Shit.
Impossible.
“Ace, I’m going to come.” He fisted her hair as he gave her a warning he hoped sounded sincere.
Her eyes snapped wide and she let him go with a soft pop. Then she smiled and licked her lips—
Licked.
Her.
Lips.
Then she said, “That’s what I’m counting on.” And dived back in.
He didn’t have to be told twice.
A few more accurately, and lovingly, placed licks and sucks, and he let go. She drank him in, every last drop, drawing a long groan and breath from his chest.
His knees quit holding him up. When he opened his eyes, his entire body was buzzing and his ass was on the floor.
She was on the floor, too, so he pulled her on top of him, all that soft flesh bursting out of her bikini, and held her tight.
He gripped the back of her head. “Got some of that for me?” he asked, amazed he’d found his voice at all.
She kissed him, and when she put her tongue in his mouth, he found new strength, sucking on her tongue, enjoying her amazing mouth. It didn’t take long for his cock to stir to life again.
Which she must have liked because next she wrapped her hand around it.
And stroked.
“Couch, Ace.”
“Bed?”
“Don’t care,” he answered. “Couch is closer.”
“Mmm,” she confirmed. “Couch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dinner was the no-muss-no-fuss combination of mac and cheese from a box, tater tots from the freezer, and for dessert, Oreos and ice-cold milk.
Charlie had no complaints. She didn’t need fancy, and she didn’t need healthy. What she needed, she’d discovered over these past weeks, was Evan.
Alarming? Not any longer. She was under no judgment from Rae’s parents, or Evan, or, as she learned tonight, Lyon.
“Are you guys getting married?” He carefully spun his Oreo, nose scrunching when the top didn’t come off clean, leaving the creamy filling half on each side of the cookie.
She’d been in the middle of licking the cream from her own cookie and realized she was sitting at the breakfast bar, tongue stuck out like the kid from A Christmas Story who froze himself to the flagpole.
Evan stopped dunking—the whole cookie, he didn’t bother with separating the tops, which was sacrilege in her opinion—and studied his son. Then he popped his cookie in his mouth, chewed, and kept chewing. When he was done chewing, Charlie managed to pull her tongue back into her mouth, but sat, cookie halves in hand, waiting for what she had no idea.
“Dad?”
Evan, done chewing, ran his tongue along his teeth for an agonizing two and a half seconds before answering… with a non-answer.
“Why do you ask, bud?”
Lyon, carefully transferring cream from one side of his cookie to the other, kept his eyes on his task. “Because a boy at school asked about my mom.”
Oh, Lyon.
New school. Of course he’d been asked.
“What’d you tell him?” This from Evan.
“What you told me to. Mommy is in heaven.”
And like that, her heart went from aching to melting. Evan had prepared his son for this situation. Of course he had. He was an amazing dad.
“I told him my aunt Charlie lived with us sometimes, though.”
Her eyes grew wide and met Evan’s lifted eyebrow.
“He told me it was illegal for my dad to marry my aunt and I called him a liar.”
Oh boy.
“Buddy, calling someone a liar isn’t nice.”
“I know.” Lyon scowled. “I got time-out.”
Evan’s frown drew down. Clearly, he hadn’t known, and clearly, he didn’t like that he hadn’t known. Charlie felt her face scowling as well. She didn’t like it, either.
“It’s not illegal for me to marry your aunt Charlie, because she’s not really your aunt.”
Lyon looked almost hurt. She gave him a wan smile, trusting Evan with this conversation. No way was she skirting the land mines dotted around this talk.
No freaking way.
“Aunt Sadie is your aunt because she married Uncle Aiden. And Aunt Kimber is your aunt because she married Uncle Landon,” he explained to Lyon. “Aunt Angel is your aunt because she’s my sister by blood.”
“By blood?” Lyon said, his lips forming an eww.
“That’s a way of saying people are related, bud.”
“Oh.” He looked at Charlie, then his dad. “And you and Aunt Charlie are not related?”
“No.”
“And you’re not married,” he said, puzzling his way through.
“No.”
“If you get married, will Aunt Charlie be my mom?”
Oh boy. The cookie halves were getting sweaty. She put them down and brushed the crumbs on her napkin.
Evan didn’t miss a beat. “Yes. She’d be your mom. Your second mom.”
“A second mom?” Lyon wrinkled his nose in confusion.
“Sure,” Evan answered. “You can have two moms.”
Lyon’s lips pulled. “My friend Rachael has two moms.”
Evan tilted a brow at Charlie, giving her a shoulder shrug that said, See? Easy peasy.
Meanwhile, she simply shook her head. He’d handled this like a champ, and here she sat trying not to let the moisture in her eyes leak out the sides. She had no idea how this was making her feel. There was an emotion there she couldn’t put her finger on.
After Russell and she decided not to marry or have children, she’d accepted an unmarried, childless future. She didn’t need either one to be happy, and for a few years with him, she proved herself right. She didn’t have pangs to be a mother, and she didn’t do photo shoots at weddings and feel pangs of loss that she wasn’t the one in the white dress smiling and posing.
