Beautifully Knight (Jordan Knight Fanfic, Liadan #5)

Check-Outs and Check-Ins

-NATALIE-

The incessant shrill of crying echoed throughout my hospital room and wore mercilessly on my nerves. After all of my years of playing auntie and cousin and even working as a therapist with lots of little, fearful patients, I thought I had the art of calming and soothing crying babies down to a perfect technique. Yet, no amount of cradling my own baby boy seemed to be enough. With every passing second, his wails just got louder and louder as his tiny face scrunched into a frown that made him look like a red tomato version of his father.

"Don't cry, cutie, you're going home with Mommy and Daddy today, isn't that exciting? Aren't you happy to get to leave this place, huh?" I adjusted the little blue cap on his head and tickled his cheeks in an attempt to distract him and get him to give me one of those adorable newborn smiles that weren't really smiles, but were smiles nonetheless—the ones that decorated my mommy friends' Instagram pages of their perfect little lives, but apparently Trey wasn't in a non-smiling smile mood.

The second that his "Gran" and "Poppy" had left, his tears had started and they hadn't ceased for the fifteen minutes since. I'd tried everything I could think of to settle him—I'd offered him a pacifier, a bottle, and a rattle. I'd walked around, sat down, hummed, cooed, and attempted every other trick I knew to try and still, nothing was working.

To add to my panic, a little voice in the back of my head was starting to second guess whether I was truly ready to check out and go home—if I couldn't manage for a few minutes while my in-laws ran home to get a car seat and my husband got dressed, then how was I ready to manage the rest of Trey's life? Maybe we needed a few more days in the hospital where the nurses were around for help.

"Trey, please," I whispered and sat back on the hospital bed. "Don't cry."

I placed a kiss on his forehead and sighed as the wailing continued on to the point that I didn't even notice the shower water had stopped until my husband emerged from the bathroom.

Unlike my current state of disarray in a lounge suit that was comfy, but far from flattering, he was dressed nicely in a t-shirt with a new version of his shop's logo that I didn't recognize and a fitted pair of jeans. His ripped biceps flexed effortlessly as he pulled his long, luscious hair back into a so-called "man" bun and expertly secured the hair tie with his long fingers. As soon as he was done, he swiped his hand over his still-damp face to rid of the few droplets of water that speckled his faint mustache and shadow of stubble along his sharp jawline.

Over the years, DJ had grown up to be an undeniably sexy man—simultaneously sensitive and strong, gentle and gallant, determined and dauntless and the target of quite a lot of women's attention. Although I tried to ignore it, I wasn't oblivious to the fact that I wasn't the only girl to swing by his shop with a car that didn't really need to be fixed.

His twenties had treated him well, made him more gorgeous than ever, and given him plenty of clients who were constantly in need of "consultations". At another point in my life, it would have made me insanely jealous—and if I was being honest, sometimes it still did, but beyond his alluring physique, the thing that got me the most and made me weak in the knees was the way his eyes never failed to make me feel like the only person in the room.

It didn't matter how near or far we were, our eyes always sought out each other and sent secret messages that only we knew how to interpret. When we were little, it'd been our way of complaining at school without getting in trouble, in middle school it'd been our method of sharing inside jokes, and as a couple it'd become our way of flirting without saying a word.

DJ's big, brown eyes made my heart flutter and in the midst of craziness, reminded me to breathe. Now was no different as he looked in my direction.