Beefcake & Mistakes

by Fennell, Judi

  Bryan walked over to her and slid his hands up her arms. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” She ran a finger along his jaw. Such a nice jaw. Strong. Dependable. Like him. “I’m okay.”

  “It will be okay, Jenna. If there’s a baby…” He rested his forehead against hers. “We’ll deal with it. The right way this time.”

  Question was, what was the right way? But she didn’t ask it. She’d wait until she had to make the big decisions. Right now… right now she just had to deal with what they’d done. “I can’t believe we just did that here. Anyone could have walked in.”

  “Only someone with a key, and that limits it to me, Gage, and his wife, Lara—and if they have an ounce of sense, they’re home doing what we were here doing.”

  He tilted her face up. “What I want to do again.” Those violet eyes searched hers and Jenna felt herself falling under his spell. “Join me upstairs?”

  “I thought Trevor was sleeping up there?”

  “The sofa pulls out. You didn’t think two unattached guys would have a place with only one bedroom, did you?” Bryan waggled his eyebrows. “Best part is, I know the owner so we don’t even have to put our clothes on to walk through the hallways.”

  “Wow, that does come in handy.” Jenna patted his jaw. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d at least like to bring them with me so Trevor doesn’t wake up to a naked mother and I can leave with some semblance of dignity.”

  “I’m with you on the no nudity thing for Trevor’s sake, but trust me, Ms. Corrigan, I plan to work anything dignified out of you for the next six hours.”

  “You’re welcome to try, Mr. Lassiter.”

  “I’ll take that as a challenge.”

  “It was meant as one.”

  And it was one Bryan was more than up for meeting.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Huwwy, Mommy! Me and Bobby wanna cwimb the tweefort.”

  “Yeah, Mommy, let’s get that cute behind moving.” Bryan swatted her on it as he passed her, then had the nerve to turn around and run backwards toward the playground in the park, looking way too good for someone who’d gotten as little sleep as they both had.

  “This cute behind is dragging,” she muttered. The price one had to pay for a night of lovemaking with Bryan Lassiter.

  “Then, by all means, allow me.” He ran behind her this time and literally held up her behind.

  “Bryan! You can’t do that! Someone might see.” She took off running. That’s all she’d need; one of her students spreading it around school that she was letting some man feel her up in the park. Of course, if she were pregnant, that’d pretty much null the feeling-up story.

  Jenna refused to think about that and whatever repercussions a pregnancy would entail. She was having too good of a time with her son and the man she loved.

  “Damn, woman, you’re a spoilsport.” Bryan caught up to her and once more ran past her.

  This time, though, he didn’t turn around so she got a nice show of his behind.

  “Like what you see?” he tossed back over his shoulder.

  “Matter of fact, I do. And if you’d let me catch up, maybe I’ll even show you how much.”

  “Now there’s a promise I can’t resist.” He stopped running and waited for her. But then he swung her up in his arms, twirled her around, and planted a big ol’ kiss on her right there for anyone and everyone to see.

  “Ewww!” Including two almost four-year-olds.

  “Mommy’s kissing Daddy!” Trevor looked charmingly disgusted.

  His father just looked charming. “Hey, kiddo. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. One day you’re going to be kissing girls and it won’t see m so icky to you.”

  “Nuh uh. I’m never gonna kiss a girl. Come on, Bobby, wet’s go in the fort.”

  Bryan led her over to the bench in full view of the tree fort while the boys ran off to play. “So about last night.”

  “Yes, about that.” She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs.

  He checked out her legs. “It was… nice.”

  “I was thinking of a different word than nice, but okay.”

  “Oh? What word was that?”

  Oh no. She wasn’t showing her hand first. She shrugged and dropped her feet to the ground. “Nice fits, I guess.”

  “Aw, come on, Jenna.” He put his hand on her knee and squeezed gently, violet eyes sparkling with amusement. “What were you thinking?”

