“C’mon Tobe, let’s get dressed. There are some things we shouldn’t see.” She said.
Travis held my stare with a powerful intensity that always tried to make my knees weak and my back cave under the pressure of it. Most of the time it did, but the idea of Toby swinging an axe—my Toby, the boy who racked up ER visits likereward points at the coffee shop—left me riddled with anxiety and pent-up frustrations from the whole pressure filled day.
“Answer me.” I glared at him with one eyebrow raised. “What good could come from giving him a weapon! He’s a baby! With a perpetual addiction to jackass-ery.”
Travis unbuttoned his flannel slowly and methodically before taking it off and tossing it over the bar top chair at the island. I clenched my jaw the second his massive, manly chest was on display for me because I could not let my traitorous body distract me from the conversation at hand.
He gave Toby an axe, for fuck’s sake!
“He’s a boy.” Travis growled back in that smooth way that didn’t push me down with his dominance, but caressed me with it like it was trying to take something off my hands. “He’s a boy who needs to learn boy things.”
“He’s—” I opened my mouth, and Travis tilted his head to the side, watching me as he stalked to the sink and washed the mud and dirt off his hands. “It’s dangerous.”
He dried his hands off with a towel and turned to face me again, “I was with him the whole time.”
“Travis.” I sighed.
“Do you not trust me to take care of him? To keep him safe?” He asked, and the vulnerability was clear as day in his gruff voice. “If you don’t, then what’s the point?”
Shit.
“I do!” I argued, getting worked up even more as shame burned on my cheeks for even making him think I doubted him. Fuck. “I don’t trust him,” I hissed in a whisper. “You know how he can be.”
“He’s a little boy, babe.” Eli offered, standing in solidarity next to Travis against the counter with his arms crossed. “You have to let him risk stuff from time to time. And you have to trust us to keep him safe.”
My shoulders deflated, and tears burned behind my eyes. I hated knowing they were disappointed in me and my reaction to the situation. I hated that I made Travis doubt how I felt about his place in the kids' lives.
I turned and lifted the pie dough into the pan, waiting for my replacement pie. “Never mind. I’m sorry.” Words I perfected in another life, bubbled out before I could stop them.
I felt like my skin was going to rip from my flesh with each second that they stared at me, scrutinizing and analyzing me as I once again let my own bullshit past cloud my present.
My nose prickled with the tears I refused to let fall as I started scooping filling into the pie, and then I felt Travis move.
I didn’t have to turn around to see him; he didn’t make a sound for as big as he was, but I felt him coming to me.
I felt Travis’s energy engulf me as he came up behind me, the warmth of his skin breaking through the thin fabric of my bathrobe seconds before his scent surrounded me.
Masculinity shouldn’t smell so fucking good, but from Travis it did.
I could taste his testosterone, and my body heated, softening and causing my needy and traitorous inner feminine urges to react to his proximity. My thighs clenched, and I barely stifled a moan when my bare thighs rubbed together against my bare pussy under the robe. He hadn’t even touched me, yet my body was getting wet, preparing itself to let him in.
It felt like the three of us had been together for lifetimes, wordlessly learning each other in the mere weeks that we’d blurred lines.
“Don’t,” I whispered, closing my eyes as my hands shook, holding the spoonful of filling over the pie like I was too scared to move. Too scared to breathe. Because if I did, then I’d fold and beg for him to reset my frazzled brain and needy body. The waythey could make my entire world stop spinning out of control, with just their touch—it was scary.
“Don’t what?” he murmured as he dipped his face to the soft skin of my neck and let his breath warm the skin and cause goose bumps in its wake. “Don’t take care of you?”
I whimpered almost silently as my body melted from just the mere mention of him tempting me with relief. The heat of his naked chest burned my back when I leaned into him, tilting my head to expose my neck to his lips.
Vulnerable.
Offering myself to him.
Desperate for what he could give me if I just let him.
“You’ve been a ball of nerves since I told you my parents were coming over for dinner.” He spoke against my neck, and his beard teased my skin, but he didn’t actually give me what I wanted.
I wanted his touch.
