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I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“Move in with me,” he asked.
I blinked. “I’m already in with you.”
He trailed his fingers up the length of my spine.
“True,” he agreed. “But you’re also not ‘in.’ All of your stuff is still in boxes. You’re checking in with the contractors that started as if you want them to hurry up. But…I want you to stay. I want you to be here when I get home from work. I want to go to the grocery store with you every week, then come home and unload it into our shared refrigerator.”
I trailed my hands down the length of his beard.
He’d trimmed it today.
It was closer to his face than usual.
I could almost make out the squareness of his jaw.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll move in with you.”
His hands squeezed my hips, and I felt his not-all-the-way-softened cock start to fill with blood again.
“You’ll move in,” he said. “Really?”
I pressed a kiss to his nose.
“Yes, really,” I said. “On one condition.”Chapter 13I may act like I’m okay, but deep down inside, I’m hungry again.
-Lock’s secret thoughts
Lock
“Yes, sir,” I said to Kettle. “I will, sir.”
“Now let me talk to my daughter,” he ordered gruffly.
“One more thing,” I said.
“What?” Kettle sounded miffed.
He did not, under any circumstances, like that I’d moved in with his daughter—or more correctly, his daughter in with me.
Even more so, he wasn’t happy that I’d told him that I cared for his daughter.
“I love her, sir,” I said. “I love her a lot.”
Saylor blinked owlishly at me and my words.
“You better love her,” Kettle grumbled. “If I had thought you didn’t, I wouldn’t have said yes. Now let me talk to her. Oh, and make sure y’all are down here this weekend. There’s a party that I want you both to attend. No is not an option.”
I chose not to tell him that I was working this weekend.
One of the other guys would cover for me just as I’d done for all of them when they’d asked.
“Have a good one, sir.” I bit my lip and handed the phone to Saylor, who was watching me go through practical hell as I told her father that she was moving in with me.
Saylor’s eyes weren’t full of mirth any longer when she pressed the phone to her ear and said hello.
They were unreadable as she spoke softly to her father.
Thinking they could use the privacy to talk without me listening in, I went outside and used Saylor’s phone to place a call to my mother.
She answered on the first ring.
“Saylor?”
“It’s me,” I said. “How’d it go?”
Mom sighed.
“He didn’t get anything,” she muttered. “Thank God.”
“Good news,” I said.
“The kid was kind of sad, actually,” she admitted. “He looked rough. He’d changed a lot since he’d come in for that job interview. I’m glad that you convinced me to hire Saylor first. I’m kind of concerned on what would’ve happened had I given him a job.”
My dad muttered a ‘fuck yeah’ in the background, and I raised a hand to scratch my head.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw that Saylor was now waving her hands around in the air as she talked to her dad, switching the phone back and forth as she spoke heatedly about something.
Turning back, I took a few more steps down into the yard as I said, “Hey, Mom?”
“Yes, baby?” Mom said, sounding distracted.
“Will you go ring shopping with me tomorrow?”
There was a long pause, and then my mother started to screech like a lunatic.
“Jesus Christ, Memphis,” Dad said. “We’re at the fucking courthouse for God’s sake. Tone it down.”
“Your son just asked me to go ring shopping with him!” Mom cried. “Excuse me for being happy, jack wad.”
I grinned at my mother’s colorful language, it never failed to make me smile.
She’d tried to clean up her mouth when she’d had kids.
Dad, on the other hand, hadn’t given a shit.
Which was why my sisters and I were saying curse words at a very young age. At least to each other.
“I can do it tomorrow on my lunch break,” she said. “I’ll just tell Saylor that I’m going out to lunch. Oh, how did her day go today?”
I told her about Saylor’s uneventful day. How two people had no-showed on her, and one had come in but hadn’t been able to stay due to a hurt child at school.
“That one she said that she’d reschedule,” I said. “She said the girl’s daughter fell down at the playground and broke her arm.”
“Oh, no,” Mom said. “That’s awful. Of course, we’ll reschedule with her. It’d make us look like dick bags if we didn’t.”
I agreed.
It would.
“You don’t work tomorrow, do you?” Mom asked.
Something caught my eye down the street, and I watched as an old car with bright green, shiny rims drove slowly past my house.
