by Ali Parker
“Guilty as charged,” she said, smiling as she nodded.
“How’ve you been?” he asked, his attention back on me. Despite Belle sitting right across from me, a stunner in her own right, Jeremy was looking at me as if I was the center of his universe. How or why, I would never understand.
“I’m okay,” I replied, preferring not to revisit everything that was so not okay right now. Jeremy knew everything, and I’d have plenty of time to cry on his shoulder again when we were alone. “You?”
“Same,” he said, turning his wrist to check his watch. “I’ve got to run, but I’ll see you tomorrow okay?”
“Sure.” I wished Jeremy and I could just relax and enjoy what we had, but that simply wasn’t possible. As it was, he was coming over tomorrow to talk about attorneys and custody and Wesley. While I knew it had to be done, I wasn’t ready to face all that yet. It would make the situation too real, plus it would cement I was a burden of the biggest kind on Jeremy.
Belle watched him retreat, waiting for him to slip from the coffee shop before she turned to me, her eyes as wide as the top of my mega mug. “I saw that!”
“Saw what?” I asked innocently. I might have left out a few details in the story of my life earlier, such as the fact that I was kind of, sort of, just maybe seeing Jeremy. I didn’t want to complicate things even more. Outing us to anyone in town at this stage, even someone I trusted, seemed like it could potentially do just that.
“The way the two of you were looking at each other, what was that?” she asked, a sly gleam in her eyes.
“It’s nothing,” I began, but then thought the better of it. I trusted Belle. I didn’t want to complicate things between Jeremy and me, but maybe confiding in a friend would clarify them. Shaking my head as I fixed my eyes to the bottom of my mug, I came clean, “Okay, it’s not nothing.”
“Well duh!” she exclaimed, leaning forward eagerly. “What’s going on with you two?”
“I like him,” I admitted, my voice barely a whisper. “But I’m worried about Wesley. He wanted me to stay away from Jeremy, and I’m not sure what he’ll do if I don’t listen.”
Belle was quiet for a second, waiting until I lifted my eyes and met hers before saying anything. When I finally looked up at her, they were fierce and blazing. “You can’t let Wesley dictate your life any more than he already has, friend. Jeremy is obviously a good guy and he obviously cares about you. Trust me, I saw the look in his eyes. I mean, I don’t know him too well personally outside of the gossip about his father and their family after everything that happened, but rumor has it he’s a good guy. Plus, I’m willing to bet he can handle standing up to your ex with you.”
“He can,” I replied, realizing once again how true it was.
“It doesn’t hurt that he’s so damn easy on the eyes,” Belle added with a wink.
Waylon stopped by to check on us, effectively moving our conversation along. Belle and I stayed, chatting about life and commiserating about being single mothers until it was time for me to go to work. Jeremy was on my mind the entire time. Belle was right about one thing, he was good guy. A really good one.
It was nice to reconnect with her, to find a friend who I could talk to and who wasn’t afraid to be direct. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed having girlfriends who were willing to do that for me. Until now.
Chapter Fifteen
Jeremy
Once a month on a Friday morning for as long as I’d been working for Doc, he sat down with the company accountant to review the monthly accounts. Since I was taking over the company from Doc, the honor of meeting with Mr. Smith, as boring and ordinary as his name suggested, now fell to me.
Holding open the door to my office for him, I motioned him inside and stared at the growing bald spot on the back of his head as I followed him up the few stairs into my space. I’d stopped by Daisy’s Coffee & Go on my way in to pick up coffee for both of us, hoping I’d be able to catch another glimpse of Marie, but she wasn’t there.
Mr. Smith accepted the coffee I offered him, sipping it slowly as he took me through painstaking details. I tried to stay focused, but the numbers were dry stuff. The meeting passed by excruciatingly slowly and when it was finally done, I walked Mr. Smith out. The upshot was our finances were stable. That was all I cared to know.
