Played by Cara Dee

Two

The grill was ready to go, and Darius had placed the deep fryer on a table next to the grill and plugged it in. The dining table on the porch was filling up with salad, garlic bread, chips, condiments, potato salad, and paper plates and plastic cups with a Transformers theme.

A few items were left on Darius’s to-do list. Hang the Happy Birthday banner on the porch, above the steps, attach the balloons there too, and then fill two tubs with beverages and the ice he’d bought. He noticed Gray had already put the tubs on the porch for him.

Throwing kids’ birthday parties was another thing that hadn’t existed in Darius’s future until recently. His original responsibility had been to show up with an approved gift and a smile on his face, and it was supposed to be nieces and nephews who had parties, not his own ankle biters.

“Dare?” Gray hollered from inside.

“Be there in a minute,” Darius called back, attaching the last balloon. Thank fuck this was only gonna happen once more. Gray had spent two hundred bucks on personalized balloons, the banner, and other birthday crap they’d have to throw out after today. It was ridiculous. There was nothing wrong with buying a generic birthday banner they could use year after year. But Gray had said, just this once, for the first birthdays Jayden and Justin spent with them, he wanted to go all out. And Darius couldn’t really blame him for that. He wanted it to be special for the boys too.

Still. Birthday madness should be an official illness, not a billion-dollar industry.

Two hundred dollars was evidently a drop in the bucket too. Gray had shown Darius some videos of mothers going bananas buying birthday decorations for thousands of dollars for their kids’ parties. Thousands of dollars. The world had lost the fuckin’ plot.

Darius took a step back and looked up at the banner and the balloons.

Happy 9th Birthday, Jayden!

He harrumphed to himself and ascended the porch steps again. Before the day was over, they’d have to take a picture of Jayden with one of his personalized Transformers helium balloons so Darius could one day tell him how much they’d spent on decorations that could’ve been used toward an extra gift instead.

“What’s up?” He didn’t bother taking off his shoes and headed straight for the kitchen.

“The boys are upstairs getting dressed, and I’m pretty much done here. I need thirty seconds.” Gray hooked two fingers in Darius’s belt and tugged him closer.

Funny how quickly that put a grin on Darius’s mug. He lifted the dish towel draped over Gray’s shoulder and put it on the counter, then cupped his knucklehead’s face and kissed him.

Gray hummed and pressed himself closer, locking his arms around Darius’s neck. “It’s not too crazy for you, is it? Today, I mean.”

That was his worry? Christ.

“I can handle a little bit of crazy.” He smiled into a tongue-teasing kiss. “Even outrageously overpriced balloons.”

Gray chuckled and dropped his forehead to Darius’s shoulder. “I know you think it’s nuts.”

He did, but two things could be true at once. “Look at me.” He slipped his hands to Gray’s jaw and rested their foreheads together. “Those ridiculous balloons made Jayden so happy at the party supply store that he didn’t know what to do with himself. You can’t put a price tag on that. I’m just bitching.”

Gray smiled and closed his eyes. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Beyond words. So much that it terrified him sometimes, because he wrestled with some fears he’d never had before.

Darius kept those to himself.

A beat later, they heard the boys run down the stairs, and Darius looked over his shoulder to see them decked out in their finest clothes. Jeans and short-sleeved button-downs that Ma had given them.

“I can’t button it right,” Justin announced, out of breath, and rushed over to Gray.

“I’ll help you.” Gray squatted down to Justin’s level and helped him button the shirt. “You look very handsome. We’ll have to take lots of pictures.”

Justin smiled goofily.

“Someone’s here!” Jayden yelled. He was poking his head out the door. “I think it’s your brothers, Darius!”

That would be Ethan and Lias, then. Ryan wasn’t flying up until tomorrow—on Jayden’s actual birthday, but Angel had sent a gift from them.

Ethan and Lias showing up was only the beginning. There was just enough time for Darius to start the grill and get the drinks and ice in order on the porch before his folks arrived, followed by Gray’s parents and brothers, then Isla and Jack and their twin screamers. By then, Justin wanted to be carried, so Darius positioned him on his hip and asked if the boy wanted his noise-canceling headphones.

Justin hesitated before shaking his head. “Not yet.”

Safe to say, when he turned five in January, his birthday party would be a quieter affair.

Elise and Avery and their girls were next to arrive, and they’d picked up Willow along the way.

“Hi, Uncle Darius!” Grace hollered.

