AN: I am changing the rating for a brief moment of sexual content. I am not very good with detailed smut but for a part of this chapter, I felt a small part was needed.

Thank you to the reviewer who helped me point out something in the last chapter that I needed to fix in order to make one of my plot points about Fitz being jealous of Ward and Tommy sibling relationship a bit clearer to my readers. Your advice was greatly appreciated and it has been fixed.

I don't know how long this story will last because more ideas keep coming to me. I wanted an opinion on one of them. I have this idea where Ward has to be rushed to the hospital for heart trouble, only to find out that when Mike Petersen stopped his heart it caused damage. How does the tough specialist deal with his own body now working against him? How does it affect his developing relationships with Kyle and Skye?

It was around nine o'clock when Skye left the main house and walked down to the cabin. She had helped get everything planned for the party and was ready for a long shower before checking her emails and going to bed.

When she got to the porch of the cabin, Skye went to the door and opened it. What she saw brought tears to her eyes and a smile to her face.

The room was filled with candles and roses, a very nice dinner on the kitchen table and a handsome man standing in the middle of it, holding a purple daisy in his hand. She closed the door, locked it and walked over to Grant, kissing him softly.

It quickly turned passionate and they clung to each other until they had to pull away to breathe. She laid her head on his chest as he wrapped his arms around her.

"You didn't have to do all of this," she said quietly.

"Yes, I did. You weren't listening to what I was saying about Sue, so I decided to show you. I have something else for you."

He pulled away from her and walked over to entertainment center and pulled a jewelry box out of one of the side drawers.

"Gramzy gave me this right before she passed away and told me that I should give them to someone that I love. I think she knew that they were meant for you even though she had just met you."

Grant opened the box so Skye could see it and tears filled her eyes at the lovely antique diamond earrings. The round cut two point five carat diamonds winked at her from where they were attached to the box.

"Grant, how can you still love me enough to give me these? I shot you and told you that you should have slammed your head into a wall harder. I have been a bitch to you."

"Skye, I admit that I was very pissed off at you from the time you shot me until my conversation with Lily the day I got to Hamptons. Then I thought about what she told me that you were trying to keep me from following you into those tunnels or stopping you from following Raina," he gently kissed her on the forehead before speaking again. "You're right. I wouldn't have let you go down into that tunnel or would have followed you down there. The sight of you holding the obelisk scared the hell out of me and I didn't want you anywhere near that damn thing."

She pulled his head down to her and kissed him with a passionate abandon that had them both reeling.

"Take me upstairs, now."

"What about dinner?"

"We can heat it up later."

"What about your back?"

"Lily had Tommy check everything out and its fine."

Before she could finish speaking, his lips were on hers and Skye felt him lift her up into his arms. Their mouths separated long enough for him to carry her up the stairs to their room before meeting again after he sat her down at the foot of the bed and closed the door.

Fitz was working down in his lab alone while Mack was up at the main house playing poker with Kara, who was avoiding her girlfriend like the plague. He was so lost in his work that Leo didn't hear Tommy step into the barn and walk over to him.

"We need to talk."

Fitz jumped at the sound of his voice, not expecting the other man to be standing there.

"For some reason, you're jealous of my relationship with Grant," Tommy said. "Why?"

"For all of the ways I was angry at him, I still missed him being a big brother to me, even my friendship with Mack hasn't taken that away. Now he has a relationship with his real little brother again, so why would he bother with me?"

"He missed you too, Leo," Tommy commented. "He was worried about you when everything happened with you and Aunt Lily. The look on his face when I told him that you were okay made me jealous of you. For over fifteen years, my brother was gone from my life and all of it because of my parents, my oldest brother and a psychopath who fucked him up so bad that he might not ever completely recover it."

"Did you ever see your mother abuse him?"

Tommy shivered as a memory from when he was five years old came back to him.

"Yes. It was right after the Christmas that I turned five years old when I saw her throw him out into the backyard when it was five degrees outside and the wind made it feel even colder. He didn't have a coat on and I could hear him crying before he walked away from the door. What my mother didn't know was the butler had set up a place in the tool shed for Grant to go to and not freeze to death on the times that mother did that to him. She used him as her whipping boy for years. Christian told me what mother did to him on the night that Lou left for boarding school. He was three and had been Lou's little shadow since he was born. He missed her and was crying for her. She beat him with a hair brush until his legs were bruised, then put him to bed that way and wouldn't let the nanny calm him down; threatened to fire the woman if she even went into Grant's room,"

Tears filled Tommy's eyes at the thought of anybody beating a three year old like that. He had seen too many cases of child abuse during his ER rotation in med school.

"According to Christian, dad snuck in the room, calmed down Grant, rocked him to sleep and called Gramzy. She sent grandpa over and when he saw the damage mom had done to Grant, he took Grant and Christian away from our parents and they lived with them for a year. She then put on an Oscar worthy performance and pretended like the therapy she had been ordered to take was working. After she got both of them back, that woman found ways to torture them both that wouldn't leave scars and told dad that if he ever went over her head like that again, she would kill him. Our grandparents knew what she was doing but could never prove it so they could take custody again and Dad was too fucking scared of her to fight for his children ever again."

