Then Bowe entered the room, and everyone’s quiet chatter halted.
“Sorry about that,” Bowe said as he walked into the room, a mannequin in front of him, blocking the view of his cock. “I had a phone call.”
“It’s okay,” Jade’s annoying voice accepted his apology like it was intended for her. “We were just talking about what you were going over before break.”
Bullshit.
She was talking about her hair appointment when I’d walked through the door.
Bowe smiled tightly at her.
“Now, let’s start on the ACLS bonus question I’ll have on the test tomorrow,” Bowe went to the board, and I nearly groaned when his tight backside was presented to us.
I wasn’t the only one in the room to notice, either.
Every woman did, and I wanted to stab them all with my pencil.
Every last one of them.
Fuck, but this was going to be one long hour and a half.
***
Dinner that night wasn’t stilted or uncomfortable.
Bowe talked while he cooked dinner, just like he always did since he had moved in and I fed Elise.
It was like we were one big happy family.
But the feeling of him…that was still burned on my brain.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I was also counting down the hours until bed time.
The moment Elise was asleep, Bowe and I were going to solve a few things.
“Did you see who picked Jade up today?” Bowe asked, turning concerned eyes to me.
“I did,” I said. “That was my father.”
“I thought that was him,” Bowe muttered. “Why do you think a grown ass woman needs picked up from her college classes?”
“Because she’s a bitch and likes to rub it in my face,” I told him. “She’s fucking petty.”
I could tell that he was convinced of that as well.
“I had a talk with Alan today,” Bowe started.
I looked up from putting peas into my daughter’s mouth and looked at him intently.
“And?” I asked shortly.
He tossed me a grin over his shoulder.
He was wearing a loose-fitting pair of knit shorts that came to just below his knees, an old beat up shirt, and nothing else.
His feet were bare and digging into the new rug—memory foam because Bowe had insisted that he needed it—as he stirred the food.
His eyes, though, were on me as he stirred.
“He and I both decided that, if all goes well with my fitness test that I’m taking tomorrow, I’ll start back to work on Monday.” He stopped stirring and turned so his back was resting against the counter, his eyes intent on me.
“That…sucks,” I said. “You were the only thing keeping me sane throughout my classes.”
Bowe grinned.
“That’s another thing,” he paused. “He’s offered me the teaching position if I want it. He says that with the test scores of all of the students, it’s obvious I’m teaching what needs to be taught, and that if I want it, I can have the position. It’d still be only one day—but that’s okay. Right?”
A smile broke out over my face, and I started to reply when Elise slammed her hand against the spoon that was still suspended in the air in front of her mouth—obviously ticked that I wouldn’t give it to her—and sprayed green mushy peas all over the place.
Splatters went everywhere. On the floor, on my white shirt, on the table. Even in my hair.
“Thank you,” I said, turning to her.
Bowe was laughing softly as he watched the interaction.
Elise gave him a toothy smile.
“You should’ve known not to deprive her of her food,” Bowe reprimanded softly. “The girl’s wastin’ away. Can’t you tell?”
I gave him a look that clearly relayed what I thought of his ‘wastin’ away’ comment. Obviously, the girl had plenty if her clothes, three sizes up from what most children her age were wearing, was any indication.
“She’s like the Michelin Man in baby form,” I told him.
He nodded his head in agreement.
“Oh, I’m well aware of the state of all her rolls since I was the one to put her in the outfit she’s wearing,” he replied.
I looked at the tiny onesie that declared her as a future member of KFD.
“It’s cute,” I said. “Where did you get it from?”
He turned back to the stove and shut the burners off.
“A couple of the guys had them made and I asked for a couple. I’m just glad it fits,” he admitted. “I had no earthly idea what size to get her.”
I smiled as I scooped the last spoonful of peas onto the spoon and fed it to a still starving Elise.
“Will you grab me a jar of fruits?” I asked him when he shuffled in the direction of the cabinet where I kept the baby food.
“Yeah,” he rumbled. “But let me feed her while you get yourself dinner.”
“You eat first,” I told him.
He gave me a look that conveyed what he thought of that, and I rolled my eyes.
“You eat so slow that it won’t matter if I feed Elise first. I’ll still finish before you,” he challenged me.
I huffed a laugh as I offered him the spoon.
“We’ll just see about that.”
The thing was, when it came to Bowe’s dinners, I liked to savor them.
They were freakin’ works of art and they didn’t deserve to just be shoveled down.
They deserved to be eaten slowly, each flavor relished and enjoyed.
Like sex.
As I scooped up some of the sauce and ran it over my noodles, I looked at Bowe out of the corner of my eye.
Even in an old pair of shorts and an even older shirt, he was still sexy as sin.
He was sitting on a dining room chair with Elise’s high chair directly in front of him.
His beard, which had grown quite exceptionally over the time he had been off from the fire department, was front and center in my thoughts.
