Page 14 of One Last Time

No news was good news, he supposed.

“I’m going to handle it, Haven. It won’t happen again. I promise.”

She looked like every inch the hurricane she truly could be. Tattooed, beautiful, angry, and entirely his.

“He got past my enforcers,” she said softly.

Yeah, and that was the real problem.

“And the girls were there,” she added.

It would not matter to his wife that the guy who accosted her at the park was practically harmless considering he didn’t even have a weapon on him when it happened. All that mattered to Haven was that it happened in the first place.

He understood that well enough.

It pissed him off, too.

Andino nodded. “I’ll handle it.”

Before his wife could reply or start another argument—it really depended on which way her mood swung, frankly—a cry from one of their girls echoed overtop their heads. Both of them looked upward at the sound.

Being parents never stopped.

Not for anything.

“I have to make a call,” Andino said, “but then I’ll be up to help.”

Haven gave him another one of those looks—one that stung like nothing else. “Whatever, Andino.”

He understood her anger.

She could have it.

John was the person Andino called first. As soon as his cousin picked up the call, he muttered, “Did you hear the news about what happened today at the park?”

“Unfortunately,” John muttered. “What are you going to do about that?”

“Handle it.”

“How?”

“That’s why I called you. I need a plan.”

John chuckled. “I love making those.”

Yeah, he knew.

EIGHT

“And the pretty little unicorn flew away …”

Haven leaned her head against the doorjamb of their master bedroom, listening to her husband down the hall reading yet another bedtime story to Rose because their middle child just did not want to go to bed. It wasn’t as though she had nightmares, and since the kid didn’t even know what had happened that day, it couldn’t be anxiety from that, either.

Certainly not what her mother was currently feeling.

No, the girl was just impossible to put to bed. Even when she was younger, Haven swore Rose would switch her days and nights around from week to week. As a toddler, she rarely had a proper nap which often led to a clingy, grumpy little girl they still loved no matter what.

And then there was Andino …