"What are their names?"
I breathe a heavy sigh and step forward to face the news cameras, gingerly holding my burden. It is tiny and fragile and I feel more awkward than I have in years. What if I drop her? What if she cries? What if?
Her hand steals around and grasps the one that is not fully occupied, lifting it to her lips where she brushes a soft kiss over the hammered gold band there. I feel instantly more at ease and she smiles encouragingly at me. "Go on and tell them, love. We're with you."
She can feel my slight hesitation and squeezes my hand gently, amusement and love lighting her eyes as she whispers, "Trust me."
Tucking her smaller hand in my own, I pull her forward and we step together into the rose garden and the brilliant light of media flashbulbs.
I glance down the pink blanket-wrapped angel in the crook of my arm and cannot help but smile goofily, love-sick. The infant with the downy fuzz of russet hair yawns and I am nearly struck dumb with the realization of how lucky I truly am.
The sweet babe's adored twin, also swathed in pink, blinks up at me with sleepy star sapphire eyes from where she lies cradled protectively in her precious mother's arm.
Hitching my daughter up higher, I open my mouth to speak, then glance over at Makoto, who graces me with a serene smile and an impish twinkle in her evergreen eyes that makes the breath catch in my throat and forces me to try again. "I…I am proud to present the future of the royal line of Jupiter…Princess Mica Juno and her twin sister, Princess Verity Rose.
Flashbulbs explode like skyrockets, dazzling my eyes and questions erupt from every direction. But one in particular slithers into my hearing and very nearly poisons the moment.
"Do you wish that you'd had a son, Lord Nephrite?"
The nerve of it!
The unmitigated gall, by Gaia!
I glare daggers at the hapless reporter, who withdraws to a safer distance, holding up a hand as if to erase the memory of the impudent enquiry or to fend me off. One of the other reporters to the royal court smacks him with a steno book, knocking his hat and press badge to the ground along with his glasses.
It is truly insulting to my wife, my daughters, and me. For who could love any boy more than I do my darling, blue-eyed daughters who have the gorgeous dark cinnamon-hued hair of their adored mother? It is an absurd question.
Makoto laughs softly, soothing my raised hackles with a gentle hand on the back of my neck, and I hear her throaty murmur low so that only I can hear her.
"Perhaps next time, General."