I’d never been one for a man with a beard, and I knew that at some point he would be shaving it off for work, but right now, I was enjoying the hell out of it.
And so were the ladies at my school.
I’d never given much thought to the hype with beards lately.
Sure, some of them were cool.
But most of them were a little too long for my tastes.
Bowe’s beard, however, was just about perfect. Long, but not too long, it had a reddish tint to it that got brighter or darker depending on the lighting he was in.
His muscles bulged as he lifted his arm to feed Elise another bite, and it took everything I had to get my food and sit down next to him without drooling.
“This is good,” I told him the moment my ass hit the seat and I got my first bite.
“Chicken Cacciatore,” he said, looking down at my plate. “You didn’t get too much.”
“I’m trying to be on a diet,” I told him.
And really, I was.
With the way he’d been cooking for me lately, I’d gained ten pounds.
“Why?” he asked, his undivided attention on me.
“Because your cooking is fattening as hell,” I told him. “But I’m eating it, see? Just not as much.”
His mouth kicked up at the corner.
“We can start running together,” he offered. “Then you can eat as much as you want.”
I grimaced.
“I’m too tired to do it consistently,” I told him. “I have no energy to run on top of my jobs, Elise and school.”
He nodded his head in understanding.
“I run—or used to—while I was at work. Just like you did.” He rubbed his head where the incision had been made almost absentmindedly. “I feel fat. But I know I’m in halfway decent shape since I’ve been walking, I still think I’m likely going to die tomorrow.”
I sighed long and loud. “They say working out makes you feel better, bu
t I haven’t yet seen any benefit like that. Exhaustion, yes. Energy, fuck no.”
He grinned and fed Elise the last drop of food from the jar, then spooned Elise the food. “Okay, Chickadee. I’m going to eat my food, too. Then we’re going to let Mommy take a shower while I hose you off in the pool.”
I gave him a droll look. “That’s a bathtub, Bowe. Not a pool.”
“Whatever,” he said as he walked away, giving me another clear view of his sexy behind.
I looked over at my daughter to see her staring at Bowe, too.
“I’m not sure he can help it,” I whispered to her.
She turned those warm honey eyes to me, and drooled as she tried to talk.
“What was that?” Bowe asked as he set a heaping plate of food down on the table next to me.
“Nothing, Bowe,” I lied.
“Bo-we!” Elise babbled.
I glared at Bowe.
“What?” he asked, not doing anything to try to hide his smile.
“I’m with her for entire life, and you show up for the last few months of it and suddenly you get to have her first clear word? A word that I know she’s saying because she wants you to pick her up?” I replied. “It’s not fair.”
“Hasn’t anyone told you life isn’t fair, silly girl?” he teased, reaching up to tuck a stray lock of hair that’d fallen free of my messy bun.
My face sobered.
“No,” I told him. “But I know it’s not.”
He looked at me with raised eyebrows, clearly asking me to elaborate.
I knew better than most that it wasn’t.
I’d been experiencing life’s unfairness since I was a young kid.
My father was deployed nearly half of my life. Though, now, I realized that he wanted to be deployed.
Then when he wasn’t deployed anymore, he had a new family.
When I graduated at eighteen, I couldn’t afford college, not even community college.
“When I’d tried to get loans right out high school for my college, I found that my credit was shit. I haven’t a clue why, either. It said that I had loans taken out for a car that I didn’t have, and a few petty loans for a grand here, or two grand there.” I licked my lips. “Unpaid medical bills that I racked up at seventeen from needing an emergency appendectomy. Something in which my mother wasn’t able to pay, so they got tacked onto my credit report as well.” I sighed, “Needless to say, I couldn’t get any loans. Someone had stolen my identity, and I was unable to fix it because I didn’t have any money.”
He looked at me with concern.
“That doesn’t sound right,” he told me. “Someone would have to have all of your information to get stuff like that taken out.”
I nodded my head.
“I know.”
“It might be someone you know,” he continued.
I nodded my head again.
“I know.”
“Do you have any ideas?” he persisted.
I shrugged.
“Then I met Troy, and I thought my life was complete. I was happy for the first time in years. He was helping me with my bills. Buying me expensive dinners. Treating me like a freakin’ queen.” I looked away from his knowing eyes.
“And all the time he had Jade on the side,” he guessed.
I looked back at him, pain now clearly in my eyes.
“Yes.”
He looked at me, truly studied me, and I knew he saw through my mask.
“You think I’m going to do that.”
I shrugged helplessly.
“Every other man in my life has done it to me when it comes to her. Why should you be any different?”
With that I got up and walked out of the room, not looking back.
I knew we weren’t done.
I was going to take him up on his offer to put Elise in bed. I already took him up on his offer of rent.
What I was second guessing was taking him up on the offer of his body.
