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I gestured at his coffee. “Want anything in that?”
He walked to the fridge and pulled out milk. “No, do you?”
I held my hand out for the milk. “I need sugar, too.”
He walked to a canister on the island and picked it up, bringing it to me.
His palm wrapped nearly all the way around it, and I felt things inside of me tighten as I thought about how his hand would look wrapped around my thigh.
“Spoon?” I asked.
He touched my hip with his fingers, and I felt electricity jolt through me at the unexpected touch.
I backed away slowly, and his hand reached around my front and captured the cabinet pull that I’d been inadvertently leaning against.
“Ohh, I like those forks,” I said as I inspected the black silverware.
“Me, too,” he said. “I never got to use them before I went inside.”
I felt something inside of me twinge at that.
I hated that he had to spend time in prison. Especially for avenging his dead fiancée.
There was a line that people shouldn’t cross…and if they did, you should have a free ride to do whatever you wanted to that person. Killing people was wrong, I knew. But killing people for killing your fiancée? Well, that seemed fair to me.
“Here you go.” He held out the spoon.
I took it, being sure not to touch his fingers when I did.
“My sister bought them for me,” he started, startling me with the intro into his story seeing as his breath was right on the back of my neck. “I thought they were so cool…they matched the kitchen. Vanessa hated them.”
I made a sound in the back of my throat. “Well, that sucks because I think they’re pretty cool.”
It wasn’t until we were both walking outside with our coffee that I realized it was somewhat chilly.
“Crap,” I said. “I left my jacket on the hammock.”
We both looked over toward the hammock.
The next time the lightning lit up the sky, we saw my one and only jacket on the ground getting pummeled into a muddy puddle.
“I have a blanket you can use for now,” he murmured as he set his coffee down onto the railing and disappeared inside. He came back moments later and handed it to me.
I took it gratefully, wrapped it around my shoulders as best I could with the coffee still in my hand, and nearly orgasmed right there on the spot when the smell of him surrounded me.
Neither of us said a word for a while after that.
Me because I was trying to decide how to steal the blanket and never return it, and him because he was literally enraptured with the lightning streaking across the sky.
It was only when the silence went on too long that my thoughts got the better of me, and words popped out of my mouth that I should’ve stopped myself from saying.Chapter 10If a cow doesn’t produce milk, is it a milk dud or an udder failure?
-Harleigh to Slate
Slate
“You don’t seem that broken up about your…fiancée,” she said. “You seem very well put together about it all. As if you have your shit straight and you’re not sitting here in a funk thinking in the past.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at the woman, practically on the edge of my seat waiting for the lightning to light up the sky just so I could get a glimpse of her. My blanket that I slept with every single night was wrapped around her, and my hands were curled into fists as I stopped myself from reaching over and dragging her over to me.
“I’m not broken up about it anymore,” I murmured. “I had years in prison to come to terms with the fact that she’s gone.”
I looked down at my hands.
“But, saying that, Vanessa wasn’t really mine.”
Her sharp inhale had me glancing away from her and back to the sky.
Was I really about to say this aloud?
“What?” she breathed.
Yep, I was. I was going to do it.
“I’m not the man that got her pregnant,” I said, startling the ever-loving shit out of her.
She gasped and leaned forward. “What?”
I nodded once.
“You heard me,” I said. “The baby wasn’t mine.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it. “Wasn’t your…what?”
It was obvious that she couldn’t get her brain to wrap around my words.
The baby wasn’t his? I could practically see that thought on the edge of her lips, waiting to spill over.
He had a fiancée that was pregnant with a child that wasn’t his?
That’s pretty much why I’d kept the whole thing a secret. I knew nobody would believe me easily…but for some reason, I needed Harleigh to know that Vanessa wasn’t all that she was cracked up to be.
“About a week before Vanessa was shot, I found out that she was carrying another man’s baby,” I murmured, going into the tale that had practically ruined me.
