“Yeah, you’re welcome. No problem. Anything else I can do for you? Wait. Never mind. Forget I asked that.” He’d learned not to challenge Janey when she was feeling vindictive.

“You think you’re pretty damned funny, don’t you?” Janey asked. “Bringing extra smalls.”

“Those are for P.J.’s sock drawer,” Mac said. “Never too early to be prepared.”

“Get out,” Janey said with a growl. “Now.”

He kissed her cheek. “Love you, too, brat. Go easy on poor Joe. He’s out of practice. Things might happen quickly.”

Joe took him by the arm and escorted him to the front door. “Sorry to throw you out of my house, Maddie, but that’s what you get for marrying him.”

“I understand,” Maddie said dramatically. “I want to throw him out of my house sometimes, too.”

“You do not,” Mac said. “You’re always like, ‘More, Mac, harder, Mac, no, there, Mac…’”

“I’m going to kill you when I get you home.”

“She doesn’t mean that,” he said over his shoulder to Joe and Janey, who were laughing in the doorway.

“Yes, she does!” Maddie said. “You call her brat, but no one is a bigger brat than you are.”

He held the car door for her and then leaned in to kiss her. “You love me. Admit it.”

“Yes, Mac,” she said with a long-suffering sigh. “I do love you.”

“And the extra-small thing was pretty funny. Admit it.”

“I’ll do no such thing. I refuse to encourage you.”

“You’ll be encouraging me, all right. In about thirty minutes if it takes that long. ‘Harder, Mac, oh thereeeeee.’” The kids were spending the night with Ned and Francine, and he had big plans for his wife tonight.

She pulled his hair. “Shut up and drive before you find yourself sleeping alone on the deck tonight.”

He grinned at her and stole another kiss before he walked around the truck, whistling as he went. “You’re only mad because you know I’m right,” he said as they pulled out of Janey’s driveway.

“Mac, I swear to God, if you don’t stop talking and drive this car, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.”

Thrilled with her and everything about their life together, he did as she directed. But he’d have her screaming his name in thirty minutes flat or his name wasn’t Malcolm John McCarthy Junior.

“Upstairs,” Joe said to his wife the second he closed the door behind Mac and Maddie.

“It’s only five thirty,” Janey reminded him.

“So?”

She crossed her arms as she took a long look at him. “Do I have time to retrieve my baby from the patio before you drag me upstairs?”