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“Just think,” Mom says, a playful quirk to her lips. “You might end up being Kane’s father-in-law, Jason.”
“Mom,” I yell, my cheeks blushing up a storm now. “We haven’t even talked about—don’t jump the—just shh, please.”
She holds her hands up, innocence personified. “I was just thinking aloud.”
“Well, think in your head, please.”
She laughs and rolls her eyes. “So is this settled than, finally?” she says. “Because, honestly, it hasn’t exactly been fun watching you two pretend to hate each other all these years. And now that Kelly has found the man of her dreams—”
“And I’ve found the woman of my dreams,” Kane cuts in, giving me one of our secret looks.
“I think it would be good if we could move past this,” Mom finishes.
“Yeah,” Dad sighs, a smile twitching his lips. “Jesus, all these years we could’ve been working together, and it took this to make me see what an ass I’ve been.”
“You seem more like your old self,” Kane comments, his voice light and his smirk open.
“It’s like a weight’s been lifted,” Dad yells, grinning from ear-to-ear now. “Christ, carrying this around, living under the weight of this lie, this guilt, it’s been killing me. But now I feel it going away. And I can just …”
He pauses, and then glances between me and Kane.
“I want you two to be happy,” he says. “I know there’s an age gap. I know things might be a little complicated. But …”
He shakes his head.
“What, dear?” Mom urges.
“It’s silly,” he grumbles.
“Love,” she whispers, reading him the same way I can read Kane. “Love finds a way. That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”
He reaches for her hand. “How did you know that, Henri?”
She giggles and winks at me. “Because that’s what you said when you proposed to me, you grumpy bastard.”
Everybody laughs then, a salve of relief washing over the interaction, making our laughter high pitched and carefree, rising gloriously into the summer sky.
I love you, Kane.
The thought collides with my common sense, with my desire not to make this complicated when we’ve just disentangled it.
I love you so much.
But for now it’s enough to be in the sun together, the past dim and easy to lay to rest, the future shining like a sky of desert stars and begging to be lived.
Chapter Fourteen
Kane
Kelly squeezes my abs as I ride up Route 13, my helmet pulled low and the wind whipping past us. The rumble of the bike is like a beast underneath us, but even so, I feel like I can sense the tremors in her body, the nerves twitching through her fingers and pounding in her heart.
My mind goes back to last night, sitting in the cabin as she clutched the Berkley acceptance letter in her hands, twisting as though she could turn back time to the first night we spent in the cabin and we wouldn’t have to confront the reality now facing us.
“I’m proud of you,” I told her, pulling her into my lap and running my fingers through her tangled, sweaty hair, all the more beautiful for how untamed it was. “You’re going to do a fantastic job. I just know it.”
“But what about us?” she whispered, her eyes flitting to the ceiling and then to the bed, as if she wanted to look anywhere but at me.
I touched her chin and guided her gaze to mine, looking into her with all the security I could muster, which was a lot.
For her, it always would be.
“Everything’s going to be fine, Kelly. Actually, that’s a lie. Everything is going to be amazing.”
“What, you want to do long distance?”
I smirked. “It’s about two hundred miles. It’s not that long.”
She threw her hands up, which caused her to wriggle lustfully in my lap, driving me almost feral with the motion.
“That’s still not an answer, is it?”
“Do you trust me?” I asked her.
“You know I do,” she whispered. “I trust you more than anybody I’ve ever met.”
“Then come for a ride with me tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
I tickled her, making her squirm and dance on my lap, sexiness personified with her cascading blonde hair and her nature green eyes sparkling with excitement.
“Berkeley,” I told her. “I want to get a look at the place that’s going to steal my woman.”
She mock glared, letting me know she didn’t find that funny at all, and then asked what we were going to be doing up there. But I wouldn’t tell her. Even as my heart hammered with nerves, I kept my lips sealed and just asked her to trust me.
Now, we glide down the highway and I feel those same nerves cascading through me, which is damn strange.
I’ve never been much of a nervous man. Even in the alleyway with those Cartel bastards coming at me, there were no nerves, only the violent focus of a man who knows he has to do what is necessary.
