🔥 Groundbreaking 🔥

Thank You for Reading! 💜

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve experienced Beau and Brandi’s journey from revenge to love to home. Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

⚠️ Content Warning: This scene contains explicit MF content, shower sex, postpartum intimacy, praise elements, and extended intimate scenes. It’s rated 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ for a reason. Significantly more explicit than the main book. Reader discretion advised.

Groundbreaking

Set one year after the epilogue • May • Brandi POV

Josephine Ray Hadley came into the world the way she’d done everything since conception — on her own schedule, in the middle of the night, with zero regard for anyone’s plans.

She was three months old now. Eleven pounds of opinionated fury wrapped in a onesie that said Future CEO — a gift from my mother, which told you everything you needed to know about Jolene Holloway’s priorities. Jo had Beau’s grey eyes and my dark hair and a cry that could shatter crystal at forty paces. She slept in ninety-minute cycles, ate like she was training for a competitive sport, and had exactly one method for communicating displeasure, which was maximum volume at all times.

I was obsessed with her. Completely, horrifyingly, inconveniently obsessed.

But right now, at seven-fifteen on a Saturday morning, Jo was asleep. Had been for almost two hours — a personal record that I was not going to jinx by acknowledging it out loud. She was in the nursery, in the crib Beau had built from reclaimed oak, in the room painted quarry-water blue-green, with the baby monitor transmitting her steady breathing through the speaker on my nightstand like the world’s most beautiful white noise.

And Beau was in the shower.

I could hear the water running through the wall. Our bathroom — our bathroom, in our house, the house he’d rebuilt with his hands while I was pregnant and furious and falling deeper in love with him every time I caught him measuring cabinet heights against my belly to make sure I could reach things in my third trimester.

The house was done. Had been since before Jo was born. Three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen with butcher block counters and the oak table he’d built and a porch that wrapped around two sides with a view of the cedar ridge where the sun set in colors that made my chest hurt. Hadley Renovations had done every inch of it. Tommy Reeves had laid the tile. Beau had done the trim work himself — every baseboard, every window casing, every piece of crown molding hand-mitered with a precision that bordered on pathological.

It was the most beautiful house I’d ever lived in. It was ours. It was paid for in sweat equity and stubborn love and one extremely ill-advised revenge pact that turned out to be the best decision either of us ever made.

The shower was still running.

I looked at the baby monitor. Green lights, steady. Jo’s breathing, rhythmic. The little white-noise hum of a baby who had absolutely no intention of waking up in the next — I checked the clock — fifteen minutes, minimum, based on her emerging pattern.

I’d been keeping a spreadsheet. Beau called it my Sleep Optimization Matrix. He was not wrong.

Fifteen minutes.

I got out of bed.

The bathroom door wasn’t locked. It was never locked anymore — not since Jo arrived and the concept of personal privacy became a quaint relic of our childless past, like sleeping in and spontaneous sex and conversations that lasted longer than forty-five seconds before someone started screaming about being hungry.

Steam hit me when I opened the door. The mirror was fogged. The whole room smelled like cedar soap — the kind Beau had been using since before I knew him, the smell I associated with his skin and his neck and the hollow of his throat where I pressed my face at night when Jo was crying and I was crying and the only thing keeping me from losing my mind entirely was the solid, impossible steadiness of the man I’d married.

We’d gotten married in February. Courthouse. No fanfare. I wore jeans and the copper ring that had turned green and a flannel shirt that I’d stolen from his closet six months prior and never returned. He wore the good jeans — the ones without paint on them — and the expression he wore when he was trying not to feel too much in public, which was the expression that made me want to climb him like a tree.

The judge had asked if I took this man. I said, “Obviously.” Beau had said, “Yes, ma’am,” because he was pathologically incapable of being anything other than polite to authority figures, and the judge had laughed, and that was it. Married. Done. The most dependable sonofabitch in the state of Texas was mine, legally, permanently, with a courthouse stamp and a copper ring and a baby due in six weeks.

Now I was standing in his bathroom watching his silhouette through the frosted glass of the shower door, and the silhouette was —

God.

A year of hauling lumber and framing walls and carrying a pregnant woman up porch steps when she was too stubborn to admit her ankles hurt had done things to his body that should be illegal. He’d always been built — wide shoulders, thick arms, the kind of working-man physique that doesn’t come from a gym — but now there was a definition to him that hadn’t been there before. Leaner through the waist. Harder through the chest. The arms were ridiculous. I’d watched him carry Jo’s crib up the stairs one-handed while talking on the phone to a client, and I’d had to sit down.

He hadn’t seen me.