  She tweaked his nose. “You don’t need any more reasons to get a big head. I’m not going to be one more in the list of women who fall at your feet and feed you lines about how magnificent you are.”

  The teasing light disappeared from his eyes and Bryan got solemn. “First of all, there aren’t any long lines. Second, even if there were, do I really seem like the guy who’d take advantage of that? Bachelor party notwithstanding. That was too much alcohol and mutual desire. I was in no shape to resist a sexy woman coming on to me.”

  “How do you know she—I mean, I came on to you? Maybe you came on to me.”

  “Did I?”

  Damn. Snagged. She didn’t know the answer to that—because Mindy hadn’t known it either. “There was a lot of alcohol all the way around that night.”

  “Exactly. So let’s take that night out of the equation for what I was trying to say.”

  “What were you trying to say, Bryan?”

  He took a deep breath and looked at her, the look in those gorgeous eyes one she’d never seen before. Then he looked away.

  “I was going to say… ” He looked back—and then he dropped to one knee in front of her.

  Right there. In the dirt, beside the wooden bench that lovers had carved their initials in.

  Oh my.

  Bryan picked up her hand. “Jenna Corrigan, what I was going to say was that, while I might dance for a lot of women and maybe even inspire fantasies in some of them, you’re the only one I’ve fantasized about. I wish I could say I’ve been doing that since I first met you, but there was that alcohol thing and, well, let’s just say that since I’ve re-met you, since coming to your house and seeing you being so fiercely protective and supportive of your students and our son, of seeing how you welcomed me, and my family, into Trevor’s life, of how beautiful you are when you smile, how adorable you are when you’re determined to do something, and how utterly you rock my world with just a simple glance… I want to ask you something again. And this time, it’s not because of Trevor and it’s not because of what might or might not have been created last night, but because I can’t get you out of my head and because spending this time with you and coming to know the person you are—and the way you turn me on—I want to ask you again if you’ll marry me.”

  This time, he pulled out a ring.

  “Where… where did you get that?”

  “It was my mother’s. I asked her last night if I could give it to you and she said she would be honored if you would wear something that symbolized the love she and my father shared for over forty years.”

  Jenna couldn’t speak. She couldn’t respond. She couldn’t even shake her head.

  He wanted to marry her. He hadn’t said he loved her, but surely it was there. Surely, it was implied. Surely if he didn’t now, he was on his way?

  And what’s going to happen when you tell him the truth?

  “Jenna?” He squeezed her fingers. “Will you?”

  God, she’d made the man ask her twice.

  Maybe because you’re having second thoughts?

  “Yes. I will.” She was not having second thoughts. She’d tell him. She would. And he’d understand. Now that they were going to get married and be together forever, he’d understand her need to protect Trevor. He said it himself: he loved the way she loved and protected their son.

  His son.

  “As soon as possible, Bryan.” Then she’d tell him the truth.

  Coward.

  She preferred to think o
f it as self-preservation. Of Trevor preservation.

  He slid the ring on her finger, then caught her head in his hands and kissed her. Long, lingering, full of promise and commitment and happiness and, yes, even love—it was there—Bryan sealed their souls and healed her heart.

  “Ewww!”

  They broke apart laughing. The two boys stood less than a foot away. Trevor was looking at them so very innocently. “We want ice cweam.”

  Bobby on the other hand… “Are you gonna kiss the whole time because it’s gross.”

  “I just might keep kissing Trevor’s mom, yes,” said Bryan, wrapping an arm around her. “You have a problem with that, Trevor?”

  Trev shrugged. “I don’t care. I just want ice cweam.”

  “Well I think it’s gross.” Bobby crossed his arms. “My mommy said that’s how she got a baby in her belly again. Are you gonna get one, too, Jenna?”

  “Cool! I want a baby bwother!”

  Jenna looked at Bryan and something… magical? emotional? forever? passed between them.

  Yes, he loved her. It was there.