“Hey, trooper.” Darius shifted his grin to the massive cake box Ave was holding and dipped down to kiss Elise’s cheek. “Thanks for comin’. Jayden’s been talking a lot about that cake.”

“We wouldn’t miss it!” She beamed at him but quickly gave her attention to Justin, and she touched his cheek briefly. “It’s good to see you again, sweetie. Where’s your brother?”

Justin became shy and drew closer to Darius. “With Nana, I think. On the porch.”

“That’s where we’ll go, then.” Elise carried her youngest and ushered Grace and the hubby toward the cabin.

Willow lingered, and Justin was more than happy to greet her. In fact, Darius lost his claim and had to release the boy.

“I take it you’ll stay here for a while?” Darius asked.

They both nodded with matching impish smiles. It was a special relationship they’d formed, and Darius was only glad for it. Sometimes, they’d just sit on the bridge over the stream and swing their legs above the water and communicate in sign language. Willow brought Justin a new calm.

After making rounds for a quick beat and checking in with Gray, Darius brought the meat to the grill, where Ethan and Avery were waiting for him with an extra beer.

“Welcome to my station,” he joked.

“We figured this would be our watering hole,” Ave replied with a wry smirk.

Darius accepted the beer and took a big swig. Hell, the shindig had just started, and he was already wondering when it would be over. But Jayden was having fun—that was what mattered. Most of the guests were crowding the porch, and the birthday boy was buried in gifts.

More people were expected to show too. Adeline, Lincoln, Gray’s aunt who’d just moved to town… It was almost a relief that some hadn’t been able to make it. Madigan and Abel were stopping by tomorrow when Ryan got here as well.

Darius started loading steaks, hot dogs, and burgers on the grill, and he glanced at Ethan. The man didn’t look happy.

“Who pissed in your low-calorie, organic beer, little brother?”

Ethan shot him a glare at that. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

Ave snorted.

“Yeah, you say that, but then you start ranting,” Darius drawled.

“It’s just…” Ethan sighed heavily, already starting, and it made the other two crack up. “I have a new client at work. She’s… She gets on my nerves. She doesn’t react the way other women do, and she’s sitting on a high fucking horse if she has the balls to tell me I’m pretentious.”

For fucking real?

“You are pretentious, Ethan,” Ave said flatly.

Darius furrowed his brow. “Yeah, you’re without a doubt the most pretentious guy I know. You’re the one sitting on a high horse, for chrissakes. Can you even breathe up there?”

“Fuck you, fuck you both,” Ethan told them. “I’m not going to apologize for having standards. Some of us strive for perfection.”

Get a load of this guy…

Darius snorted and turned the hot dogs.

“Thanks, buddy. I needed that laugh.” Avery chuckled and patted Ethan’s shoulder. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to check in with the wife and tell her she’s not perfect according to her own brother.”

“Be very clear about which brother,” Darius told him.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it!” Ethan called after Avery.

When it was just the two of them left, Darius side-eyed his brother as he added a few pieces of chicken to the grill. Something was up with Ethan—and had been for some time now. He hadn’t always been like this. Uptight, arrogant, superficial. Once upon a time, he’d been laid-back and funny. Actually, he’d been more than that. He’d been kind.

“Are you all right, man?” he felt the need to ask. “I know I give you a lot of shit, but it’s because I don’t get all these changes. The guy I grew up with didn’t give a flying fuck about…well, pretty much everything you claim to care about today.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Ethan at ease. He walked around with a stick so far up his ass that he had to be able to taste the shit by now.

For a moment, it looked as if Ethan was gonna give him a bullshit response that closed the subject before it’d even been opened. But then he hesitated and drained his beer with a hint of defeat.

“My employees think I’m old,” he said. “They used to jokingly call me ‘boss’ but still wanna grab drinks on Friday. Now they make plans when I’m not around, and they call me ‘sir.’” The last word came out with a sneer. “I’m becoming irrelevant.”

Darius looked at him, bewildered. “Why do you care? I understand that a twenty-five-year-old yoga instructor with a pep in her step and a Colgate smile is good for business, but why do you wanna be friends with those people? Y’all got fuck-all in common.”

It didn’t compute. Ethan had plenty of friends his own age, so it couldn’t be loneliness of any kind.

“I don’t like being excluded because I happen to be out of my twenties,” Ethan responded irritably.

Darius withheld his remark about the fact that his brother was out of his thirties too.

This was some messed-up midlife crisis.

“So this new client of yours,” Darius went on. “She just walked up to you and called you pretentious?”