Surprised to find Sonny’s truck parking next to mine, I jogged over to meet my brother as soon as Mr. Smith climbed into his car. “We taking turns to surprise each other at work this month?” I asked by way of greeting.
“Looks like it,” he grinned as he stepped from his truck. Sunglasses hid his eyes, but I sensed the grin didn’t reach them. His posture was stiff as he walked to my office with me. “Can’t stay long, but I just got a call from my contact over at the Savannah P.D., and I wanted to share the news in person.”
“Please tell me Wesley’s headed back to Savannah.” I’d been keeping an eye out for him, but hadn’t seen him in the last week or so. I hoped that meant he’d left Cypress.
Sonny sank into the chair Mr. Smith vacated minutes earlier, wheeling it over to my mini fridge to pull out a bottle of water. “Yeah, he has gone back actually. How’d you know?”
“Call it a hunch.”
“Good call,” he said. “Thing is, the cops know he’s back there because he got arrested after starting a fight in a bar.”
“Another example of what a stellar human he is,” I muttered, raking a hand through my hair.
It didn’t answer the question about why he’d fled Cypress right after filing the custody paperwork. I couldn’t help but think his actions wouldn’t help when the custody case finally came before a judge. That didn’t bother me one damn bit.
Yet, if he wasn’t around, Marie could hardly accuse him of stalking her. Getting arrested wasn’t exactly lying low, but it had nothing to do with Austin or Marie, so who knew what was going through his head.
“How is it possible that a guy like that has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting custody? It’s bullshit. Marie doesn’t deserve this shit,” I fumed, idly flinging a paperclip against the wall.
Sonny shrugged, shaking his head. “Fuck knows.”
“She’s terrified of losing her son, and he’s just trying to mess with her head. Maybe even screw with me. Where’s he figure Austin into all of this?”
“Chances are he’s not even thinking about how this might affect Austin,” he said, his jaw set in a grim line. Giving me a long look, Sonny changed the direction of the conversation. “She means a lot to you.”
“What?” I knew there was more to his offhand comment.
Lifting a shoulder, he took a sip of his water before answering me. “Relax, I’m only making an observation. I know you’ve told me this before, but you really do care about her, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Fuck,” he muttered with a slow smile, meeting my gaze. “When you talk about her, you don’t seem so bitter about life. Despite all the shit that’s going on with her ex, that’s saying something.”
“Dunno whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The last thing I need is another legal battle.” I didn’t want that for Marie either, but Wesley wasn’t leaving us much choice. Marie wasn’t giving Austin up without a fight and she shouldn’t.
The man was fucking awful. Austin would be in nothing short of grave danger with him. It was ludicrous to consider the possibility someone like Wesley could potentially be responsible for the life and well-being of a child.
If I were Marie, I would’ve fought him tooth and nail too. Hell, I wasn’t even related to the kid, and I was gearing up for the fight.
“I think it’s a good thing,” Sonny said, interrupting my train of thought. “First, you’re damn straight. A guy like that should never get custody of a kid. Austin needs everyone he can to fight in his corner, whether he knows you’re there or not.”
Sonny might be the younger brother, but he looked at things differently than the rest of us. He saw things that ofte
n passed others by. It also figured he’d think of Austin first, albeit in the context of a legal fight that may well be for his life.
Sonny rubbed his eyes, which I realized for the first time looked tired. They were tinged with red and dark circles shadowed the skin underneath them. “Second, I’m just happy Marie seems to make you happy. You know, when her psycho ex isn’t driving both of you nuts.”
“She does.” My heart twisted in my chest every time I thought about Marie. Even with all the bullshit with Wesley, I couldn’t imagine letting her go. Perhaps it was the messy history in my past that recognized the mess in hers and drew me to her. Although, it was more likely that despite all she had been through, she was still an optimist.
Marie had a way of seeing the good in people and situations regardless of all the darkness that surrounded her because of her ex. She was always smiling at her clients, giving them compliments and making them feel good about themselves. As far as I could tell, she didn’t care the least about my family’s messy history. Hell, she’d never even mentioned it.
