Page 9 of Bliss

He bent to brush a kiss against her cheek. “I’ll call you soon, pretty girl.”

She gave him a smile and a wave, turned a scowl on Evan, and then kept walking toward the bathrooms, completely ignoring me.

While my players returned to their seats, Xaden asked Evan if he’d met his daughter yet. I didn’t hear most of their conversation, my jealousy over watching Xaden touching my angel so all-consuming, it caused a tunnel effect to my hearing and vision.

I sat there, already mentally counting, telling myself I wouldn’t move until I reached one hundred. My control lasted up to number fifteen before I pushed back from the table. Without a word to the other men, I followed Bliss.

The door to the family bathroom was still closing when I reached it. Without hesitating, I grabbed it and stepped inside. It held a small sofa for nursing mothers, a changing table, and two separate toilet stalls.

Bliss had placed a cloth down and was securing her niece on the table. Her head turned as I stepped into the bathroom, a small smile forming in greeting until she realized it was me.

“Is this going to be a thing now?” she bit out, turning her attention to the squirming baby. With practiced ease, she began shifting clothes out of the way, then undoing the dirty diaper.

I watched every move she made, a lump filling my throat at how amazing she was with the tiny human.

“Just ignore the giant buffoon, Truly. Apparently, he’s stalking Auntie Bliss.” Bliss spoke to the baby in a soft voice, playfully tickling her tummy. “Don’t worry, though, precious. The only danger he presents is to himself. If he overuses his brain, it will most likely explode.”

Truly kicked her legs, her hands swatting around at nothing as she cooed.

It wasn’t until a fresh diaper was in place that I found my voice. “Are you fucking Xaden Newton?”

That was not what I’d planned on asking. For a full ten seconds, I didn’t regret it. And then she slowly lifted her head, those blue-gray eyes narrowed in that way that told me I’d messed up.

I definitely should have asked the original question, which was if she’d enjoyed her coffee that morning.

“Not that it’s any of your business, Kavanaugh, but I have a strict personal rule of not hooking up with athletes. Xaden is a friend, but I’m actually closer to his daughter than to him.”

“You let your friends kiss you and call you pretty girl?” That image was burned into my brain.

She rolled her eyes at me. “He’s a very affectionate person, and he has no problem with openly showing it in public. As for the pretty girl thing…” She readjusted Truly’s clothes and picked her up. “My grandfather used to call my sisters and me that. When Xaden found out about the old nickname, he started using it to make me smile.”

Jealousy wasn’t something new for me when it came to Bliss. It was just more intense now. After years of growing without her to soothe it, calm my possessiveness, my jealousy had become colossal.

Scraping my fingers through my hair, I fought for the correct things to say to fix this. To heal what I’d broken, in both of us.

“I’ve missed you so damn much, meleğim. Every day, every minute of the last seven years has been hell on earth without you.”

Her eyes closed, pain flickering over her face. “You don’t get to say that to me. Not now, not after all this time. And not after the horrible things you said to me before you walked away.”

“Bliss, canim, I regret it.”

Lashes lifting, she blinked back tears. My knees went weak at the sight of her unmasked pain. “Which part? Keeping me like a dirty secret you were ashamed of? Or maybe telling me I was trying to baby-trap you so you would have no choice but to take our relationship public? Or was it that you left the next day without a single explanation and I didn’t know you’d taken a new job in another state—on the other side of the freaking country? I had to find out from an ESPN clip on social media.”

As I looked at the baby in her arms, how naturally she held that little bundle of pink with the dark pigtails and those pretty eyes, the knot in my throat only tightened. I’d done that, accused her of wanting to baby-trap me. Even though she’d taken her birth control religiously. I was the one who’d been careless, more than once. It was me who’d ached to fill her up and watch her belly grow with our baby. And then I’d get that much more scared.

Because all my life, I’d had plans, and being with her, loving Bliss, had put everything at risk.

But the years I’d spent without her, building my career, creating my own legacy within the world of basketball, hadn’t been worth it. I would have traded every victory, every trophy, every award, every NCAA ring that sat in a glass case. Each of those achievements had only left me feeling empty without Bliss there to share it with.

“All of it,” I choked out. “Everything I said and did that made you feel used or dirty or not enough. I regret it, aşkim.”

“But not enough that you ever tried to apologize. Not once have you reached out. You didn’t care then, because even at a different school, you were too scared of losing your career to risk being associated with me. And the only reason you’re here now is because of your new job.”

“I took this job for you, Bliss. There were so many offers I could have taken. Boston. Texas. New York. Miami. But I chose LA to be closer to you. That’s the only reason I’m here, bebeğim.”

Bliss

I heard a note in Noah’s voice, the one I could always identify as him telling the truth. If I could have forgotten it along with everything else about him, wiped every detail I’d learned about the man during our relationship, I would have. It would have made things so much easier.