shirt and wept. She stopped when Marshall opened the door and looked up at him with watery eyes, then buried her fa
ce against Adrian’s shirt and broke down all over again.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Marshall said. “Is everything alright?”

  “Everything is fine,” Adrian said. “Stella thinks that Aaron and Caleb were being mean to her, and she needs to get it out of her system.”

  Stella howled something incomprehensible against Adrian’s chest.

  “They weren’t ignoring you, sweetheart,” Adrian replied. “They wanted to go swimming, and they invited you to go, too. You said no. That’s not ignoring you.”

  “Well,” Marshall said softly, “if you decide you’re good to come inside, we’re getting ready to have cake.”

  Stella stopped crying immediately. She pulled back from Adrian and looked up at Marshall with stars in her eyes. “Cake?”

  “Yes, cake. It’s Mr. McKellar’s birthday.”

  “Cake!”

  “And just like that, the universe is right again.” Sterling chuckled and picked Stella up as he stood. “If only all drama was two-year-old drama.”

  Stella squirmed, so Sterling set her down. She zipped around Marshall’s legs on a mad dash for the dining room. Neither Sterling nor Adrian looked all that alarmed that she was off on her own. Sterling extended a hand to Adrian and helped him to his feet, and as Adrian rose, he held a hand over his swollen belly. Holt baby number three was on the way—another little girl.

  “I’m going to get a head start on getting settled,” Adrian said. He kissed Sterling’s cheek, then passed Marshall and stood on the other side of the doorway. “I’ll see you at the table.”

  “See you soon.” Sterling offered him a warm smile before they parted ways. For a moment, they watched in silence as Adrian made his way down the hall and turned the corner to the dining room. Then, Sterling chuckled. “Can you believe it?”

  “Believe what?”

  “How far we’ve come.” Sterling gestured into the house, so Marshall stepped back through the door and headed down the hall. Sterling matched his stride. “I don’t think any of us would have expected life to turn out this way, but here we are.”

  “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can never account for life.” Marshall slid his hands into his pockets, his gait easy. “Things will be the same for years and years, and then one tiny event will turn everything you know on its head. I think I’ve come to accept it.”

  They stopped a few feet before the dining room door. From inside the room there was laughter and conversation. Lilian, Logan, and Carter were talking about stomach cramps and how fast they could get back into the pool once they were done eating. The younger children were reunited, and Stella was giggling as Caleb went on and on about something—Marshall couldn’t pick apart what he was saying from where he stood. The adults were conversing, too. Crawford seemed to be directing seating arrangements, and Cedric had been tasked with corralling the children. It was chaos, but it warmed Marshall’s heart like nothing else.

  “You have no idea how glad I am to hear you say that.” Sterling laid a kind hand on Marshall’s back. “It’s good to see you with that spark back in your eyes.”

  “You’re not the only one who’s glad.” Marshall smiled into the distance. “It’s like all those years I really was dead, and now I’ve come back to life. Oliver and the boys... they’re my everything. There isn’t a thing in the world I wouldn’t do for them, and I know they feel the same way about me. I can’t believe that it almost turned out differently. I can’t imagine losing them... and I can’t imagine them having to lose me.”

  “Now you don’t have to.” Sterling slapped his back, then kept moving. “There’s no point in regretting the past.”

  Regret was a waste, and Marshall didn’t have time for it now any more than he’d had time for it before. “You’re right.”

  “We just have to keep moving forward,” Sterling said as he rounded the corner to the dining room and joined the fray.

  “Breath by breath,” Marshall whispered, completing his sentence. “One moment at a time.”

  He followed Sterling into the dining room and took his place where he belonged—beside the ones who’d helped him see that there was always something in life worth breathing for.

  Bonus Scene

  Does Oli ever end up making friends with the doorman? For access to a short bonus scene from Breathe, subscribe to Piper's mailing list!

  http://eepurl.com/cw6BMD

  About the Author

  Piper Scott debuted as a trio of authors looking to write together for fun. Their collaboration led to three novella-length books (Love Me, Save Me, and Keep Me,) before life sent them in different directions, leaving just one author with an omegaverse plot bunny that wouldn’t leave her alone. Obey was born several months later... but the plot bunny never left—it multiplied.

  Left to her own devices, Piper Scott writes scorching but heartfelt contemporary omegaverse romance about men you can’t help but fall in love with.

  Want more from Piper? Sign up to receive bonus content and news about her newest releases at http://eepurl.com/cw6BMD, or hang out with her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piperscott/.

  Also by Piper Scott

  His Command Series

  Obey – Omega rehabilitation counselor Owen doesn’t need an alpha in his life... but that doesn’t stop Crawford from giving him his collar

  Beg – Recently liberated from omega rehabilitation therapy, Lucian’s only just learned to say “No.” It’s too bad that night after night, Marcus makes him whimper, “Yes!”

  Stay – When an accidental pregnancy forces troubled omega Adrian to bond with the alpha he hates, Sterling, the arguments aren’t the only thing bound to get hot

  Heal – Broken omega Gabriel needs an alpha to hold him together, to love him, and to give him a family... and professional Dom Cedric just might be the man for the job

  Breathe – When a scorching online relationship leads to an unexpected pregnancy, Oli has to decide whether Marshall’s terrible secret is something he can shoulder, or if he’s better off alone

  Rutledge Brothers Series

  Love Me – When Seth escapes from The White Lotus brothel and runs into Army vet Thaddeus, he sets into motion a series of events that will shape his world—and his heart—forever

  Save Me – Elijah didn’t asked to be saved from the brothel that kept him warm and fed, but when he meets omega rehabilitation counselor Silas, he starts to think that maybe salvation isn’t so bad after all

  Keep Me – Sweet Nathaniel’s life changes forever when his path crosses with doula Harrison after Nathaniel’s missing brother returns home pregnant

  More from LoveLight Press

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  More from LoveLight Press

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  Piper Scott, Breathe (His Command Book 5)

 

 

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