Then there was the way she was with Austin. No matter where they were or what they were doing, she always kept him foremost in her focus, to put him first, to give him everything she possibly could despite having to do it all herself.
She was a ray of light for me. When she looked at me, I didn’t feel like she was looking at the guy who disappointed the whole town when he blew his shoulder out, or the former rich kid whose family had spectacularly and publicly fallen from grace.
When she looked at me, I felt like she was seeing just that. Me.
She wasn’t digging for information on my father or commiserating with my almost-career in football when she was with me. She seemed to enjoy spending time with me, simply for me being me. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
I could admit I hadn’t been the most fun-loving guy since my football dreams got blown, along with my shoulder. I’d buckled down and carried on. Then, with my mother passing away and my father sliding from glory to shame in a few short years, well, it was safe to say my family had given our small town plenty of gossip fodder. Yet, I’d never believed the world owed me anything.
The world didn’t owe me jack shit. Everything I had now I’d worked my ass off for and I was proud of that. Yet, sometimes it felt as if people were forever seeing my brothers and me as nothing more than the Lovett boys. It pissed me off that so often who we were was ignored for what had happened to our family. We were constantly tarred with the brush of our father’s failings.
It wasn’t like that with Marie though. With her, things were real. I didn’t think I’d ever find that, but now that I had, I wasn’t about to let her go.
“Damn, you’re just all dreamy every time she comes up,” Sonny teased, drawing me out of my reverie.
“Shut up,” I said with a roll of my eyes, wiping any emotion that might’ve been there from my face. “What’s it to you anyway?”
Throwing his hands up in surrender, he kept grinning at me as he pushed up off his chair. “Nothing man. It’s just good to see you actually smiling. Haven’t seen much of that since the old man went away. You were hit pretty hard by what happened to him. Understandable, but, you know…”
I snapped, “I know what?”
“You had to get back to living your own life at one point or another. It’s good to see that point might just be here, is all,” he said, leaning against the wall as he sipped his water.
“Leaving already?”
“Have to,” he answered quickly. Too quickly. I wondered what he was getting up to, but he wouldn’t tell me until he was ready to. I just hoped to hell it didn’t have anything to do with our father’s case. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“I’m going to help Marie with an attorney,” I told him. “Collins recommended a woman called Savannah Steele. You heard of her?”
He lifted a dark eyebrow, pulling his sunglasses from his shirt and nibbling on one of the ends as he nodded. “I have, yeah. She’s good. She’ll do a good job. Go for it.”
“Thanks bro. I’ll see you later.” I was already pulling my phone out of my pocket to make the call when Sonny nodded and waved.
“See ya.”
The next minute he was gone and the phone was ringing in my ear. Once. Twice. A woman answered in clipped tones, “This is Steele.”
Explaining to her who I was as concisely as I could, I scheduled an appointment with her for the next week. Before she hung up she added sternly, “Oh, and Mr. Lovett? Since Ms. Nix will be my client and not you, I need her to be present at the meeting. You’re welcome to come with her, but she needs to be there herself.”
Chapter Sixteen
Marie
“Jeremy’s coming over to dinner that okay with you?” I asked Austin on Friday afternoon.
I hadn’t seen Jeremy since the previous morning at the coffee shop, but I’d been counting the minutes until tonight. Anticipation thrummed through my veins with the awareness I’d see him tonight. With a mental scold, I forced myself not to zone out into fantasies about Jeremy. Not in front of Austin.
Austin stopped what he doing, rinsing some carrots for me in a bowl of water. His green eyes shot open wide and a slow grin split his face in half. “For real? I missed him!”
I did too, but I didn’t tell Austin that. Abandoning the carrots, he raced around our small kitchen with his arms out chanting, “Yay, yay, yay!”