Fitz couldn't say a word as the realization of what Ward had gone through sunk in even more than it already had. It made him thankful his own mother who had raised him by herself but had been very loving to him.

Skye gripped Grant's shoulders as a loud orgasmic scream came from her as he collapsed on top of her. She held him in place, not wanting to let him go as they remained joined together.

"You are an ass, Grant Ward. We could have been doing this since Dublin and you had to choose Garrett."

She felt his laugh rumble in his chest before letting him pull out of her and lay down beside her on the bed. He pulled her into his arms and cradled her head on his sweaty chest, caressing her arm.

"If we had started sleeping together then, Garrett would have made sure that you died. He was a ruthless and selfish son of a bitch that would do whatever he had to do to get his way."

"Have you heard from Black Widow and Captain America about getting that money back?"

"They had arrived in the Cayman Islands yesterday and were going to go to the bank this morning. Aunt Lily said that they closed all of the accounts there and going to Switzerland to close the remaining accounts before coming back here."

"Good. Maybe once that money is back where it belongs, everybody can start to move on."

"Skye, do you know why Fitz has a tantrum everytime me and Tommy joke around with each other?"

Skye pulled away from him and started to laugh hysterically for a brief moment before calming down and kissing him briefly. She ran her fingers through his thick dark hair before starting to speak.

"He is jealous, Grant and so is Tommy. They are in competition over you."

"What?"

"Your baby brother and surrogate baby brother are fighting over you."

"Is that why Mack grins like a jackass everytime all four of us are in the same room together?"

"Mack isn't the only one; he and Christian have a bet going on which one punches the other first," she replied before moving over to straddle his waist. "I think we have more important things to do besides arguing over Fitz and Tommy, don't you?"

Grant smirked at her before pulling her down to him and flipped them over. His lips claimed hers in a hungry kiss that led to other more pleasurable things.

Lily lay in her bed, reading her Kindle when tremors shook the house and she grinned knowing exactly what was causing them. She sat the reader down and got up, grabbing her robe and pulling it on.

She stepped out of her room and walked down to the second floor to see Cal and Travis sitting in the loveseat in the small sitting room that was located at the top of the stairs, drinking scotch.

"I don't know if getting drunk is such a good idea," she said with a grin.

"It's better to do that and pass out than know that the earthquake is being caused by my son and his girlfriend having sex," Travis commented before taking another gulp of the strong alcohol.

Cal didn't say a word; he just sipped on the scotch and prayed for sleep to come soon. He has accepted that his Daisy was now a woman and he didn't have a problem with Grant Ward but it still wasn't easy for him to think about them having sex.

After two more rounds of lovemaking, Skye and Grant were down in the kitchen. She was wearing his t-shirt and the denim shorts she had been wearing earlier while he was only wearing the khaki shorts he had been wearing.

Skye sat on the counter and watched him heat up the steak, spring vegetables and baked potatoes that Adele had made for them. If her stomach wasn't growling, she would push him back on the table and continued what they had started upstairs. Once she had gotten a taste of what it was like to be with Grant, Skye didn't want to stop.

"I can't figure out if May is a liar or what," she commented, running her hand down his shoulder and enjoying the shudder that went through him.

Grant turned to face her, confusion in his dark eyes.

"May claimed that you weren't that good in bed, now I know she was either lying or trying to save face."

She grinned at his irritated groan before he started to speak.

"May was a mission. Don't get me wrong, she is beautiful but she wasn't the one I wanted and it showed."

He moved away from the stove and stood in front of her, kissing her softly and caressing her cheek before pulling away and turning back to the stove.

"I was an ass, Skye and deserved some of the ass kicking that she gave me. I used her and I know that no matter how much I try to apologize to her for that, she will never accept it and that is her right. The only part that pissed Lou and Lily off was the fact that she needlessly fractured my larynx and that was why the one that cast the spell that threw May into the wall back in the Hamptons did it. They both feel like Coulson and Shield taking cheap shots at me is over and they won't hesitate to use their power to keep May from hurting me again."

"I think she has calmed down. Lily had a conversation with her about the fact that she would lose me if she kept it up. I love her like a mom but I can't keep accepting everything she and Coulson do and not question them."

"Lily is one of the nicest people in the world but will fight for the people she loves. I think with me, it is regret that she couldn't help out with my mother until after it was too late."

He put their food on plates and sat them on the table before lifting her off of the counter and kissing her tenderly. She wrapped her legs around his waist and almost lost herself in him before her stomach started to growl, letting her know that other needs were more important at that moment.

Grant sat her down on her feet and held out the chair in front of her plate, making sure she was okay before he sat down to eat. They carried on a quiet conversation as they enjoyed the reheated dinner, acting as if outside world didn't exist, only them.

AN: The chapter got a bit serious in the middle with Tommy's story about the abuse he had witnessed. The hairbrush story will come back up again as Lou finds out exactly what happened to Grant the night she went to boarding school.