But with Evan, a different possible future laid out before them, she found herself ready to accept an alternate reality. And with the phrase “second mom” bouncing around in her head, Charlie realized it was the perfect term for her. She and Rae. Linked in their pursuit to raise Lyon.
It was kind of beautiful.
“So I would call Aunt Charlie ‘Mom’?” Lyon asked.
“Well, bud,” Evan said softly. “That’s a big deal, isn’t it? It’s something you’d have to ask Charlie, not something you can decide over Oreos.”
Lyon nodded and smiled his cookie-crumbed face at Charlie.
She gave him a watery smile back, losing the battle and the hold on her emotions.
Evan reached for her knee under the table but focused on Lyon. “Yeah?”
Lyon grinned at his dad. “Yeah. Can I play Clashing Clans? I almost rescued the queen yesterday!”
Who reminded him of his mom, Evan had told her.
Oh, her heart.
“Sure, bud.”
“Excuse me for a second.” Charlie took the opportunity to bolt. Hustling, she moved quickly through the kitchen, down the hall, and paused in the laundry room. Her chest had tightened with an almost panicky feeling. Making a snap decision between the bathroom, the deck, and the studio, she stepped into the bathroom and shut the door.
After several minutes passed, a light knock came on the door, followed by, “Ace?”
She was settled on the edge of the tub, a wad of toilet paper in one hand she had used to quell the stream of tears running down her cheeks. Thankfully, she’d pulled it together before Evan’s arrival at the door.
“You decent?” he asked.
She should have known she couldn’t avoid him for long. “Yeah.”
The door popped open and Evan sat on the closed toilet seat. He took in the tissue in her hand and the way she was slouched—knees pressed together, feet splayed in opposite directions.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Of course.”
He reached for her hand, took the tissue, and dropped it into the trash can. Keepin
g hold of her fingers, he brushed his thumb over her hand. “Sorry about that conversation. That’s what having kids is like. They say what they think, drop verbal grenades when you least expect it.”
“I was thinking land mines.”
Evan’s smile did a lot to loosen her tight lungs. “That’s a good description, too.”
A few more strokes of his thumb on hers and she commented, “You handled that well.”
His smile was smaller, but no less handsome. “Thanks.”
“I guess we should have explained what we were before we sent him to school with some know-it-all boy who asks highly age-inappropriate questions,” she muttered.
Evan laughed again, but it was short-lived. A shadow of seriousness covered his face as his dark lashes closed over his eyes briefly. He met her gaze with his. “Maybe we should explain what we are to each other first, Ace.”
Eep!
She moved to stand and Evan clutched her hand harder. “Too soon?”
Stuck between half up and half down, she sank back onto the edge of the bathtub. It shouldn’t be too soon. Evan and she knew each other intimately; had known each other for years. He’d taken her to the pinnacle of her sexual experience—to, up, and over—several times. She was sleeping in his bed, eating dinner with him and his son, who she considered way closer than a nephew.
But somehow talk of family, talk of “mom,” talk of permanence and the future had freaked her out.
Freaked her right out.
“It’s… a lot to think about,” she ventured.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is a lot to think about.” His eyes redirected to various spots in the room, none of them in the area she was sitting. Then he dropped her hand and stood. As he walked to the hallway, he said, “Lyon’s going to watch a movie. You hanging around?”
She nodded.
He gave her a soft smile, followed by a softer, “good,” but worry lined his brow. Charlie wanted to ask why, but in a lot of ways she also didn’t want to know.
So she didn’t ask.
* * *
It occurred to Evan he’d made a lot of assumptions about Charlie.
He thought her rooting herself into their lives since they’d moved here meant she was accepting not only him but also all that came with him. And the things that came with him were Lyon, a deceased wife, a big family spread over three states, and a career that sometimes caused him to keep weird hours.
Evan made the mistake of assuming after he’d warmed her up, loosened her up with a few dozen orgasms, that she’d wedge herself in tightly at his side. What he had learned this afternoon was she wasn’t sure where she stood with him.
Or Lyon.
Not that Evan had expected her to propose to him the moment Lyon asked if they were going to get married—because he’d known that was a huge step for her—but he hadn’t expected her to dart from the room and hide for the next ten minutes.
When Evan thought about marriage… hell. He was ready.
He married Rae because he loved her and wanted a family. His mom and dad stayed together until cancer took her away, but if she hadn’t been ill, he knew his parents would have stayed together forever. His family was full of promising relationships. Shane and Crickitt, Aiden and Sadie, even Landon and Kimber seemed to have their shit together in the marriage and kid department.
No, getting married again didn’t spook Evan in the least. And getting married to Charlie… He may have had a few relationships with very loose strings since Rae, but he would have never, ever started something with Charlie if he didn’t think they had staying potential. She was too involved in Lyon’s life, in his life.
Now that they were testing the waters, he was sold. Charlie for good sounded great. She poured herself a glass of juice and came to the living room where he was watching… he didn’t know what. Some reality show about moonshine. He hadn’t really been paying attention.
She kicked off her shoes and settled on the couch next to him, curling her feet under her.
He dropped an arm around her and tugged; she molded to his side. He kissed the top of her head as she sipped from her glass and emitted a quiet hum of happiness.
