SUMMARY: Emma never envisioned having a family of her own, a home brimming with love, but watching Killian sing their child to sleep, she knew that the life they were building would be one of true happiness – and for a time it was, but the past has a way of finding itself on your doorstep, and the things it wants can darken even the brightest of hearts, tearing families apart while trying to bring them together.
For once, I’m not being lazy with this one, so I’m sharing the chapter here as well. If you’d like to be added or removed from my tag list, let me know. If you’re not caught up, you’ll have to check out AO3 or FF.
He watched her in the distance, a glimmer of ivory against the steel grey sky, wind tossing her golden curls like ribbons as she stood beside the wash basin, water slipping from her arms to carve a sheer path down the sides of her shift. She fastened the laundry to the sturdy line he’d hung weeks earlier, wedging each pin stubbornly over the garments that twisted and fluttered like birds caught in a storm.
His own shirt was soaked with sweat, clinging to his chest and falling haphazardly open at the top as he paused in his work, basking in the vision she presented. Letting the arms of the handcart drop, he stood to his full height, stretching to rid himself of the ache that came from hard labor. The stones would hold, but there were other things he had no intention of delaying.
He made his way up the slope, the sea breeze offering some relief from his exhaustion, kissing his damp skin and easing the unseasonable heat that should never have touched such an early spring morning. By the time he neared his Swan, he could just hear the soft tones of her voice as she sung something beneath her breath to their child.
“Why do you always stop, love?” he asked, taking his place behind her and sweeping the cascade of sweat-dampened curls from her shoulder, her skin smelling of ash and lye from where the bat had splashed it from the basin.
“Stop what?” she said, sighing and sinking against the solidity of his chest, her own aches relaxing as his lips skimmed over her warm skin.
“Singing. You’ve a beautiful voice, Swan.”
“Not like yours,” she muttered, a moan catching in her throat as Hook’s fingers wandered down the curve of her full breast and dragged across where her shift was stretched taut over her stomach.
“Our little one seems to enjoy it well enough, and I know I do, when I’ve luck enough to hear it – you’re like a siren, puller me always closer…”
“Oh, what a fate,” she laughed, turning into him as much as her belly allowed, the rinse pans and pile of wrung laundry forgotten as she took in the sheen of a hard day’s work on his skin. The sweat had run clean streaks through his dirt-rubbed cheeks, the dull white of his work shirt crossed with smudges of pine tar from packing the walls of the outbuildings with oakum, “to be drowned among the wash water by your siren of a woman, though I don’t think a bath tonight would be wasted.”
“I’ll have you know I bathe quite frequently,” he groused, arching a brow and running his tongue along his bottom lip, “though far more time is spent between your thighs than seeing to my ablutions, I’ll admit.”
“I’ve never seen a filthier pirate.”
“That’s Captain to you,” he reprimanded, hand sliding down her back and cupping her bottom, “but seeing as I’m so dirty, perhaps my washer woman will do me the service of getting me clean.”
“Now?” Emma grinned, her eyes flashing back to the valley below where she could see the men still working on the outbuildings and the recommissioned stable – small, dark figures laboring with stone and wood, twice the distance away as their cottage. “Won’t the crew wonder where you’ve disappeared to?”
“We may be on land these days, Swan, but they know better than to question their captain, unlike someone else.”
“Well, in that case,” she whispered, her fingers wrapping around his hook and tugging him between the laundry she’d already hung, “I know just the place…”
She dragged him back down the open hillside toward where their cottage was nestled among lichen covered ridges of stone and gentle bluffs, the wind teasing her hair as she turned her eyes back toward him, shining with happiness and laughter, lips caught in a wide smile beneath her scrunched nose.
He loved seeing her this way – carefree and reveling in the small, quiet moments that, stacked one upon the other, were the foundation of the life they were building together. Because of her, he knew what it was to have a full heart again.
She guided him toward the long neglected copse of apple trees, and falling to her knees among the soft, feathered heads of grass, she pulled his body against her, smiling into the rough wool of his breeches and casting her lidded eyes in his direction.
“Did my captain request my services?” she purred, but her words fell on deaf ears, so lost was he in the green of her eyes and the scattering of freckles teased out by the sun across her nose.
“No time for that…” he muttered, and he dropped to the ground beside her, ignoring the knobbly twigs and bits of leaves that prodded his skin, pulling her against him and claiming her lips. His hand wound in her curls as he leaned over the large swell of her stomach, tasting her – honey and the bitter mint of her tea, the salt of sweat that lingered at the edges of her lips.
She was everything, she was his.
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