Axel looked down at me, a brow raised. “Are ye’ goin’ to kiss ‘er again?”
“Do you not like when I kiss her?”
He shook his head. “She’s my mammy.”
“And she’s my wife,” I countered, grinning.
“I was in ‘er belly,” Axel deadpanned. “Beat that.”
Easy.
“I put you in her belly.”
He stared down at me. “How?”
I hesitated, wondering if he was too young for the talk that I had given to all my other kids at various ages, but Axel’s attention switched to flicking my nipples and laughing when I flinched. He crawled off me when I playfully swatted his hands away, then jumped off the bed and ran out of the room shouting, “I woke ‘im up, Ma!”
I shot into an upright position. “You said you wanted to play!”
“I lied,” Axel shouted as he reached the stairs. “Mammy said I’d get the biggest cookie ever after dinner tonight if I woke ye’ up. Sorry … not really, though! Cooookkkiieeee.”
I kicked the blankets off my body, before turning to the left and hanging my legs over the bed. I snorted as I heard my wife praise our youngest at the bottom of the stairs for waking me up. I wasn’t surprised that she enlisted our kids’ help; she always had them scheming when she didn’t want to do something. She said it was one of the perks of having children.
“Beau!” Georgie suddenly bellowed. “Give it back or I swear to God I’ll—”
“Hey!” I shouted, getting to my feet and walking out to the hallway to see what was going on.
Georgie, my eldest, had Beau, my second eldest, in a chokehold with her arm hooked perfectly around his neck. She had her right leg wrapped around his left to angle his body so she could get a firm grip in a better stance, and he couldn’t attempt to break her hold on him without hurting himself in the process. I had taught her how to protect herself and how to hold her own, but she wasn’t supposed to practice her self-defence moves on her brothers.
I stared at my firstborn son, and a flashback of his birth suddenly entered my mind.
“He’s perfect, baby,” I said to my exhausted partner as she cradled our newborn son against her chest. “He’s so perfect.”
“He looks so much like you, Dominic.” Bronagh smiled. “We have a mini me and now a mini you.”
“How did we get so lucky?” I asked. “How did I get so lucky?”
Bronagh smiled up at me, so I leaned down, closing the distance between us, and brushed my lips over hers.
“What will we name him?”
“I love the name Beau.”
I raised a brow and leaned back. “How do you spell that?”
“B-E-A-U.”
“That’s pronounced Bo, baby. I like that, though. Let’s name him that.”
Bronagh blinked. “No, it’s pronounced Beau as in beautiful.”
“In the States—”
“We aren’t in the States.” She cut me off with a twitch of her eye. “I like Beau bein’ pronounced like the word beautiful. Bo can be his nickname, if you’re so pressed about it.”
“Okay.” I chuckled. “His name is Beau like beautiful, and Bo will be his nickname. I’ll inform my brothers of this to avoid your wrath.”
Bronagh smiled. “What will his middle name be?”
My heart warmed when I said the name, “Damien.”
Bronagh beamed up at me. “Beau Damien Slater. I love it, I love him … I can’t wait for Georgie to see ‘im. She’s a big sister now.”
“Alannah will bring her up when I call,” I said. “She’ll be with us soon.”
Bronagh closed her eyes and snuggled Beau.
“I love our family.”
“I love you, pretty girl.”
“I love you too, fuckface.”
“Let him go, Georgie,” I said, my mind snapping back to the present.
“He has me phone, Da!”
“Let him go,” I repeated, sternly. “Now.”
Georgie gave Beau’s neck one last squeeze before she released him and forcefully shoved him to the floor. I folded my arms across my chest and stared down at my only daughter. She placed her hands on her hips and stared right back at me. I looked at my son as he groaned on the floor, then looked back at Georgie.
“Was that really necessary?”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation. “He took me phone without permission, Da.”
I looked at Beau. “Why’d you take her phone?”
He groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, then straightened up to his full height. He was fourteen, but he already dwarfed Georgie’s five-foot-two frame with his five-foot-eight. When he stood next to her, it always amused me. He was fifteen months younger than she was, and he physically looked down at her. My daughter, however, never let a trivial thing like height stop her when it came to disciplining her brothers or any of her many male cousins. She’d had years of practice on how to harm them when she needed to. Or wanted to.
“I was only messin’ with ‘er, Da,” Beau said before side glancing at his sister. “She’s a bleedin’ psycho.”
Georgie kicked Beau in the shin. He yelped, grabbed his shin with both hands, and hopped around on one foot.
“Bo, give your sister back her phone,” I ordered. “And George, stop hitting your brother.”
I hoped by using their nicknames, the situation would calm to somehow make it playful, but Georgie’s antsy teenage attitude refused to cooperate.
“No promises,” she said to me as she snapped her phone out of Beau’s outstretched hand. “Next time, I’m breakin’ your bloody leg.”
She turned and stormed down the hall and into her bedroom, the door clanking shut behind her. Beau shook his head, then his leg, before he lowered his foot to the ground and trained his eyes on me.
“Ye’ need to send ‘er to a mental institution, Da,” he said, his face the picture of seriousness. “She is a bloody nightmare.”