“No.” Ethan clenched his jaw. “We were talking while she was on the treadmill. I said I was every woman’s type—screw you!”

Darius coughed to hide his laughter. Or scoff. Or a combination of both. Jesus Christ, his brother was too much sometimes.

“Anyway,” Ethan continued sourly. “She made a noise and kinda blurted out that not all women are into pretentious gym owners who shave their chests. And there’s that fucking insult again. It’s the second time this year some woman’s said that.”

Darius couldn’t hide his amusement any longer. Fuck, he’d tried, but damn. He laughed—hard—and sort of wanted to buy the treadmill woman a drink. Ethan clearly needed to hear it. More than once.

All of a sudden, Ethan went rigid and narrowed his eyes. “It’s her.”

“Huh?” Darius looked at him and felt his forehead wrinkle in confusion.

“It’s her. She’s here.”

Wait, what? Darius followed Ethan’s gaze, glanced over his shoulder toward all the cars parked near the dirt road, and he frowned. A short, curvy woman shut the door to a rusty old truck, and it was someone he’d recently met for the first time. Gray’s aunt.

“I did wonder about her last name—if she was related to Gray.”

This was priceless. He smirked and faced Ethan again. “Your new client is Natalie?”

“You know her?” Ethan gritted out.

Darius cracked up again. “It’s Gray’s aunt. I can’t fucking wait to tell him. And I’m gonna buy that woman a drink sometime.”

“Fuck.” Ethan ran a hand through his hair and looked like he was searching for an escape. “It’s possible I’ve come off as an ass to her.”

“Yeah, I take that for granted.”

Ethan flicked him a glare before looking toward the cabin. What, was he gonna hide upstairs?

Well, Natalie was coming closer, almost at the bridge now, and Darius had two options. Turn Ethan into his party entertainment or…actually help him out.

“Give her a fresh start,” he told his brother. “Go over to her, apologize for whatever you’ve done, introduce yourself, and start over.”

That gave Ethan pause, and he knitted his brows together. “Where the hell did that come from?”

Experience. Experience with another Nolan, to be exact.

A few months ago, Gray had admitted he felt robbed of a conventional beginning to their relationship. He and Darius had been thrown into hell together and forged the foundation of their bond in captivity and through weeks of trauma. And to Darius, it didn’t matter how they’d met. When push came to shove, it didn’t matter to Gray either, but at the same time, the guy was twenty-one years old and had just lost the future he’d envisioned growing up. Like meeting Darius under normal circumstances, like going on dates, like worrying about “Does he like me?” rather than dreading nightmares, flashbacks, and therapy.

“Just trust me when I say it works,” Darius said. “Go over to her.”

Darius wasn’t what one might call stereotypically romantic. Far from it. He sometimes forgot important dates, he missed certain social cues, and he didn’t pick up on hints. But what he could do was give his knucklehead as many new beginnings as possible. So far, he’d introduced himself to Gray at the grocery store, they’d flirted as strangers at Darius’s restaurant, and he’d come home from work one night to treat Gray like the babysitter.

That last one had been a hit.

The trick was to discreetly ask Gray’s mother what romance novel she and Gray were currently reading together at the inn.

He watched, a little amused, as Ethan trailed off toward Natalie with another type of stick up his ass. The stick of uncertainty.

Darius smirked to himself and returned his attention to the grill. The hot dogs were done, so he started plating them and called out for the kids. Then he switched on the fryer and removed the wire basket so he could fill it with fries.

* * *

With Adirondack chairs, plastic lawn chairs, and blankets strewn about, they threw one big barbecue slash picnic where family members and friends sat wherever they pleased. Darius ended up on the top step of the porch, and he had Gray sitting on the lower step between his legs. The boys were long gone. Justin and Willow shared a blanket near the stream, and Jayden had planted his butt in the grass and was listening to Gideon and Gabriel tell some wild stories from hockey camp.

“I’m not sure Gid’s gonna cope well when Gabriel leaves,” Gray said quietly.

Yeah, that would probably be rough for a while. Gabriel had, as predicted, been drafted over the summer. He’d just barely made the cut because his eighteenth birthday fell on the final date for this year’s round of possible prospects. Now, his future career in the NHL was looking more and more certain, and he was moving to Chicago in a couple weeks, where he would finish high school and work with a farm team or something. He’d been assigned his own goalie coach, and the general manager of the Blackhawks had said in an interview that he had high hopes for the kid.

Darius had a feeling Gideon would follow as soon as he’d graduated high school here in town. Maybe go to college there.