We both wanted it. That wasn’t the question.
What I didn’t know, and likely would never know, was if I’d be enough for him.
***
“There are no guarantees in life,” Bowe’s deep voice poured over me.
I looked over my shoulder at him.
He was standing in the doorway that led to my back porch, one muscled shoulder leaning against the wall as he looked down at me, studying my every move.
“I know.”
I did know, too. I knew that tomorrow wasn’t promised.
What I couldn’t get past, though, was the heartache of what was to come.
Would the heartache of what might come trump the heartache never having him to begin with?
Maybe.
Yes.
“Your daughter is asleep in her crib.”
My eyebrows lifted at that.
“Really?” I asked. “How’d you manage that?”
“I gave her a bottle and after she was done I put her in her crib awake. She cried out in anger for all of twenty seconds, and then closed her eyes and fell fast asleep.” He told me what I already knew.
I’d witnessed it on the monitor.
I also liked what I saw.
Would it be bad to ask him to do that every night?
“My baby’s growing up.”
My worry must’ve been evident in my voice because he abandoned his perch against the doorframe and came to me, taking a seat directly next to my backside. The added weight made the entire swing shift, and I rolled backwards until he was halfway underneath me.
I was on my porch swing which was really a large bowl-like contraption with a huge cushion on it.
It was great for reading or studying—which happened to be what I was doing at that particular moment in time.
Or had been until Bowe came back.
“But imagine all of the fun things you get to do with her once she gets older,” taking a hold of the ponytail holder that was haphazardly holding my hair up, and giving it a tug.
My hair left the bun as if it’d never been, and settled down around my shoulders and face, falling down my back and landing on Bowe’s chest that was directly behind me.
The tightness that was surrounding my head diminished, and I sighed.
How he knew I had a headache, I didn’t know. He was likely a mind reader.
“Thank you for giving her a bath. I don’t realize, sometimes, how stressful it is to be doing this on my own until I have the help I never knew I needed.”
He trailed his fingers down my neck.
“My sister used to have a little girl about the same age as Elise,” he whispered.
I tensed.
“My sister, Margaret, and her daughter, Lacey, both died instantly. They were driving down the interstate when a tractor trailer jackknifed. They had no other choice but to hit that thing head on. Died instantly.”
My belly started to sour.
“That’s terrible,” I whispered.
“She looked just like Elise,” he said. “I think that’s why my parents are having such a hard time with you.”
I hadn’t actually mentioned anything about his parents to him. I didn’t want to burden him with my negative feelings.
It surprised me that he not only knew there was trouble, but explained it to me so that all of those hard looks from his parents now made sense.
“That’s terrible,” I repeated. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you when nobody told you?” he asked.
“Do you have any more siblings?” I asked.
He’d, of course, met mine. A lot.
It wasn’t uncommon for them all to come over at random times in the day or night. Hell, sometimes Alec even showed with his kids and dropped them off without a word.
That’d happened twice now, and I’d had to explain to Bowe each time that I did the same thing to him when it came to Elise.
That was just our family. We counted on each other, and no explanation was needed when it came to u
s. We all knew the others like the backs of our hands.
It pained me to think about Bowe not having that.
“It was just me and my sister,” he said. “My brother-in-law is around, but it hurts him to see us, so he stays away.”
I frowned.
Leaning over to drop my school book to the ground, I rolled carefully until I was facing him, half in his lap, half on the swing.
“Have you tried to do anything more?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“It’s a no-go,” he said. “My brother-in-law, I think he’s been drinking a lot. Every time we try to intervene, he pulls even further away. His parents are keeping an eye on him, though. And his own sister.”
I nodded my head.
I could see that.
Oh, boy could I see that.
“That’s how Troy got me at first,” I told him. “His sister had just died in a car accident right after she was released from rehab. I met him while his sister was on my floor. She was doing so well when they released her from the hospital. Then, she purposefully ran head on into oncoming traffic. She was hit by another driver, while she was going the wrong way down a one-way street.”
His face showed his sadness.
“I don’t really want to talk about this,” he said after a while. “I don’t like that man and I don’t want to have anything that connects me to him, even remotely.”
A smile quirked up the corner of my lips.
“So I guess being with me—like he was a very long time ago—would connect you to him. Even remotely.”
I knew I was poking the sleeping bear.
What I hadn’t countered into the equation was the sheer possessiveness that he felt towards me. Even though we’d never gone much further than what we had earlier in the day.
His hand went into my hair, and he pulled my face closer at the same time his other hand went to my hip and yanked me fully into his lap.
“I don’t want to think about that—you with him,” he said. “I don’t like him. I don’t like that he’s had what I want.”
I stared into Bowe’s chocolate eyes, and smiled. A full out, I’m going to lick you up, never going to stop, smile.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
Chapter 12
Put Out (Kilgore Fire Book 5) Page 9