From the Embers

by Aly Martinez

  “Stay. I need to talk to both of you anyway,” Asher said, opening his sketchpad. He flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for and shot me an impatient glare. “Come on. You can’t see from over there.”

  Ohhh-kay. So we were piling into the bed. Together. At five a.m. With the man who he had considered an uncle for the majority of his life who was now my boyfriend.

  Sure. Why not.

  Shoot me.

  I perched on the edge of the bed, but he was having none of it.

  He tugged at my arm. “Come on, Mom.”

  “Ash, baby. Maybe we should go downstairs and talk.”

  “Why?” He curled his lip. “We’re all here. The girls are still asleep, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Mom, Eason’s not even wearing pants. How’s he supposed to go downstairs?”

  My mouth fell open as I stared at my son. It was way too early for this conversation—actually, any conversation, but especially this one.

  Eason let out a cough to cover his laughter. “Maybe we should hear the boy out, Bree.”

  Out of arguments—or at least the caffeinated brain power to process more—I got back into bed. “Right. Okay. What’s up, bud?”

  Dramatically, Asher cleared his throat. “So the girls and I had a talk last night.” He flipped the page in his notebook to reveal a crayon rendering of three sad kids—both of the girls crying. Everything was dark, the sky gray and the grass brown.

  Eason leaned in close and threw his arm around Asher’s shoulders, the tips of his fingers grazing my arm. “What’s happening here?” he asked, the same concern filling my chest thick in his voice.

  “Well…” Asher blew out a hard breath. “This is a picture of me, Madison, and Luna now.” He turned the page. “And this is me, Madison, and Luna with a cat.”

  All three of them were smiling. The green grass mixed with pink and purple flowers, and the yellow sun hung high in the sky, surrounded by blue clouds. But it was the orange cat, approximately the size of a small airplane if he’d drawn to scale, that was the center of the picture.

  Eason and I exchanged a knowing glance, a smile growing on both of our mouths.

  I ruffled Asher’s hair as he turned the page.

  “This is us with a black cat.” Another bright and cheery picture. He flipped the page again. “And this is us with a brown cat.” This time, he had added text bubbles from Madison and Luna’s mouths with Hahaha! and hearts inside. He flipped again to another bright picture of them with a white cat, this one with a stick figure standing on the clouds. “And this is Dad in heaven, a long, long, long way away from our house. So he’s not al-ger-ic to our cat.” He paused and twisted his lips, looking over at Eason. “You’re not al-ger-ic to cats, are you?”

  Eason chuckled. “Allergic and nope. I love cats.”

  Asher’s eyes lit as he swung a damn near giddy gaze my way. “Please, Mom. Please. Can we have a cat? Madison and Luna said they would help me walk it and feed it so you don’t have to do anything.”

  “Cats don’t go on walks. Plus, the girls aren’t even allowed outside without an adult. I’m not sure that should be your selling point. Let’s talk about who’s cleaning the litter box.”

  “Please. Please. Please. I’ll take care of it. I promise. I swear, Mom.”

  Laughing, I shook my head, his desperation and excitement explaining his Christmas morning-esque five a.m. appearance. “Ash, I haven’t even had coffee yet. Can we please save the cat talk until after breakfast?”

  “No,” he whined. “Because at breakfast you’re going to make us talk about you and Eason getting married.”

  I clamped my mouth shut.

  But Eason let out a long, “Whoooooa!”

  “Wait, if Eason’s my new dad, that means he can get us a cat.” He turned to Eason. “Please. Please. Please. Eason. Just one little kitten. I don’t even care what color it is. I just want a cute one.”

  “Slow down, kid. One thing at a time. Your mom and I…” He lifted his gaze to mine in a silent request for permission and I nodded, trusting him implicitly.

  Okay, fine—and a little curious as to how he was going to handle this too.

  “Your mom and I are dating, Ash. We’re not getting married. At least not yet. And maybe never.” His lips curled into a warm smile as his eyes locked with mine. “But I have my hopes.”

