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"Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too"
Fleetwood Mac
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The jam was in the butter and the butter was in Beaver jr’s fur.
And Rupert Campbell-Black, former Olympic champion, sat quietly at the kitchen table of Penscombe Court with a toddler in his lap and the kind of ache in his chest that felt like religion, on the verge of tears.
His newborn son, William, was humming tunelessly to himself; his cheeks rosy, jam on his chin and socks mismatched.
Will’s hair was stuck up in the back, and he looked much less stylish than Rupert’s older daughter currently did.
Rupert supposed that was because he had dressed him that morning. Or tried to.
He’d held up two small socks — one navy, one green — and muttered under his breath that life’s too short for symmetry before shoving the two socks onto his little feet.
Now he just watched him smear raspberry across the antique pine tabletop with sticky fingers and pure concentration, and thought:
I deserve none of this.
He hadn’t deserved her then, either. That day — that unbelievable day — when she’d gritted her teeth and brought their first daughter into the world, cursing through the contractions, hair damp and hands clenched in the sheets like she was hanging off a cliff’s edge. She’d refused the epidural. Rupert had tried not to beg.
He remembered holding her, the unbearable powerlessness of it, kissing her temple and whispering “You’re doing so well, I love you, I’m so proud of you, darling—” even as his own hands trembled. He remembered the moment it all turned — that last cry, the push, the wet silence.
Then the cry. That wail.
His daughter’s voice, furious and alive.
Rupert had sobbed. Quietly, violently. Right into Taggie’s hair.
He’d thought he would feel triumphant. But instead, he’d just felt stripped. Reduced down to bone and utter awe for the woman in front of him.
She’d been magnificent. So calm once it was over, so her. Laughing a little through the tears, brushing his cheek with her thumb and saying, “We made her, Rupert. Look what we made.”
And when he finally felt his eyes could move away from the love of his life, he looked.
And Rupert, who had stood on podiums and won medals and once walked into a bar to applause, had never felt prouder of anything than that tiny, squirming thing with a tuft of dark hair and her mother’s nose.
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The first year had been utter bloody chaos.
It was all milk-sick jumpers. Cries that pierced the marrow. Nights of pacing and bloody burping and Taggie sleeping upright with the baby on her chest, both of them soft and still and glowing in the blue light of dawn.
Rupert strongly believed he hadn’t had less sleep even when he was in his showjumping days.
Part of Rupert thought it ironic that they'd named her Aisling, an Irish name that, supposedly, meant dream. He seemed to reflect on this choice more when he stared at her in the middle of the night, cheek pressed to her soft head, muttering under his breath that there wasn’t nearly enough 'dreaming' going around, since she never bloody slept. Instead, she insisted on being in her mum’s arms; and he couldn’t even complain, of course, because he was just as desperate and pathetic about curling around Taggie like a lovesick idiot, muttering about dreams he would never get.
Taggie had been his first anyway.
He’d taken hundreds of photos — mostly when Taggie wasn’t looking. Her face tucked over their daughter’s. Her bare feet on the cold floor. Her laugh when she peed mid-nappy change.
Rupert had learned to swaddle. To sterilise. To hum lullabies with the same rhythm as a heartbeat. He’d held the baby against his chest on nights when Taggie was too exhausted to wake up and whispered promises into the downy scalp, things he couldn’t say out loud:
You’ll never have to wonder if I love you.
And she hadn’t — not then, not ever; he suspected she’d never wondered if the entire Venturer team adored her either, because whenever they’d taken her to Priory meetings, she’d been fawned over as though she were the managing director.
Basil had grinned like a fool and looked at Rupert like he couldn't believe that she was a product of him (he didn't return that look because he couldn't believe it either); Lizzie cooed with that indulgent sort of delight Rupert had only ever seen reserved for her own children (not including her dispshit husband James); Cameron shuffled papers carefully so as not to disturb her; and even Declan — Declan! — who would normally have shredded Rupert with a single glare, had insisted on holding her, swaddling her neatly in a blanket, while outlining strategy for the new Venturer project. His voice had grumbled over margins and forecasts, but his hands had never faltered, fingers rubbing gently over the soft crown of her head, coaxing tiny giggles even as he mapped out profit margins.
Rupert had watched it all with a wicked mixture of pride, disbelief, and something almost ridiculous twisting him in knots. Taggie had stayed beside him through it all, hands tucked around his own and leaning her head on his shoulder. Even as Aisling's baby gurgling turned into words, the love of the Venturer team for her never changed.