I raised a brow. “She wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t touch her things.”
“I wouldn’t bother ‘er if she didn’t annoy the life outta me.”
I lifted my hand to my face and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“It’s too early to deal with this.”
“It’s after nine.”
I dropped my head. “Exactly. That’s early.”
Beau snorted as shouting and a bellow from my wife sounded from downstairs.
“Not in this house.”
I pointed at my son. “Leave your sister alone. Otherwise, she’ll whoop you.”
“Only ‘cause I won’t hit ‘er back!”
“I know.” I grinned. “When you’re bigger and fill out more, she won’t be able to grapple you so easily.”
“I can’t feckin’ wait.”
“Language.”
“Feckin’ isn’t a curse.” Beau rolled his eyes. “And neither is damn or hell.”
“The former can slide because it’s part of everyone’s vocabulary in this country, but if I hear you say the second and third, your ass will be whooped by me. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” I nodded. “Now, go clean your room. It’s Saturday, and you know your mom will raise all kinds of hell if she finds it dirty when she makes her rounds.”
As I walked down the stairs, Beau asked, “How come you get to say hell and not be whooped?”
“Who is gonna whoop me?”
“You’ve got a point, Da.” Beau paused. “You’ve got a real good point.”
I laughed as I jogged downstairs. A glance into the sitting room revealed Axel lying upside down on the couch as he watched a cartoon on the television. I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at him.
“You’re going to give yourself a headache watching the TV like that, Ax.”
“No, I won’t,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the TV. “I always watch it like this.”
I had no doubt.
“Just sit up every few minutes; otherwise, the bloo
d will rush to your head.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
I shook my head in amusement, dropped my arms to my sides, and walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. My eyes found her the second I entered the room. With her back to me as she cooked breakfast, I took a moment to drink her in. In twenty years, nothing about her had changed. Not really, even after five kids. Her body was the same level of perfection it had always been. Small waist, thick thighs, and an ass so fat it still made my knees weak when I looked at it.
Her hair was shorter—it hung just past her shoulders instead of touching her butt—but it was still a beautiful shade of chocolate brown. She had more laugh lines around her eyes, more stretch marks and a slight tummy pouch from having so many babies, but she didn’t look thirty-eight years old. She could easily pass as late twenties, and I told her that often because it was true … not just because it got me laid whenever I said it.
She was tiny, feminine, and was the greatest love of my life, along with my five children. Children she gave to me. I glanced down at my ringed finger, smiling at the reminder that we recently celebrated our thirteenth wedding anniversary. We’d been married for thirteen years, but together for twenty, and I couldn’t wait to spend fifty more with her, God willing. I couldn’t imagine spending my life with anyone else, and I didn’t want to, either.
“Good morning, Mrs Slater.”
I knew she smiled without having to turn around. I could sense it on her.
“Good mornin’, Mr Slater,” she replied. “How did ye’ sleep?”
“Before or after you woke me up with your mouth on—”
When she spun around and narrowed her bright green eyes at me, my own laughter cut me off.
“Children,” she whispered hissed. “They are present.”
I glanced to my left, noting my third and fourth sons, Quinn and Griffin, sitting at the kitchen table on the far end of the room, not paying us a lick of attention. I turned my attention back to my wife and grinned.
“They can’t hear me.”
She gave me a once-over, her eyes lingering on my groin and torso a little too long, allowing naughty thoughts to enter my mind, but like I knew she would, she turned back to face the stove.
“I made you eggs, and I’m workin’ on your protein pancakes,” she said, rustling the pan to make the pancake flip. “The boys horsed down the first two batches I made, as well as two ten-egg omelettes.”
“Q and Griff?”
“Yeah,” she answered with a shake of her head. “Axel and Beau had cereal; Georgie hasn’t been down to eat yet. Quinn and Griffin are goin’ to eat us out of a home all by themselves. I can’t believe how much they can put away. They’re just as bad as Locke, and that lad never stops eatin’.”
“They’re growing boys.”
Bronagh snorted. “Growin’ boys, me arse; they are always feckin’ hungry.”
“So were my brothers and I growing up.” I chuckled. “We still are.”
“Oh, I know,” my wife answered. “I do the cookin’. I know how much your fat self can gobble up.”
I stepped closer to her, pressing my body against hers and sliding my arms around her tiny waist.
“You think I’m fat?” I teased. “My body fat percentage would disagree with you.”
“You have the appetite of a fat person and so do your kids. Well, except Georgie, but she used to eat just as much.” Bronagh shook her head. “I don’t know how we afford it. Ye’ know, it costs me nearly three hundred and fifty euros a week on just food? I don’t even shop in Dunnes anymore because it’ll easily reach over four hundred in price if I go in there.”
I leaned down and kissed her cheek.
“Why are you worrying about this?” I questioned. “I make more than enough to cover our bills. We own the house since Branna signed it over to you, and the cars are brand new since we traded in our others for a steal of a price. We have a fantastic policy on our family health insurance and both of our life insurance policies. You set aside money each month to pay our bills on time. You’re worrying yourself over nothing.”