While I wasn’t breaking into chants, I was definitely excited to see Jeremy. The excitement didn’t take away from the sense of apprehension that was also still lingering though. Wesley and Jeremy fought a constant battle for the forefront of my mind, and I was worried about what the former might do if he found out Jeremy was coming over for dinner. With Austin around, no less. Wesley had this fucked up idea he owned me and, by extension, Austin. I could recognize the overpowering need to protect my son from the whole wide world, but that wasn’t what drove Wesley. No, it was more than he viewed Austin as leverage to control me. It was love or protectiveness that drove him.
Gripping the counter to keep my hands from trembling, as they tended to do this week whenever I thought about Wesley, his threats and now the custody case, I called Austin back. “You’re not done with those carrots, young man. You promised me clean carrots.”
Austin zoomed to a stop, dropping his butt back to the floor beside his bowl while he smiled at me. “Jeremy won’t want dirty carrots.”
“Nope,” I said, gaining enough control of the trembling that I could carry on spicing the meat without making a mess. “Hop to it, buddy. He’s going to be here soon.”
As I said the words, my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out with my free hand, both thrilled and nervous to see Jeremy’s name on the screen. “If you’re canceling, please at least come fetch some carrots,” I said by way of greeting.
Jeremy chuckled, a low rumbling sound that made me want to tickle him to keep hearing it. “I’m not canceling, but why carrots?”
Lowering my voice, I watched as Austin plucked another bag from the fridge and started washing those too. He was completely dedicated to his task now and clearly seemed to think he needed to do extra since Jeremy was coming over. “I gave Austin a few to wash for me, then he found out you were coming and things got a little out of hand. I think it’d break his heart if you weren’t coming anymore.”
“Wouldn’t dream of doing that,” he assured me, his gravelly voice sending a shiver over my skin. “I was actually calling to find out if it’s okay if I bring my dog with me? I think Austin might like him.”
I was speechless, completely shocked and taken aback by his offer and the fact that he’d actually put some thought into what Austin might like. “Sure. Sounds good.”
“Great. See you in a few,” he said. He paused for a beat before continuing, “Can’t wait to see you.”
It wasn’t that his words were deep, but the tone in them—so direct and laden with the desire
sliding through my veins. Heat bloomed from my center, flushing me straight through. “I can’t wait to see you either,” I murmured.
“On the way,” he replied before the line clicked dead in my ear.
As I set the phone down, I was slightly mortified. My voice had come out breathy. While it was how Jeremy made me feel, I wasn’t used to feeling like this—tumbling madly into the desire that flashed so hot and high between us. Yet, it wasn’t just that. Jeremy made me feel safe, and I wanted to wrap myself in the strength he offered.
We were just finishing with the preparation for dinner when Jeremy and Arcadian showed up. I’d met his dog at his place, but he hadn’t shown more than a passing interest in me. He tended to be quiet and nap just about all the time—at least, that was what he’d done when I’d been there. He was different with Austin though, walking right over to him, nudging him with his nose and then rolling onto his back for a tummy scratch.
Austin obliged almost immediately, sinking to his knees beside the gentle black giant after giving Jeremy no more than a perfunctory hug. All his excitement over seeing Jeremy was now replaced by adoration of the dog. “What’s his name?” he asked without even looking up at Jeremy.
“Arcadian,” Jeremy answered. The dog’s ears perked at the sound of his name, but he made no effort to make any other move.
“Does he bite?” Austin asked, half his upper body already stretched out over the dog as he scratched him vigorously.
“Definitely not,” Jeremy said, the corners of his lips twitching up. With Austin’s attention on Arcadian, Jeremy caught my hand and reeled me toward him, dropping a quick kiss on my temple and murmuring in my ear, “But I might.”
A shiver ran down my spine. It didn’t matter where we were, the effect he had on me was instant and powerful. My body nearly purred at the feel of him close to me. I desperately wanted to pull him to my room and have my way with him. But now definitely wasn’t the time.