I pulled my sleep shirt over my head. No bra — I’d stopped wearing them to bed approximately fourteen seconds after Jo was born, and the freedom was a revelation I was never going back from. My body was different now. Fuller. The hips were wider, the breasts were heavier, and there was a softness to my stomach that I’d initially hated and then stopped hating when Beau put his mouth on it one night and said, “This is where she lived,” like my stretch marks were a monument instead of a flaw.

I slid the shower door open.

He turned. Water streaming down his chest, his hair dark and slicked back, grey eyes going from surprised to that look in approximately one-half of one second.

That look. The one I’d first seen in the cab of his truck at the Eastgate site. The one that said every thought in his head had just been replaced by a single, focused frequency, and the frequency was me.

“Jo’s asleep,” I said.

“How long?”

“Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty if we’re lucky.”

He looked at me. Standing in the steam. Naked. My hair was a disaster and I hadn’t brushed my teeth and there was probably spit-up on my shoulder from the two a.m. feeding, and he looked at me like I was the most devastating thing he’d ever seen.

“Get in here,” he said.

I got in.

The water was hot. Almost too hot — Beau showered at temperatures that would sterilize medical equipment, a fact I’d protested exactly once before realizing that the heat turned his skin flushed and warm and that the contrast of the cool air when he pressed me against the tile was its own kind of foreplay.

He pulled me under the spray. His hands — those broad, rough, calloused hands — slid from my shoulders down my arms to my waist, and the touch was so familiar it ached. We hadn’t — it had been three weeks. Three weeks since we’d done more than collapse into bed, pass out, wake to Jo’s screaming, and repeat. New parenthood was a war of attrition against sleep deprivation, and sex had become a luxury item, like uninterrupted meals and showers that lasted longer than four minutes.

This shower was going to last longer than four minutes.

“Hi,” I said. Looking up at him. Water on my face. His hands on my hips.

“Hi.” The word was low. Graveled. The voice he used in the dark, in the quiet, in the space between us where nobody else existed.

“I missed you.”

“I’m right here.”

“You know what I mean.”

He knew what I meant. His thumbs traced circles on my hip bones — slow, deliberate, the way he touched everything. Beau didn’t rush. Not with trim work, not with tile, not with me. He measured twice. He was thorough. He was meticulous, and the meticulousness, which had once driven me insane with impatience, now drove me insane in an entirely different way.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

“You. Fast. Before the baby wakes up.”

“Brandi.” His mouth curved. Not quite a smile — Beau didn’t do smiles, he did slight adjustments to his expression that I’d learned to read like a seismograph reads tremors. This particular adjustment meant: I hear your request and I’m going to ignore the timeline entirely.

“We have fifteen minutes —”

“Then I’ll be efficient.”

He dropped to his knees.

In the shower. On the tile floor. Water running down his back, his shoulders, streaming over the muscles I’d been staring at through the glass thirty seconds ago. He looked up at me — grey eyes, dark lashes, water beading on his face — and the sight of Beau Hadley on his knees was a thing I would never, in my entire life, get used to.

He lifted my left leg over his shoulder.

“Beau —”

“Shh.” His breath against my inner thigh. “Efficient, remember?”

And then his mouth was on me.

The sound I made was not quiet. It bounced off the tile and the glass and the fogged mirror and I slapped my hand over my mouth because the baby monitor worked both ways and I had a brief, hysterical image of Jo’s little eyes popping open at the sound of her mother losing her entire mind at seven-twenty on a Saturday morning.

Beau didn’t stop. He never stopped. That was the thing about being with a man who approached everything with the focus of a finish carpenter — once he started something, he completed it. No shortcuts. No approximations. He’d learned my body the way he’d learned joinery, through repetition and attention and an obsessive commitment to getting it right, and a year of practice had made him devastating.

His tongue moved in a pattern that he knew — because he paid attention, because he always paid attention, because this man could tell if a wall was a sixteenth of an inch off plumb but couldn’t remember to buy milk — a pattern that built the pressure in my core like a wave building offshore, steady and relentless and inevitable.

My fingers were in his wet hair. My back was against the tile. The water was running over both of us, hot and constant, and his hands were gripping my thigh and my hip with a firmness that said I have you and I’m not letting go and you’re safe to fall apart because I will be here when you land.

“Right there — God, right there — don’t stop, don’t you dare —”

He didn’t stop. He applied more pressure, then less, then more — reading my body’s responses in real time, adjusting, recalibrating, working me with a patience that was almost cruel because my entire nervous system was screaming for release and he was giving it to me in increments, in measures, in the careful, deliberate, maddening tempo of a man who had all the time in the world even when we had twelve minutes at best.

I came with my hand over my mouth and my leg shaking on his shoulder and a sound that leaked through my fingers anyway — a high, broken cry that the tile amplified into something obscene. The orgasm rolled through me in waves, deep and full and devastating, and his mouth stayed on me through the entire thing, drawing it out, extending it past the point where I could breathe or think or do anything except grip his hair and hold on while my body did what his body was telling it to do.