And now, here he was, ready to do it all again with this apple-cheeked boy smearing jam onto heirloom wood, blissfully unaware that his father used to wake up in cold sweats wondering if he was capable of loving anyone properly.
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Across the room, Taggie was dancing. Not properly — just swaying as she poured milk into a bowl, one hip bumped against the counter, her arm stretched protectively in front of their daughter, who was cracking eggs with the wild confidence of a five-year-old on a mission.
“Bits of shell are character,” she said brightly, and laughed.
Rupert just stared at them both.
Taggie had flour on her jaw and her hair half-clipped back, and she looked more like home than Penscombe ever had. Her sleeves were pushed up, and she had that little crease between her brows — the one she got when she was concentrating but trying to make it look effortless.
He remembered that crease in a thousand different lights.
In the stables when she’d help brush down Rocky.
Over coffee, when she used to try and read the papers like she was gathering ammunition.
In bed, above him, with her hair falling loose and her lip tucked between her teeth with a whisper of a smile when he murmured something filthy and completely devoted into her skin.
He’d always loved it.
Though, he’d loved it even more the moment she first told him they’d be having a baby.
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They’d just come back from the honeymoon, skin burnt and bodies sore from a week of doing little but fucking and eating and fucking again.
Christ, she’d been ravenous. He’d thought it was him — that marriage had flicked some secret switch inside her — and he’d been swaggeringly proud of it. Couldn’t walk across the bloody room without her pulling him back down, tugging at his belt, whispering that she needed him again.
At first he’d laughed, teased her for being insatiable, but he hadn’t exactly put up a fight. How could he, with her climbing into his lap still damp from the pool, knickers abandoned somewhere on the floor, grinding down on him until he was swearing into her throat?
She’d wanted his cock all the time — mornings, afternoons, midnight with the shutters banging and the villa echoing with the sound of her begging for it. She’d ride him until his cock ached, hair sticking to her temples, muttering his name in that way that always drove him nuts. And he’d let her — more than let her, he’d given himself over, utterly lost every time she pressed her soft little body down on his and took what she wanted.
He’d hold her hips steady when she got too frantic, fuck up into her until she was clutching at his chest, moaning like she’d come apart if he stopped. She’d go tense and shivery, nails dragging down his chest, before melting around him, sobbing his name into his neck. And then, not even half an hour later, she’d be reaching for him again, eyes wide and lips swollen, whispering, “Please, Rupert.”
And he’d bloody well give it, every single time. Couldn’t deny her. Didn’t want to.
He hadn’t known then that the pregnancy was stirring her up and that her hormones were running riot. He’d only realized that his sweet, shy girl had finally turned demanding and greedy. That she no longer was afraid to ask and take what she wanted, which Rupert had adored.
It was only when they’d come home pink-skinned and drunk on each other - when she took his hand, placed it gently on her belly, and told him she was carrying his child - that he realised what had been happening. That all that hunger, that desperate need, had been more than just the product of his persistent efforts in building up her confidence in bed.
She hadn’t just been wanting him. She’d been making their future.
He couldn’t remember everything about the moment she’d told him, only that there were gentle tears — hers warm on his chest, his stinging behind his own eyes — and later at night, the taste of them on his lips as he bent low to kiss them away, tasting the salt on her skin, when thrusting into her slowly, deliberately, her legs draped over his shoulders, holding her close.
“Such a good girl,” he murmured, voice low and rough. “So fucking perfect… my brave little girl giving me a baby.”
She’d trembled, nails digging into his back (he was certain he still had the marks to this day) and he groaned, pressing his forehead to hers. “So proud of you… so proud of you, sweetheart. You’ve no idea how proud I am.”
He really was so proud.
His hands roamed her hips, down her thighs, feeling her soften and cling to him. “I’ll never stop wanting you… never stop loving you like this,” he whispered, slow and deliberate, letting every word land between her hiccups.
He bent again, kissing the tears from her cheeks, letting the rhythm of his body match the desperate ache in his chest, and thought with every shiver of her skin under his hands, that he would never need anything else but her, ever.
After she’d fallen asleep, he’d gone down to the stables and told Rocky. Stood there in the dark, stroking his nose and whispering into his mane that he was going to be a father with the love of his life.