  My chest got warm as I stared back at him. After losing Rob, I never thought I’d even entertain the idea of getting married again. But I couldn’t deny that being with Eason gave me a few hopes of my own.

  “For now though,” Eason continued, “she’s my girlfriend. This means we’re getting to know each other and spending time together. But, Ash, if and when your mom and I ever do decide to get married, and even if we don’t, I’m here for you in every way you could possibly need me. But I’m never going to replace your dad, okay? You already have a pretty amazing dad. Him being in heaven doesn’t change that.”

  And that was the exact moment I fell all-the-way, head-over-heels, unapologetically in love with Eason Maxwell.

  I hated Rob Winters. I had few positive memories I clung to, most of which revolved around the kids, but after seeing the selfish and disgusting things he and Jessica had done without thought or regard for us, I’d come to terms with the fact that I’d been married to a stranger.

  And Eason—God, poor Eason. He still didn’t even know if his former best friend, who had been sleeping with his wife, had fathered his daughter or not. I couldn’t imagine he held anything other than disdain for Rob.

  But there he was, his arm wrapped around Asher’s shoulders, preserving Rob’s place in his life all because it was the right thing to do for my little boy.

  I looked away and swallowed hard, hoping to keep the emotion at bay.

  “Does this mean you guys kiss now?” Asher asked.

  “Yep,” Eason replied.

  “And sleep without pants?”

  “It would appear so. Though not all the time. We’re going to take this slow and make sure you guys are comfortable with it. Man to man, I should have come to talk to you about things first. And I apologize for that. It’d mean a lot to me if you gave me your permission to date your mom.”

  Okay, seriously. How sweet could this man get? Maybe he was the real sugar in this relationship.

  “I care about her a lot, Ash. I won’t do anything to hurt her.”

  Okay, so Eason was damn near perfect. Cue. All. The tears. I continued to stare at the far wall so they couldn’t see my face.

  Asher hummed for a minute. “If I say yes, does it mean I get a cat?”

  “Nope. But it does mean you get chocolate chip pancakes while we discuss it over breakfast.”

  “Yessssss!” he hissed.

  Eason laughed, and still unable to look at them, I heard the telltale slapping of their high-five handshake and fist-bumping routine.

  “All right, kiddo. Get out of here and give me a few minutes to get dressed and talk to your mom. I’ll be down to cook in a few. Do not wake up the girls. Yeah?”

  “Okay.” With two bounces on the bed and a loud thud on the floor when he landed, he was off.

  “Shut the door,” Eason called.

  In the next second, I heard the click of the doorknob.

  And in the second after that, Eason’s strong arms wrapped around me, dragging me to the center of the bed. He rolled to his back and jostled me like a rag doll into a position with my head on his shoulder and my leg draped over his hips, and only then did he let out a long exhale. “All right. Talk to me. How’d that go for you?”

  There was literally only one answer. Drying my cheeks, I tipped my head back to look up at him. “You’re incredible.”

  “I don’t know about all that. I just committed us to not sleeping without pants all the time. I have regrets already.”

  “I’m serious, Eason. The way you handled that… It can’t be easy for you to talk about Rob after everythi
ng that’s happened, but what you just gave Asher… I can’t say thank you enough.”

  He pressed a soft kiss to my forehead. “Not one good thing will ever come from him knowing how much I hate his father. Right now, he trusts me, so he talks to me. If he knew, he’d feel like he had to choose sides. I’m not putting that shit on him. Rob and I were best friends. None of the kids need to know why that ended after he died.”

  And what if Luna was Rob’s daughter?

  What if we had to tell them that their father had an affair with Jessica?

  What then?

  I said none of that though. Those were problems for a different day when Eason was finally ready to learn the truth. He’d get there, and it wasn’t my place to rush him.

  “Like I said, you’re incredible.”

  He inched down the bed, bringing us eye to eye, a playful smile tipping his lips. “Good. Keep that in mind, because you know I’m totally getting them a cat, right?”