He stood up. Water streaming down his face. His mouth wet. His eyes dark with that focus, that intensity, the look that said he was not finished.

“Turn around,” he said.

I turned around.

My palms flat on the tile. The water hitting my shoulders. His body behind mine — the heat of him, the size of him, the solidity that I’d built my entire new life around. His hand slid up my spine, between my shoulder blades, to the back of my neck. Not gripping. Resting. A question.

“Yes,” I said. Before he asked. Because we’d learned each other’s language by now and his hand on the back of my neck was always a question and my answer was always the same.

He pushed into me from behind and I dropped my forehead to the tile because the stretch, the fullness, the way he filled me was something I never got used to no matter how many times — in this shower, on the couch after Jo’s midnight feeding, against the kitchen counter while the pasta water boiled, in the truck that one time we drove out to the cedar ridge and didn’t even make it to the back seat — no matter how many times, it still felt like the first time in the supply trailer when everything I thought I knew about my body turned out to be wrong.

“Fuck,” I breathed.

“Language.” His mouth against my ear. Amused. The bastard was amused.

“Don’t — don’t you dare tell me to watch my language while you’re —”

He moved. Deep. Slow. A single, devastating stroke that ended with his hips flush against me and my breath leaving my body in a rush that steamed against the tile.

“While I’m what?” he murmured.

I couldn’t answer because he did it again. And again. Slow, rolling thrusts that used the full length of him, pulling nearly out and pushing all the way back in, the kind of rhythm that said I have done this a hundred times and I know exactly what happens at this angle at this speed, and what happened was that every coherent thought in my head turned to static.

His hand moved from my neck to my hip. His other hand snaked around my front, down my stomach — over the stretch marks, over the softness, his fingers finding me with a precision that should not have been possible for a man who claimed he was “just a carpenter.”

“Beau.” My voice cracked on his name. “The baby —”

“Fifteen minutes. You said fifteen minutes.”

“That was — that was eight minutes ago —”

“Then I’d better make the next seven count.”

He changed the angle. Tilted my hips with his hand, shifted his stance, and found the spot — the spot, the one he’d mapped months ago with the same careful attention he brought to blueprints and finish work and every other thing he built — and the sound I made was not compatible with sleeping babies or functional vocal cords.

“Quiet,” he said. Which was rich, coming from the man who was systematically dismantling my sanity against a shower wall.

“You — quiet — you try being —”

He thrust harder. The sound of our bodies, the water, the ragged breathing that was his and mine and both at once — the bathroom was an echo chamber and every wet slap and gasp bounced off the tile and filled the steam-thick air until the room was nothing but heat and sound and his body moving in mine with an urgency that told me the calm, measured pace was gone now, replaced by something rawer, something that lived under the steadiness, the thing I’d discovered that night in the flip house when the revenge stopped being revenge and started being everything.

His fingers between my legs matched his rhythm — faster now, relentless, building the second orgasm with an efficiency that was almost aggressive. He could feel me tightening around him — I knew he could, because his breath changed, went ragged, the low groan he made when he was close vibrating against the back of my neck.

“Come for me,” he said. And he said it the way he said everything — quiet, sure, the voice of a man who expected results because he’d done the work to earn them.

I came. Harder than the first time — my whole body clenching around him, my hands slipping on the wet tile, his arm around my waist the only thing keeping me upright while my legs buckled and my vision went white and the orgasm tore through me with a violence that was not compatible with the gentle cascade of warm shower water.

He followed. Three more strokes — hard, deep, his grip on my hip bruising — and then he buried himself inside me and pressed his forehead to my shoulder and made a sound. Not a groan. Not a shout. A sound that had no name, that came from the bottom of him, that I felt in my chest and my spine and the place where his body ended and mine began.

We stood there. In the water. Breathing. His arms around me, my back against his chest, the steam rising around us like the bathroom was burning and we were the fire.

From the baby monitor on the nightstand, transmitted faintly through the open bathroom door: silence. Beautiful, miraculous, lottery-winning silence.

“She’s still asleep,” I whispered.

“She’s her mother’s daughter. Stubborn.”

“Did you just call me stubborn while you’re still inside me?”

“I called you stubborn because I’m still inside you. Seemed like an appropriate moment for honesty.”

I laughed. The laugh made my muscles clench and he hissed through his teeth and I laughed harder and then we were both laughing — quiet, breathless, leaning against the tile in a shower that was starting to go cold, married, parents, twenty and thirty-nine, ridiculous, impossible, exactly right.