Some part of Rupert now thinks the poor sod may have understood all his ranting, because he’d lowered his head with the same grave gentleness he’d shown when Rupert first brought the baby girl to his stable later that year.
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Rupert remembered the utter fear that had gripped him when Taggie had started to become nauseous and exhausted, beautiful even when she was green and groaning on the bathroom floor. Rupert sat behind her most mornings, rubbing circles on her back, murmuring about porridge and toast and promising he’d go strike the gods if they didn’t bloody ease up.
He read every wretched pregnancy book. Highlighted things. Wrote questions in the margins. He cared, the way he’d once only cared about horses, headlines and women.
She would catch him staring sometimes, from across the room, like she was a miracle he hadn’t quite earned.
Which was entirely true in his opinion.
“You keep looking at me like I’m going to vanish,” she teased once.
“I keep looking at you,” he said, “because I still can’t believe you’re carrying our baby.”
She reached for his hand, tucked it under hers against her belly to feel the kick.
And later he’d held that same hand above her head as he fucked her and told her the same thing all over again.
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His daughter reached for a spoon, flung some batter wildly, and it landed in Taggie’s hair. Both of them shrieked with laughter.
Rupert’s throat tightened. Violently.
It wasn’t just the mess, the way the sticky batter clung to Taggie’s hair and cheeks. It was the sound of the pure and unfiltered joy that bubbled up from both of them, breaking through the edges of his carefully controlled world.
He remembered the first time he heard that laugh — the real laugh — the one that made his chest ache with something tender and new.
It had been a miserable Wednesday morning, rain tapping steadily on the kitchen windows. Rupert had been trying to crack an egg one-handed — a foolish attempt to impress his wife and their tiny daughter, who was watching with wide eyes from her high chair.
“I saw it on Grandad Declan’s show,” Rupert had boasted, holding the egg like a prize. “All in the wrist, he said.”
Taggie had rolled her eyes, half-smiling, “We both know daddy doesn't know a thing about cooking. You’re going to get egg everywhere.”
“Which Daddy are you referring to?” he’d shot back, waggling his eyebrows, a grin tugging at his lips. "I can assure you I have more finesse than you think to not get egg everywhere."
Which, of course, meant that he promptly did. The egg burst wrong, yolk running down his cuff, shell scattering across the counter before the bastard of a thing slithered off and fell against his trousers too. He swore, lurched for a tea towel, and then froze — because from the high chair came a sound he’d never heard before.
A bubbling giggle. Their daughter, shoulders shaking, tiny fists banging on the tray as she laughed at him — properly laughed — for the first time.
And Taggie, startled but probably not surprised at his antics, had joined in, her own laugh breaking loose in helpless waves.
Rupert realised in that moment that Aisling’s laugh must have come from Taggie because it floored him the same way hers always did.
And he knew, standing there ruined by egg yolk that he would do anything in the world just to hear it again. The same way he always used to and still did for his wife.
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He reached for his coffee, more out of instinct than need, and knocked the mug slightly. Some of it sloshed onto the newspaper, right over an article about some new TV executive in London. He didn’t care.
His son babbled something unintelligible and shoved a jammy fist in his direction.
Rupert took it gently in his much larger hand, wiped it with the tea towel, and kissed the top of his son’s sticky head before the emotion swelled too much.
It was dangerous, this feeling.
Too big for him.
Too bloody soft.
It had snuck in slowly over the years, like rain soaking into old stone, until he was entirely sodden with it. Until he could barely breathe in a room like this, with the woman he loved and the children they’d made, the smell of sugar and earth and dog hair and woodsmoke in his lungs.
He had nearly lost her. So many times.
And now here she was. Still here.
A flash of memory — Taggie in the Priory kitchen, years ago, her voice shaking:
“Only he’s not you”
He had changed for her.
He didn’t even work in parliament anymore. He even spent more time with ponies and pencils and school drop-offs than he did at Venturer meetings.
And he would’ve done it all again. Every inch of the softening. Every inch of the humbling. If it meant this.
This kitchen. This woman. These children.
He looked at his daughter, her little mouth pursed in imitation of her mother’s focus. She sprinkled cinnamon far too liberally, then turned to Taggie with pride.
Taggie beamed. “You’re a genius, darling.”
“Daddy doesn’t like cinnamon,” the girl announced.
“He does,” Taggie said, grinning over her shoulder at him. “He just pretends he doesn’t so he doesn’t have to share.”