“I know.” She sighed, her body relaxing. “It’s just with the football season startin’ back up, and the lads all bein’ taller with bigger feet, it means we have to buy all new team uniforms and tracksuits, and new football boots, which are over one hundred euros each in their sizes, and new clothes since they’ve no summer clothes that fit. Don’t even get me started on Georgie’s art supplies. She goes through them so fast that we need to replenish every—”
“Sweetheart,” I cut Bronagh off. “We have savings for a reason. This kind of reason.”
She tensed all over again as she placed a large pancake on top of four others next to the large omelette that I assumed was for me.
“Heat the eggs up,” she grumbled. “They’ve been coolin’ while I made the pancakes.”
I watched her as she moved around me.
“Bronagh, honey—”
“I’m goin’ to get a shower,” she cut me off, leaving the room. “I won’t be long.”
I stared after her, frowning. I had no idea why she was so worried about our finances all of a sudden. Ten years ago, I got a loan from my older brother Kane and bought a broken down old building in the city centre and demolished it. After rebuilding it from the ground up, I opened Slater’s 24/7 Fitness. Every month since it opened nine years ago, it’d turned a considerable profit. I was even considering opening a second gym in Tallaght because the main one was doing so well. I paid Kane back and had no debt whatsoever.
Bronagh knew all of this, so I had no idea why she was worrying about paying for our children’s sports gear or art supplies. I had enough to buy hundreds of football cleats. Hell, we could buy another house if we wanted to. My instinct was to follow her and find out what was truly bothering her, but over the years, I’d learned that she needed her space when she got upset. Normally, I invaded her space and didn’t give her a chance to run away when an argument got her going, but right now, something else was bothering her. I had to time when I chose to talk to her about it.
With a sigh, I turned to my plate of food and put it into the microwave as instructed. While it heated, I went to the refrigerator with the intention of pouring myself a large glass of orange juice, but when I lifted the carton and found it was empty, I scowled and shut the door with a little force before I turned to my sons.
“Which one of you morons put the empty OJ carton back in the refrigerator?”
Quinn and Griffin pointed at one another, but when Quinn scowled and slapped Griffin’s hand, Griffin yelped, most likely thinking Quinn was going to pound on him for lying, which I knew he had done.
“Griffin?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes still on his older brother. “I forgot.”
“How do you forget the carton is empty when you can feel it’s fucking empty?”
Quinn glanced around me, looking for his mom, but when he saw she wasn’t there, he kept his mouth shut about my cussing. I rarely cussed in front of my kids, and especially not to them, but sometimes, they irritated the life out of me when they did dumb shit, and it just slipped out. Putting an empty carton of orange juice back into the refrigerator was a dumb shit thing to do.
“I’m sorry, Da.”
I sighed. “It’s okay. Just don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
“And I’m sorry for cussing.”
Griffin’s lips twitched. “It’s okay. Just don’t do it again.”
Quinn laughed but muffled it with his hand while I smirked.
“You’ll tattle on me to your mom otherwise?”
“Well, duh, I’m hardly gonna try to fight you.”
I snorted. “You’ll be as big as me someday. You both will.”
“In height, yeah, probably, but you work out a lot. I don’t think I’d be into that. I’m lazy.”
Griffin was lazy.
If you gave him the choice to go outside to play and get fresh air,
or stay inside and play video games all day, his games would win every single time. He was on the soccer team purely out of parental force. Bronagh and I ran out of ideas to entice him to leave the house, so we had to resort to giving him an ultimatum. He either joined the soccer team or picked a different sport or activity to participate in, or all his gaming consoles, his computer, and his phone were going in the trash.
He signed up for the soccer team the next day.
Beau, at fourteen, played for the sixteen and under soccer team, Quinn and Griffin, who were twelve and eleven, played for the under thirteen team, and Axel had just joined the under eight team. Griffin tolerated the soccer team, but damn, the kid was good. Luckily, Beau and Quinn were awesome too, but they lived and breathed the sport. It wasn’t punishment to make them go to practice or to games; it was punishment to stop them from attending. Axel’s team wasn’t competitive because of the age group, so each game for him was just for fun, but he loved it.
Then there was Georgie, who was fifteen. My eldest, my only girl … the only girl out of the twenty-five children my brothers and I have fathered.
Sports were out of the question for her because her passion lay with sketching, painting, and, recently, sculpting. The many years of being in her aunt Alannah’s company had rubbed off on her. She started drawing when she was young, and with Alannah’s guidance and her own talent, she could draw a lifelike portrait of someone by the time she was thirteen. She loved art; it was her form of self-expression. She attended a local art class on the weekends to gain more experience for the rare time when she wasn’t around her aunt. Alannah and Bronagh were joined at the hip but even more so since she started dating my twin brother, Damien, many years ago.
“You’re always gonna be lazy if you don’t get your head out of the video games you play all the time.”
Griffin rolled his eyes and grumbled something under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothin’, Da,” he grunted. “I just don’t wanna hear ye’ givin’ out to me about playin’ on me games again. You and Ma always get on me case about it.”
“Because you’re always on it.”
“I joined the football team like ye’ both said I had to do,” he protested. “Isn’t that enough?”