He made me breakfast. Eggs scrambled the way I liked — soft, with chives from the herb box on the kitchen windowsill. Toast. Orange juice, because Jo went crazy when I drank orange juice and the kicking was the funniest thing either of us had ever witnessed and we weren’t ready to give it up even though the kicking was now external and involved tiny feet against my forearm during feedings.

Jo woke at eight. On schedule. I nursed her on the porch while Beau sat next to me in the Adirondack chair he’d built — two chairs now, matching, with a small table between them that held his coffee and my juice and the baby monitor we didn’t need because the baby was right here, in my arms, eating with the single-minded determination of a Holloway woman.

“The Henderson kitchen starts Monday,” Beau said.

“The big one? With the island?”

“White oak throughout. Custom cabinetry. Client wants hand-routed pulls.”

“How long?”

“Three weeks. Maybe four. Tommy’s doing the tile.”

I looked at him. Sitting in the chair he’d built, on the porch he’d built, in front of the house he’d built, talking about the business he’d built. Hadley Renovations. Three crews now. A wait list through September. A reputation that had spread past the county line into territory that used to be Ray’s, absorbed quietly, without fanfare, because Beau didn’t do fanfare. He did the work. He showed up. He was dependable.

But he wasn’t just dependable anymore. That word — the one Ray had used like a leash — had been reclaimed. Repurposed. Like the copper pipe that was now a wedding ring. Like the flip house that was now a home. Like the revenge that was now a marriage.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“You’re staring at the ridge.”

“I’m looking at the cedars. They’re filling in.”

“You planted those.”

“I planted those.”

Jo unlatched and made the face — the scrunched, tomato-red, deeply offended face that meant she had an opinion about something and the opinion was I’m done and I want to be vertical now. I lifted her to my shoulder. Patted her back. She burped with the force and volume of a man twice her size, which I attributed to the Holloway genetics and Beau attributed to pure talent.

“Your mother called,” Beau said.

“And?”

“She wants to come for Jo’s christening.”

“We’re not having a christening.”

“I told her that.”

“And?”

“She said, and I’m quoting, ‘Tell Brandi that child needs Jesus even if her parents don’t.'”

I looked at Jo. She was drooling on my shoulder with the serene indifference of a creature who had no concept of Jesus or christenings or grandmothers who drove up from Houston in a Cadillac to deliver unsolicited opinions about salvation.

“Tell her we’ll think about it.”

“I told her we’d think about it.”

“And?”

“She’s coming next weekend.”

I closed my eyes. Opened them. Jo was staring at me with Beau’s grey eyes and my stubborn mouth and an expression that said, very clearly, you brought this on yourself.

“Fine,” I said. “But she’s not bringing Ray’s name into this house.”

“She won’t.”

She wouldn’t. Nobody mentioned Ray anymore. Not in this house. Not on this porch. Ray Holloway had become what he was always afraid of becoming — irrelevant. Last I’d heard, through the town grapevine that I pretended not to listen to, he’d sold the equipment. Moved to a job site in Oklahoma. Shelly had filed the papers. The house on Pecan was for sale.

I didn’t feel anything about it. Not satisfaction. Not guilt. Just the clean, clear nothing of a door that closed a long time ago.

“Beau.”

“Yeah?”

“Today’s Saturday.”

“I know it’s Saturday.”

“It’s a beautiful Saturday. Jo’s fed. She’s happy. Your phone is inside. No one needs you for anything.”

He looked at me. The grey eyes. The quiet face. The slight adjustment that meant he was about to say something that mattered.

“You need me,” he said.

“I always need you.”

“Then I’m right here.”

He reached across the table between our chairs. His hand — rough, scarred, the copper ring warm on his finger — found mine. The ring had gone fully green now, patinated and soft, the color of new leaves in spring, and I twisted it against his knuckle the way I always did, a habit I’d developed during the pregnancy when I couldn’t sleep and his hand was the only thing that made the anxiety go quiet.

Jo fell asleep on my shoulder. Just like that — mid-drool, full stomach, the abrupt surrender of a three-month-old who had been awake for an entire hour and was exhausted by the ordeal.

I held her. Beau held my hand. The cedars moved on the ridge. The porch light was off — it was morning, no need for it — but the light was everywhere anyway. On the house. On the yard. On the two chairs and the table and the man and the woman and the baby that none of this was supposed to produce but all of it did.

Scorched earth. That’s what we’d called it. The plan. The revenge. The fire we lit to burn one man’s world down.

But fire doesn’t just destroy. It clears. It opens. It returns nutrients to the soil that was too exhausted to grow anything new.

And from the scorched ground — this. This house. This porch. This morning.

This life, green and stubborn and loud and ours.

Growing.

THE END

Thank You for Reading!

If you loved Beau and Brandi’s story, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Reviews are the #1 way to help other readers discover books they’ll love — and they mean the world to indie authors.

Never Miss a Release