Rupert cleared his throat. “Slender slander,” he muttered, trying not to smile.
But the smile was already there. Half-tugged, hopeless. One of those ridiculous, private grins that made his daughter laugh and Taggie suspicious. Because she knew — of course she knew — exactly where his mind had gone.
It had been the night he’d first given her all of him. Before the children. When Penscombe had still felt a bit like borrowed space and Taggie was still learning where the creaky floorboards were.
He’d come downstairs after midnight and found her there; barefoot in one of his old shirts, her hair braided loosely down her back, a mixing bowl tucked under one arm and a half-open spice rack at her elbow.
God, he still remembered the mighty restraint he’d had to not take her against the counter so soon after their first time together.
Although, knowing her appetite now, she’d probably have liked that.
“What,” he’d asked, rubbing a hand through his hair, “are you doing?”
Taggie had looked up, cheeks flushed, a tiny dusting of flour across her nose.
“I was hungry,” she’d said. “You tired me out, you know.”
“And your solution was baking? You should have woken me up, I could’ve made you something.”
She shrugged, pouring something into the bowl. “I find it calming. This is such a nice kitchen too.”
Rupert had grumbled, but stayed. Mostly to watch her. The way her hips swayed slightly as she measured. The way she licked a dab of batter from her finger and didn’t notice him noticing.
At some point, he’d leaned against the counter and reached lazily for a spoon, trying to taste the mixture.
“Don’t touch,” she warned.
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
He grinned. “You do realise you’re in my kitchen?”
“Yes, and I also realise I’m the only one who knows how the bloody oven works.”
That made him laugh and he'd held up both hands in mock surrender.
His girl, ever smug, turned back to the bowl and reached for the cinnamon.
Rupert had hated cinnamon.
Or rather, he thought he did.
He’d tried it once and immediately thought it too sweet. It clung to everything.
And yet—
The moment she opened the jar and the scent hit him, warm and earthy and somehow utterly her, he’d felt something flicker.
He stepped closer.
She didn't notice at first, humming under her breath, focused on the mixing bowl. He was already next to her by the time she turned, startled, holding a wooden spoon like a weapon.
“Jesus, Rupert—”
He kissed her.
Her lips tasted like cinnamon and sugar and whatever spell she always seemed to be casting without trying.
“Still hate it?” she murmured, smiling against his mouth.
He kissed her again.
“Maybe it’s growing on me.”
Again.
“Might just be the spice.”
Again.
“Hm.”
He kept kissing her like that, tiny and teasing, until she was laughing into his hands and tugging at the collar of his t-shirt.
“You’re insatiable," she said.
“You’re delicious.”
“Still talking about the cinnamon?”
“No bloody clue,” he said honestly, and kissed her again.
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Their daughter giggled again.
Taggie turned fully then, and walked toward the table.
She wiped her hands on her apron and crouched beside him, her hand reaching instinctively for their son’s curls. She kissed the top of his head — same spot Rupert had kissed — and then glanced at Rupert.
“You’ve gone quiet.”
He shook his head. “Just thinking.”
Her eyes searched his.
“You alright?” she asked, quieter now, her eyes blazing. He fucking loved those eyes.
His mouth twitched, but he couldn’t speak. Not with her looking at him like that — like she saw through him (she did, of course she did), down to whatever fragile thing was crumbling underneath.
Taggie reached up and touched his cheek.
Her fingers came away damp.
She frowned. “Rupert…”
He turned away, wiped at his face with the back of his hand.
“I’m fine, angel.”
Taggie didn’t press. She knew when to leave things alone. Instead, she stood, pressed a kiss to the crown of his head, and said lightly:
“You’re a sap.”
“I know,” he said hoarsely.
When did he become a sap? He had no idea.
Actually, yes he did and it was Taggie's fault.
And then he said, softer:
“I’m so bloody lucky, Tags. That’s all. It just hits me sometimes.”
Taggie smiled, leaning down, her forehead resting against his temple; warm and insistent, as if the weight of her presence could steady the unsteady man she’d somehow tamed. “We’re just as lucky,” she said, low and sure, and entirely certain in a way he had never been about anything, except her.
He reached up, caught her wrist, eyes closing, letting the heat of it settle in his chest; the tiny burble from William below him, the vigorous stirring from Aisling, and the scent of flour and milk— all of it pressed in at once, and Rupert thought he could not possibly bear a finer, crueller, more devastating kind of happiness than this.
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Fin.