Page 18 of Mitch

Autumn had tried to guess when she was alone with her thoughts, but too often her imaginings ended up like a blockbuster movie, with espionage, black ops, and government cover-ups, so she’d given up. Her mum had always told her that her wild imagination would get her into trouble. How ironic was it that it was the safe job, the steady husband, that had been her downfall.

“What’s wrong?”

Autumn jumped at Mitch’s voice so close and twisted to find him sitting beside her, his worried gaze on her face. She didn’t want to lie to him, but she didn’t know how much she should tell him either. She shrugged. “Just thinking about my family.”

His hand came up to tug her across him, her ass in his lap as he bandied his arms around her. “You miss them.”

It was a statement rather than a question, but she nodded anyway. “I do. We were always close, especially me and my younger brother. He was ten years younger than me. My mum had me when she was fifteen, so we were close too, even though we were totally different.” She stopped, not sure what else she could reveal without breaking the rules.

“How about you tell me about them without telling me any identifiers? That way you won’t break any rules.”

Autumn angled her head to look up at him. His dark eyes were alight with understanding, even as his brows pinched in a frown. Reaching up, she smoothed the offending frown before stroking her hand down his stubbly cheek. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

It was something she’d wondered before. He often anticipated what she might say or do, and it was a little unsettling to know he knew her so well, and yet he didn’t know her past.

Mitch pressed a kiss to her temple, before resting his cheek against her head. “Fuck if I know, Autumn, but from the second I laid eyes on you something happened here.” He rubbed his hand over his chest, brushing against her arm. “I’ve seen it happen to others, but I’ve never had this kind of thing happen to me. I feel as if I know you deep in my soul, as if I can anticipate your thoughts. Does that sound weird?”

Autumn shook her head. “No, I feel it too, this comfort with a person that’s so natural it’s as if you’ve known them your whole life. I felt it the first time I held Maggie. Like she’d always been part of my life, and yet it was all so new.”

They were silent for a few moments until Maggie drew their attention away with her cries.

“She needs feeding.” Autumn lifted Maggie and quickly settled herself on the warm grass, lifted her shirt discreetly, and let her daughter feed. Mitch was sitting with his long legs in front of him, body braced on his arms behind him, watching her.

She wriggled self-consciously. “What?”

“Nothing really, I’ve just never realised the beauty of a feeding mother until you. It’s so calming to witness the pure love between a mother and her child.”

“It is, and it’s not something you can ever explain until you become a parent, but it’s fierce the love you have for them. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her, not a single thing on this planet. She’s the only person I’ve felt that with.” Autumn knew she was revealing more than perhaps she should but couldn’t stop the honesty.

“What about her father?”

Autumn looked away at the question, knowing it was so complicated, almost impossible to pick apart but wanting to tell Mitch the truth. “We met in college, got together almost straight away. We became study partners and fell in love. Got jobs together and then got married. It was perfect, we were perfect.”

Autumn sighed. “Or at least I thought we were and then cracks started to show. He was staying out later, making calls late at night. I thought he was having an affair and confronted him.”

Autumn went to say his name and bit it back. “He was absolutely adamant he wasn’t and assured me it was work, even showed me the call log to the office. I believed him, and we started trying for a baby.” Autumn glanced down at Maggie and couldn’t regret that part in the slightest.

“Things were great, and then I found several discrepancies at work. I can’t explain more without giving you the details, but I discovered he was breaking the law in a big way. I confronted him, and he broke down and told me he was in deep and it was too late to back out. I begged him to run away with me, but I think secretly he’d grown to love the power he had and the cash, and ultimately, he chose that over me.”

“His loss.”

Autumn stared into space, lost in her memories of that time. Every time she let her mind go there it hurt, but today with Mitch beside her, it hurt less. “Yes, and now he’s dead, so it makes no difference. He can’t hurt us now.”

Mitch didn’t fish for more details, and she was grateful for that, knowing she didn’t have the energy to fight him after opening up like that.

“Wanna grab an ice cream?” Mitch’s eyes twinkled as he leaned forward and kissed her neck. “Or do you want to make out?”

“Can’t we do both?”

“Fucking hell.” His deep voice rumbled against her sensitive skin, and she shivered.

As they drove towards the ‘world’s best ice cream shop’ according to Mitch, the window open and the cool airbrushing her skin, she smiled. Her life was good, better than good, it was great. A lovely home, a man who she was really beginning to care about by her side, who treated her and Maggie like gold, and more importantly she was safe. It was a thought that would bite her on her ass just seconds later when her phone rang, and her world rocked again.