Charlie for good. That was exactly what he wanted. Lyon didn’t seem to mind, either.
She was the only one who wasn’t all in.
Yet.
* * *
Charlie stayed over at Evan’s house the night before last, but last night opted to sleep in her own bed. Not because she wanted to but because she needed to get home and put in some serious hours on the work she’d been avoiding. After a simple dinner of burgers and potato chips, baked beans and coleslaw from Abundance Market—Abundance had the best coleslaw—and a Disney movie, Lyon had gone to bed and she’d followed Evan into his studio to kiss him good-bye and leave him to his painting.
But after the kiss, he didn’t get right to painting.
He did get right to turning her inside out with his tongue and his hands and a litany of words definitely not for the PG crowd.
She’d escaped—narrowly—but not before he pulled her onto his lap, slipped his fingers beneath her skirt, and put her in such a state that she walked back to her house—a walk she refused to let him accompany her for—on very, very loose knees.
Sometime around two a.m., Evan had come over to extract her from the couch in her office where she’d crashed, but had no such luck getting her to come back to his place. “Letting you have this one, Ace,” she remembered him saying before he left, “but this is the last one.”
So, last night. Her own bed.
True to his word, the next afternoon, he hadn’t let her be.
“Birthday party, Ace,” he’d reminded her as she frantically brushed her hair and slipped her feet into a pair of flats.
“I know! Sorry. I got busy.”
Busy doing more work on Guy and Mallory Houston’s wedding photos. It was the rainiest outdoor wedding Charlie had ever seen. She was able to snap pictures of soggy guests in the outdoor reception tent while it stormed, but the background wasn’t pretty. As a result she’d spent most of last night and today in Photoshop, replacing the drab white tent with shots of Evergreen Cove’s apple orchard she’d taken last year. To Charlie it seemed a little disingenuous, but Mallory was willing to pay extra for the backdrop swap.
School had started and it hadn’t taken long for Lyon to make friends, so when he was invited to a little boy’s birthday party, Charlie wasn’t surprised. It was an overnight, which Evan had jumped on, telling her, “Good for him to get away. And good for us. Another painting, Ace?”
She’d be lying if she said that suggestion hadn’t sent a drove of full-body chills dancing on her skin.
After four and a half hours of piñata-hitting, screaming seven- and eight-year-olds, and chattering with other moms at the party, Evan pulled the SUV to a stop at his house.
He let them inside and once there, reached for Charlie. She lifted her palms to his chest, her eyebrows raising in interest. In a pair of torn, well-worn, very sexy jeans, and a plain gray T-shirt, she’d admit, it was hard to take him to task about anything… except she hadn’t liked what she’d seen at the party.
He angled a glance down at her hand on his chest, stopping him from coming closer. “What’s this?”
Thoughts of Leslie O’Brian hit her front and center. She was the mom who had adhered herself to Evan’s side most of the party. Charlie wouldn’t say he’d flirted with the sexy redhead, but he hadn’t thwarted her, either.
Charlie knew this because she was very, very good friends with the party planner.
She and Sofie had hovered behind a chocolate-dipped fruit bouquet. Every once in a while Sofie would eat a piece and make a comment, like, “Do you think her boobs are real?” Or, “Evan must have the patience of a saint.”
Now, “Saint” Evan leaned in for a kiss. Charlie turned her head.
“Ace.”
He palmed her jaw gently, forcing her to acknowledge him. “Not letting you work
tonight. We talked about this.”
“More like you decreed it.”
He grinned, not caring about her attitude. When he pulled her neck and kissed her, she decided to let him. And then she decided kissing him was a lot better than not kissing him. Still, there was the small matter of the woman at the party. Boundaries had definitely been crossed.
Therefore, when his mouth left hers, she said against his lips, “Leslie O’Brian.”
His eyebrows met over his nose.
“She spent the day hitting on you like it was her job.”
“And?”
“And?” she asked, her voice sliding a little too close to hysterical for her comfort. “And… and… I didn’t like it.”
He smiled again. “No?”
She fisted his T-shirt and stood on her tiptoes, touching her nose to his. “No.”
Rather than argue or defend himself, he crushed his lips into hers and thrust his tongue in her mouth.
She’d admit, much better than an argument.
Her hands went into his hair to hold herself up as he backed her through his living room, his chest pressing against her breasts, his hips bumping hers, the hand that had moved to her ass cupping it firmly. He moved his other hand to the back of her head and buried his fingers in her hair as he walked her awkwardly up the stairs to his room.
When his lips left hers, they were at the landing, his big bed behind her. His lips moved to her neck, further preventing her from speaking coherently, then his tongue moved along the sensitive flesh behind her ear. Before she knew it, she’d been stripped of her clothes and dropped on his bed, Evan lowering himself over her.
With his lips wrapped around one nipple and finger and thumb rolling the other, she couldn’t think of anywhere else she’d rather be. His tongue delved to her belly button and darted in, then out, and Charlie—thoroughly speechless—held on to his hair and watched through hooded eyes as he settled between her thighs and slicked his tongue along her center.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Bringing Home the Bad Boy Page 26