“I reckon he copes better than your mother,” Darius murmured back.

“True. And about that, I was thinking I could stay over at their house tomorrow,” Gray said. “I’m not wanted here anyway.”

Darius snorted around a mouthful of steak and potato salad.

Gray glanced up at him over his shoulder with a wounded expression that looked a little too forced.

“Don’t even try,” Darius chuckled.

Some amusement seeped into Gray’s grayish-blue eyes. “Okay, so I’m mostly happy, but I’m a bit miffed too.”

The knucklehead would survive being miffed.

“You know it’s for the best.” Darius ducked down and stole a quick kiss. “I don’t wanna get your hopes up.”

The day Darius had confirmed that they would do something about Alfred Lange’s human trafficking organization—more accurately, the birthday party the shitbag was hosting in Vegas soon—Gray had been ecstatic. For weeks, he’d feared that Darius would just hand over the intel Kellan Ford had given them to the Feds. But Darius couldn’t. After Willow had looked through the information on that goddamn USB drive, loose plans had formed in his head whether he’d wanted them to or not.

Alongside the plans, though, was the growing list of risks. Gray had given him his word that they were done. Right after rescuing Jackie in the Mojave Desert, they’d walk away. Gray had promised. So that was why he hadn’t pushed. But it didn’t take a genius to see what Gray had hoped for. He wanted his revenge. He wanted Alfred Lange and his followers to suffer, to be stopped forever, to die.

In other words, Gray was naïve as fuck, because he couldn’t possibly understand the dangers of such an operation. Put together in a short period of time, to boot.

It was why Darius had chosen to keep Gray out of the loop for the most part. He didn’t even feel sorry. They had two boys now. They had a responsibility to stay alive.

But yeah, shit was in motion. Gray thought tomorrow was about Darius meeting old buddies from his days in the field just to “put feelers out.” In reality, it was more than that. Much more. And Gray wouldn’t get any details until Darius had created a position that entailed as few risks as possible.

“I’m a bit miffed you’re not coming home at the end of the night,” Darius chose to say instead. Because the original plan had been for Gray to spend the evening at Chloe and Aiden’s house, with the kids, who would then have a sleepover while Gray came home again.

“You can’t have the cake and eat it too,” Gray responded.

“If you’re the cake, you bet your sweet fuckin’ ass I can.” Darius dragged half a roll through the potato salad and Ma’s chili aioli, then crammed it into his mouth. “I’m planning on eating and having you for the rest of my life.”

Lighthearted declarations like that were safe. He could get away with those, and they made Gray smile with his whole face. But Darius was careful around more profound shit. He didn’t want a repeat of this spring when Gray had pumped the brakes on how quickly their relationship was developing. Not that the kid wasn’t right; he was. They’d literally agreed to become foster parents before they’d even had a first date. No one could go through that without being overwhelmed, including Darius. His life had been turned upside down almost overnight. Now, though, the dust had settled for him, and he wanted their future written in stone. He wanted this—this home, them, their kids—to be what he had to look forward to for as long as he lived.

He just had to wait for Gray to catch up, so caution was smart.

Darius knew he was being irrational. In his defense, all this was still new to him, and he’d never felt possessive before. He’d never had anyone who made him wanna lock shit down and claim ownership.

It definitely wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with someone who’d recently survived being kidnapped and sold off into slavery.

He dipped down and pressed a soft kiss to the barcode tattoo on the back of Gray’s neck.

The digits he’d added underneath the barcode had always been special, but recently they’d turned into a lot more. It was his future.

Gray leaned back against him and peered up. “Kiss.”

Darius kissed him slowly, savoring the moment. Everyone else was occupied. The kids were happy.

“Have I mentioned that I love this?” He brushed his thumb over Gray’s beard.

“A few times.” Gray smirked into the kiss. “Maybe I wanna look like my mountain man.”

Darius chuckled and drew back a little. “You’re turning into the hermit stereotype you made fun of me for. How many flannel shirts do you own now?”

“Zero if you ask Abel—he can’t handle that truth. Two if you ask me.”

“Nine if we count the ones you borrow from me.”

“We don’t count those.” Gray smacked Darius’s cheek lightly and turned back to his food.

Darius grinned to himself and reached for his beer.

As he looked out over the lawn, seeing his family and everyone having a good time, he got stuck on a particular movement. Avery leaned in and kissed Elise, and his hand briefly went to her stomach.

It appeared congratulations were in order.