Knock Down, Drag Out / Book One

Chapter Nineteen

Maddox stared at Darcy while she slept, her left hand already protectively splayed across her stomach with his mother's engagement ring still on proud display.

He sat down on the floor quietly, not wanting to wake her up. Lylah had come up to their room and practically kicked him out once she heard Darcy yelling at him, only allowing him back in once her twin had fallen asleep.

He would have to pay Jaxon back so he could fix the hole that had been punched into the hallway wall, but he had time to worry about that later. Right now he just needed to figure out how he was going to convince Darcy that he wanted her and the baby because he loved them, not because he felt the need to 'do the right thing' like she had suggested.

He stared down at his bruised knuckles, wondering how his life got to be this way in such a short amount of time. Darcy had come in like a hurricane, wrecking havoc on his life but he wouldn't take it back for anything. He had fallen in love with the small woman asleep on their bed, with her fierce protectiveness and whirlwind version of passion.

He couldn't quite pinpoint the moment he had fallen in love with her. It could have been when she told him why her and her sister became doctors, about how her mother had died suddenly from an undetected illness that her own doctors should have caught. Darcy had said that they wanted to be the ones to run the tests for families because they knew the pain of a doctor not caring enough to ask for one more.

Or it could have been when she talked about her father. The man who had turned into a shell of a person when his wife died and really only remembered his family in distant memories laced with his wife's touch. Darcy said she didn't blame him, that people grieved in their own ways, but he had seen the pain in her eyes when she told him her father stopped being her father when she was the tender age of ten.

Maybe it was how he saw her interacting with his own ragtag version of a family. The genuine smiles and inside jokes that she had created with them, like she had been a part of their lives forever instead of just three short weeks.

He knew they still had a lot to learn about each other, but he wanted the whole thing. Wanted to wake up beside her every morning and change dirty diapers in the middle of the night so she could get some more sleep. He wanted to watch her walk down the isle in a white dress, her father holding her arm tightly so she didn't trip in her high heels.

His mother told him when he was younger that sometimes it didn't matter how long you knew a person, that you just felt deep in your bones that they were your future. He had felt that from the first moment he had seen her, standing tall and defiant in the middle of the rec center despite being terrified out of her mind. It just took his brain a little bit longer to catch up with his heart apparently.

Darcy moaned in her sleep and he glanced back up at her, getting off of the floor and holding his breath while he climbed in bed with her. He let it out slowly when she didn't wake up and put his hand gently above hers on her stomach.

The thing he had learned about Darcy was that she could sleep through all the noise in the world but could wake up if someone even brushed against her body. Thankfully she didn't even stir when he put his face near her stomach and rested his cheek against her rib cage.

"No matter what your mom says, I want the both of you with my entire heart and soul," Maddox whispered, feeling a bit like an idiot for talking to his barely developed child but he had to get the words out; even if Darcy wasn't listening to them.

"It's gone to be hard, the three of us making this work with minimal bumps in the road, but I have faith in us. The universe wouldn't have thrown us together if we couldn't make it. So when this all over and your mom thinks we'll all go our separate ways, I'm not letting her leave. She holds the other half of my soul and you hold my entire heart."

Maddox went silent as Darcy shifted in her sleep, subconsciously trying to snuggle as close to him as she could get. He moved his hand so it was resting on her stomach once again instead of her rib cage.

"I'm not so good with words, and I probably never will be. But I promise to show you every single day just how much I love you. You, and your mom. I promise to protect you from the monsters hiding under your bed and let you sleep on my chest when you have bad dreams. And God forbid if you turn out to be a girl. I'll probably drive you crazy, scaring off boyfriends and insisting you train with me and your uncles to learn self defense. But I'll do it out of love, because I don't want you hurt. Emotionally or physically."

Maddox took a deep breath to push past the emotion that was choking him, making his throat tighten and words hard to speak. He wasn't very good with dealing with his emotions either, not since his dad died. He was the one person Maddox could take to with absolutely zero judgment and once he had passed Maddox had never found another way to get his emotions out in a healthy way.

"I promise to fight for you. To stand behind you when it feels like the world has thrown in the towel on you. To kiss scraped knees and bumps on your head. To hold your hand when you're scared to walk alone. To love you so much that you never have a single doubt in your head about if I wanted you or not."

Darcy let out a groan, her eyelids fluttering and Maddox pressed a kiss to her stomach before getting off the bed and walking out of the room; closing the door behind him.

He still wasn't sure what he was going to tell Darcy to convince her to at least listen to him, but he did know that he wouldn't be able to sit down and come up with a solution until Steven Lambert was taken care of. Either arrested by the police, or permanently with a bullet hole directly in the center of his forehead.