  I let out a sigh, but it was strictly for show. A cat wasn’t high on my to-do list, but it wasn’t too low, either. “I feared as much.”

  BREE

  Exhausted wasn’t a strong enough word for the week I’d had. Being that it was past nine p.m. on a Sunday and I was just getting home from the office should have said it all.

  However, the ringing of my cell phone from a number at Prism was the icing on the cake.

  With a sigh, I pressed the answer button on the screen on my dash. “I am turning into my driveway now. You have thirty seconds before I lapse into a coma for the next hundred years.”

  “They arrested him.” Paul, the new head of Prism’s accounting department, said through the speakers of my car.

  This was good news, but it didn’t exactly solve my problems. “Did he happen to have a briefcase with one-point-seven million dollars with him?”

  “That would be a no.”

  “Of course not.”

  The thing about the IRS is they are quite possibly the most hated entity in the US, and after experiencing the audit process, I thought that hatred was more than fair. But when it came to discovering that your former head of finance had been embezzling company funds for over three years, they were surprisingly helpful. The tax bill they’d slapped me with? Not so fun.

  Between hiring an outside company to do an internal audit, finding someone to replace Doug, the State’s newest inmate, and then spending the entire weekend with the police while they gathered evidence to build a case against him, I was beat.

  Unfortunately, my working overtime meant Eason was working overtime, which meant Evelyn had to be brought in so he could go to his gigs and work some more. It was a vicious circle of overtime for all of us. This also meant that, since our date a week ago, I had not seen him for more than a few minutes each morning.

  Damn, it was hard to be a working single mom trying to find time to have sex with a working single dad while all three children were in the house twenty-four-seven. And we lived on the same property, so I couldn’t imagine how hard it would have been if he’d lived across town like a normal relationship.

  Something had to give.

  We’d told the girls about our new relationship status—not that they understood. But Eason and I weren’t shy about holding hands or the occasional peck on the lips. Anything more and we’d sneak into the pantry while the kids were preoccupied. I lived for those stolen moments when I got to lose myself in his arms. I’d almost mastered the ability to tune out “Baby Shark” playing on the other side of the door too.

  I pulled into the garage and put the car into park. “Do you have anything else for me?”

  “No. With Doug gone and the audit officially closed, it should be smooth sailings from here on out.”

  “Don’t say that. You’ll jinx us.”

  He chuckled. “Okay, fine. We’re in a holding pattern until the next disaster. Is that better?”

  “Much. Now I need to go. Keep me in the loop if you hear anything else.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Bye.” I hung up and cut the engine. After collecting my briefcase and three travel mugs that had been riding back and forth with me to work all weekend, I headed inside. “Sorry, I’m late,” I called out to Evelyn as I walked into the kitchen.

  “Shhh,” someone said in the distance, but it wasn’t Evelyn, so a huge smile broke across my face.

  I hurried to the kitchen to drop my stuff on the counter and kick off my heels. Then I set out to find him.

  A quick pass through the empty living room led me down the hall to the playroom. A light flickered inside, but the room was silent. Tiptoeing in, I found Eason standing like a sentry in front of the muted TV, all three of the kids sound asleep in a pile of tangled legs and arms on the couch. His gaze found me over his shoulder, but I was nowhere near ready for the devastation that struck me.

  “What happened?” I whispered, rushing over to him.

  “Nothing. Everything’s fine,” he mumbled, tossing an arm around my shoulders and curling me against his chest for a long Eason Maxwell specialty hug.

  My whole body sagged in his arms. “Jesus, you scared me. What are you doing here? I thought you had a show tonight?”

  “Bar lost their liquor license. Canceled everything and shut down for a few days until they can get it fixed.”

  “Oh. So, you’re off tonight?” It was spoken as a whisper but there was no hiding my excitement.

  His chest shook with humor. “Yeah, Sug. I’m off.”

  I leveled him with a pointed glare, but I was too excited to care too much and let it slide. “This is a good thing? Right? Why are you standing here looking like the kids ate all your cookies again?”

