The Bad Boy with a Heart of Gold

✖ Chapter 27 ✖

I may or may not have spent the entire Saturday cleaning my room, and it may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that Sawyer was coming home on Sunday to get started paining the baby's room. That was how we were calling what used to be the studio, since sooner than we expected it was going to be taken over by the littlest member of the Martinez Fernandez family. The room was next to mine, and where I'd become used for the past few months to it being quiet, now that she was back and with what was up ahead in our future I was trying my best to come to terms with the fact that it was going to get real noisy in there and the wall in between was not necessarily thick.

That was how on Sunday morning I heard Sawyer's voice next to my head as I slept in bed.

I jolted from bed while my body was still not coordinated with my brain. My legs tangled in the bed sheets and acted like shackles to my lower body. Meanwhile my upper body had not quite got the message and hurtled forward. I hit the floor with a yelp and a hard thud that probably rattled the entire house.

The conversation in the baby's room stopped. I was hurting something fierce in places. My cheekbone met the floor intimately and my right arm landed wedged between my body and the floor and it didn't appreciate the position. I stayed like that until I was able to gather my bearings. At least I was definitely awake now. I was sitting up when my door opened and there he was, with Toni and papa right behind him.

"Are you okay, sis?" Toni asked, holding back her laughter with some weak effort. "Also, you may want to cover yourself."

I looked down, wondering what she meant, when I saw that my nightgown was all askew and I was nearly flashing all my goods. An unnatural sound came out of my throat as I picked up the blankets to try to cover myself, but Sawyer wasn't quick enough at hiding his smirk before he turned around.

"I think she's fine," he said before heading back to Toni's room.

My jaw hung open. Was I the only one who caught a double meaning there? Toni's eyebrows started wiggling and I figured that nope, I wasn't the only one.

Papa didn't look like he'd connected the dots. "Ay, mija. That sounded pretty bad. Estás bien?"

"Yeah, I'm okay." I took advantage of the fact that they were standing there to ask, "Why are you all up so early?"

"We thought it'd be best to start early," papa said. "It'll probably take Sawyer and I most of the day to get everything ready."

I frowned. "Why so long? I thought it was just a couple of paint coats."

"Oh, it's not just that," Toni said. "There's the actual wall painting, but they're also going to hang new curtains and assemble the crib and the diaper changing station."

"When did we get all that?" I asked as I made my way up to my own two feet.

Toni laughed. "We haven't got it yet. Mama and I are going shopping this morning."

Well, that sucked because I supposed they wanted me to come along, and that meant that I was not going to see Sawyer much. I knew that going shopping with mama and Toni was an epic quest. It always started out as a couple of things only but quickly evolved into an exhausting exercise to see how we could buy the most things with the smallest amount of money possible. And mama's definition of a small amount of money was loosely based on her moods. So this expedition could start out with a $100 budget and could gain one zero to the right, or it could start straight at the $1,000 and quickly get downgraded when she didn't like what we liked.

"Papa," Toni started as she looked up at him with wide eyes. "I just thought of something."

"What?" he asked, now passing his concern on from me to her.