  “Kissing doesn’t always put a baby in a woman’s belly, guys, but it can sometimes.” Bryan sat beside her on the bench again. “But what do you think if I said I wanted to marry your mom, Trev?”

  Trevor’s smile disappeared and his violet eyes turned her way. “Do you wanna mawwy Bwyan, Mommy?”

  “I do, Trev. What do you think?”

  Those eyes, so like Bryan’s, started to sparkle and his mouth dropped open. And so did his arms, and then he threw himself at them, catching them both in a hug bigger than an almost-four-year’s-old’s arms could hold, but not more than his heart could. “We’re gonna be a family!”

  She just hoped Bryan remembered this moment and all it represented for all of them when she told him the truth.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “Since you volunteered to cook, I’ll run to the market,” Jenna said to Bryan, scrubbing her hair with a towel after her shower. The jog to the park, followed by a dusty Trevor’s enthusiastic hug, along with a few more covered in melted ice cream, had ensured they’d all needed to wash up when they returned from their morning outing. Even Bobby had been bathed and now the boys were building with blocks on the living room coffee table. “Think you can hold down the fort?”

  “It’s a castle, Mommy,” Trevor said, concentrating so hard on setting the block just right that he didn’t even look over.

  “Sorry, Trev. Castle.” She looked back at Bryan. “He’s anal like that. Likes to make sure everything’s lined up perfectly, and if something is a castle, it can’t be a fort. Or a dungeon.”

  “Yeah, I get that. I was like that as a kid.” Bryan stacked the napkins on the table.

  Jenna looked at it and raised her eyebrows. “Just as a kid?”

  He blushed and it did amazing things to her insides to see that side of him. Especially when he was in one of her aprons, getting ready to bake his mother’s homemade apple pie recipe. Apparently the ring wasn’t the only thing he’d asked his mother for last night, so not only was Jenna getting an amazing father for her son, an amazing lover in the bedroom, but also a chef in the kitchen.

  “You sure you can handle this?”

  “Of course I can. They’re just kids, not a gang.”

  “Just remember you said that.”

  He swatted her butt with a dishtowel. “Go. Before I change my mind and make you stay here with them.”

  “I’m going, I’m going!”

  ***

  She grinned the entire ride to the supermarket. And through half the aisles.

  Matter of fact, the only reason she stopped smiling was because her mother was in aisle nine and saw her before Jenna could turn away.

  “Ellen.”

  “Has that woman moved in yet?”

  No greeting, no warm peck on the cheek. Ellen in a mood was someone Jenna didn’t want to be around. She grabbed a bottle of ketchup and dropped it into her cart. “Her name is Tabitha.”

  “Named after a witch. How perfect.”

  Jenna turned to the shelves. She was low on mustard, wasn’t she? She picked it up. Even if she wasn’t mustard wouldn’t go bad. Unlike this conversation. “Stop it, Ellen. Tabitha has nothing to do with this.”

  “She has everything to do with it. She tried to horn in on my daughter and her family—”

  “A family you had ample opportunity to get to know and elected not to, if you recall.” Jenna pointed the mustard bottle at her. “So you can’t blame Trevor for being thrilled to have a grandmother in his life, or for her to love him and want to be around him. Or me, either, for that matter. You can’t blame me for welcoming the woman into my home when she is probably the only grandmother Trevor will ever know.”

  “He could know me.”

  “He could—if you ever bothered to get to know him. But you haven’t, Ellen. You’ve chosen to distance yourself from us. Just like you’ve been doing to me ever since you found out about Daddy’s affair.”

  “Daddy.” Her mother’s lips curled back. “You call him that as if you loved him, but how could you when he chose her, that woman, and her bastard child over you. How could you, Jenna? How could you want to even think about being with him, visiting him, spending time with him when he did you wrong?” Ellen had a death grip on the back of Jenna’s cart, her knuckles white as she practically rattled the thing off its wheels.