  His chest expanded with a deep inhale, and his lips found the top of my head. It wasn’t a kiss. Not exactly. He just pressed them against my head as he breathed into my hair.

  “Eason,” I prompted when my elation faded into concern.

  “Look at ’em,” he rasped as though he’d barely been able to force the words from his throat.

  Following his gaze, I looked at our children. Asher was on the left, leaning against the arm of the couch, his mouth hanging wide open. Luna had her head in his lap, a stuffed dog hugged to her chest, and Madison was flat out on her stomach, her legs intertwined with Luna’s while her arm hung off the side of the couch. It was rare for them to crash out at the same time like that, but not unheard of.

  “Was there some kind of sorcery involved in getting them to sleep tonight?”

  He gave me a squeeze. “Close. We ate popcorn and watched The Wizard of Oz.”

  My stomach sank, disappointed that I’d missed it. “That sounds like fun.”

  “It was. The girls oohed and ahhed when they saw the good witch, and Ash laughed so hard he almost peed his pants when I told him he looked like a member of the Lollipop Guild.”

  I brought a hand to my mouth to muffle my giggle.

  “They don’t know a life without each other,” Eason rushed out like the confession burned his lips.

  My eyebrows drew together, and I craned my head back to get a better view of his face. “And they won’t ever have to. It doesn’t matter what happens between us, Eason. We’ll always be a family, remember? We do this together.”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t mean that. If she’s their sister, they’ll want to know.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath. Suddenly, his somber demeanor made a lot more sense. Eason hadn’t said much about Luna’s paternity since we’d left the cabin. I was trying to give him time and space to work it through in his head and his heart, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’d thought about it a fair amount over the last few weeks. But that was a decision he needed to make for himself; my curiosity on the matter wasn’t a factor.

  Shifting in front of him, I wrapped my arms around his neck. “You think you want to do a DNA test?”

  “No,” he breathed, a storm brewing in his eyes. “I’d honestly convinced myself that I didn’t need to kno
w. It wouldn’t change anything. Not how much I love her. Or how she will forever be sewn into the fiber of my being. But they deserve to know. There have been enough secrets and lies without us keeping more. If she truly is Rob’s, I have no idea how we will ever make them understand, but I don’t want there to be a day when she feels the rusty knife of betrayal, wondering why I didn’t tell her.” His voice cracked and he brought a hand up, scrubbing his eyes with his thumb and his forefinger. “God, why is everything so fucking hard?”

  “Because you’re a good dad.” Using his wrist, I pried his hand away from his face. “And you know how you handle this now will have an impact on her life. You are making the hard decisions and carrying that weight so she never has to. DNA be damned—that’s how I know you will always be her real father. It’s not my place to have an opinion, but I think you’re making the right decision.”

  “What do you mean it’s not your place to have an opinion? Jesus, Bree. She might be your husband’s daughter. Are you ever going to be able to look at her and not see Rob and Jessica together?”

  Oh, my sweet Eason. His whole world was upside down, on the verge of falling off axis, and he was worried about me.

  Pushing up onto my toes, I pressed a deep and promising kiss against his mouth. When I released him, I kept our faces close, needing him to feel my words as much as he heard them.

  “I see you in her, Eason. The way she giggles when she steals one of my M&M’s when she thinks I’m not looking. The way she loves with her whole damn heart and smiles with her whole body. The sparkle in her eyes when she sees you sit behind the piano, ready to dance wild and carefree. All the things I love about that little girl have not one thing to do with how she was made, but rather they’re because of who you made her to be.”

  “Oh, God,” he rumbled, full of emotion as he wrapped me up in a hug so tight I wasn’t sure I could breathe.

  But while I was safe in the warmth of Eason’s arms, oxygen was an afterthought.

  I smoothed a hand up and down his back. “We’re going to do this. We’re going to do it together and we’re going to make it okay for them. That’s what we do, and no matter how this plays out, that is what we will continue to do, okay? I’m here, Eason. I’m right here.”