Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 89145 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89145 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
“This is my friend Kellan and my cousin Finn,” I heard myself say.
Motherfucker, you said what?
Finn smiled, looking neither surprised nor displeased. “How you doing, hon? You must be Ellie.”
Ellie turned shy in a heartbeat and plastered herself to my thigh. “Hi.” She looked up at me next. “Have I met him before, Daddy?” she whispered. Not very quietly.
I chuckled and combed my fingers through her unruly hair. “You have not, baby girl. We’re just, uh…reconnecting, I guess you can say.”
“Hopefully, there’ll be a lot of that in the future,” Finn said.
I made eye contact with him, and I nodded once. Yeah. Fuck it. I hoped so too.
I really did.
“Okay, we’re gonna go swimming in Daddy’s pool now,” Ellie announced. “Bye!” With that said, she ran back to the hallway, where West waited in the doorway. He’d seen Finn and Kellan, but he made no move. He wasn’t interested in introductions. Or eye contact. He poured all his focus into Ellie and picked her up.
“Did you find your goggles, son?” he called.
“I’m looking!” Trip hollered.
That tension rolling off West wasn’t all in my head, was it? Whatever he’d come here for had backfired. My guess—he’d wanted to confront me since I hadn’t responded to his texts. And now, that wasn’t possible.
I walked out into the hallway again—not sure why, but I wanted an answer or two. I just didn’t want Ellie to catch on. We’d been good at keeping our arguments away from the kids.
“Did you get what you came for?” I asked. Because it sure as fuck hadn’t been Trip’s goggles.
West cleared his throat and repositioned Ellie on his hip. “No, I got something else entirely.” He flicked a quick glance into the living room, and then he eyed my torso just as briefly. “Ellie’s mentioned the drawings on Daddy’s arms and ribs a few times, but I hadn’t expected that.”
“They’re cool,” Ellie gushed. “I’mma get drawings like that one day.”
We’d see about that, girl.
“Oh yeah?” West plastered a smile on his face for Ellie’s sake. “You wouldn’t hide them like Daddy, though, would you? I guess he even hides cousins. Can you believe that? I wonder what else he hides. Probably a lot.”
I clenched my jaw.
Ellie giggled. “He hides candy sometimes! But so do you, Daddy.”
West rumbled a chuckle and smooched her cheek. “That’s because I don’t want to see how you’d react to chocolate with rum in it.”
Ellie put her hands on her hips and jutted her chin. “Maybe I like rum!”
“You can find out when you’re twenty-one,” he laughed. “In the meantime, can you go help your brother find his goggles?”
Oh, fuck no. Was he honestly gonna argue with me when I had Finn and Kellan in the living room?
“Yup! I’ll probably find them before he does.” Ellie scrambled down and sprinted up the stairs.
I peered into the living room real quick, relieved to see Finn and Kellan speaking quietly to each other.
“He looks familiar, the copperhead.” West kept his voice down too.
I suppressed a sigh and forced myself to face him.
“Since when do you have a cousin I don’t know about?” he asked. “I’ve met your aunts and uncles and their kids on both your parents’ sides.”
I wasn’t gonna get into this with him. Not now and probably not ever.
“You don’t know everything about me.”
He let out a humorless chuckle. “No, you’ve made that clear.” For a quick second, his eyes flashed with pain, and it fucking killed me. He was getting it wrong.
“This is a new development,” I told him. “If I kept something from you before, it was only because it wasn’t my secret to tell. It was my mother’s.”
That confused him, but then he merely shook his head, as if it didn’t matter anymore. “Whatever you say. It’s none of my business.” He folded his arms over his chest and peered into the kitchen and dining room. “A small place in Center City. Nice shirts and ties… And then this.” He nodded at me, at my ink. “And you had the nerve to get angry with me for agreeing to a dinner date. I don’t even know who the fuck you are.”
I swallowed hard, too conflicted to speak. Anger simmered below the surface, but devastation weighed me down. I hated fighting with him. I hated circling back to the same goddamn issues over and over. I hated how the hurt never ceased to floor me.
“You brought a pair of scuffed boots to a black-tie affair and got pissy when the boots tried to look better,” I said. “I don’t wanna hear another fucking word about my changes. If you didn’t want me to grow up and clean up my act, then you shouldn’t have put me on display to be judged by your family and coworkers. Because you don’t have the slightest fucking idea how much that hurt.”