  Jenna tugged the cart away. “Because I didn’t want to lose the only father I’d ever known, Mom. Because he still loved me even if he fell out of love with you. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry you thought it had to be an either or situation. That I had to choose, even though you hadn’t gotten to. I know what he did sucked. I get that. He shouldn’t have done it. But I was a kid. His child and I needed my father.” Especially when you turned on me.

  But Jenna didn’t say it. No good could come of hurting her mother with the past. Jenna just wanted to move forward. Focus on the future.

  “I loved you. I carried you. You of all people ought to know the bond between a mother and child, Jenna, and you broke that.”

  Apparently, Ellen, didn’t have the same moratorium on inflicting the pain of the past on the here and now. “How dare you. How dare you dump that on me. I was a child. A child. Yours and his. I couldn’t choose. No child should have to. And he wasn’t the one making me. You were. And you still are.”

  She spun the shopping cart around. “My door is always open for you, Ellen, but be sure that you’re willing to accept me as I am, and Trevor as he is, and Bryan and Tabitha and any other Lassiter who shows up to be part of my son’s life because I will not make my son choose who he can love. It wasn’t fair to me and it won’t be fair to him.”

  She stormed off, fighting back the tears as she steered the cart to the check-out lane. How dare her mother do that to her. How dare she try to lay that guilt at her feet. Whatever Ellen had felt about their marriage, she should have kept it to herself. Dad had. He’d never bad-mouthed her mother once in all the divorce proceedings. He’d said that they weren’t the people they’d fallen in love with and were no longer happy together. That much had been obvious to her even back then. Dad had been much happier with Mindy’s mom—and Jenna had certainly been happy to have a sister. Yes, she’d felt bad for Ellen, but Ellen had let the bitterness and hatred fester and it’d affected everyone around her, until Jenna had gone looking for love and acceptance in the arms of her boyfriend.

  It’d been a stupid thing to do. She knew that. She’d known it then. And Dave had proved just how stupid when she’d found out about the pregnancy and he’d called her a liar.

  The irony was that, then, she hadn’t been lying, yet Dave had left her. Now… with Bryan, she was lying and he wanted her.

  Granted, he didn’t know she was lying. And though she had a very good reason, she couldn’t keep doing it. It wasn’t fair. Not to him, not to Trevor, and most definitely not to her. She deserved to be loved for w
ho she was and as long as she had this lie hanging over her, she could never truly be that person.

  She had to come clean. Now.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Eighteen… Nineteen… Twenty. Ready or not, here I come!” Bryan uncovered his eyes and looked around the living room. They’d figured out there weren’t any other places to hide in the five previous times he’d been “it” and had had to find them. Thankfully, they’d wizened up because it was hard pretending not to see two giggling, squirming little boys.

  “I wonder where they could be.” He made a big production of stomping around the living room as he made his way toward the stairs. They hadn’t been at all quiet as they’d run up them the minute he’d closed his eyes.

  “I wonder if they’re in here.” He opened the coat closet door and rattled the hangars loudly on the bar. “Nope. Not here.”

  He repeated the action with the dining room and the kitchen, opening doors and cabinets and moving the noisy stuff inside them around, then closing them with a big crash.

  Giggles floated down the stairs.

  “Hmmm, it doesn’t look like they’re down here. They must be upstairs.”

  Tiny footsteps went clattering down the hallway as he walked over to the stairs. He thunked his foot down loudly on each tread with an extra huff-and-a-puff thrown in every so often for good measure. God, he loved playing with his son.

  “I don’t know… If I can’t find them, I’m not going to have anyone to throw a football with.” He peered through the railing on the landing, but didn’t see any little legs. Good, the boys were getting better at hiding.

  Or maybe that wasn’t so good…

  He’d made it to the top step when he heard the crash. Then a wail. Then some thumping.

  Definitely not good.

  Bryan ran down the hallway toward Jenna’s room. “Trev? Bobby? Where are you, guys?”

  “In here!”

  More thumps came from Jenna’s closet.