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My girls. Oh, God. She was going to give in. Even if the invitation sprang from his deep-seated need to ride to the rescue—the temptation to be “his girl” for a few precious hours proved too hard to resist. She wanted to be his girl, forever, but realistically, forever wasn’t in the cards. Their trajectories were moving them apart, not together. They had the here and now, and she didn’t have the strength to forfeit it.
“If Nelle’s available to babysit, I could leave Joy with her Saturday morning, work my shift, and then pick her up and drive to Magnolia Grove. We’d make it just in time for the ceremony. What do you think?”
He smiled against the side of her neck, and his rough jaw tickled her skin.
Dangerously charming.
“I think I’d better save the first dance for you.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Any news on the ex?”
Hunter swallowed a handful of fries and shook his head at Beau. “Nope. Atlanta PD won’t have fingerprint results until next week, at the earliest, but Madison hasn’t seen or heard from him.”
His partner nodded, took a drag of his soda, and stared through the windshield at the Monday lunchtime traffic on Peachtree Road. “Good. Although part of me wishes he’d try something, so you can kick his ass, the cops can haul him off, and Madison can have some peace of mind.”
“Not that I don’t welcome the opportunity to kick his ass, but I don’t think it was him who broke in. If so, I doubt he has the balls to try again.”
“You’re probably right. Speaking of balls, I can’t believe you finally grew a pair and asked Madison to be your date for the wedding.” Beau managed the insult around a mouthful of burger.
“Do not talk to me about growing a pair, Beauregard. There wouldn’t even be a wedding this Saturday if it weren’t for my balls of steel.”
Beau choked on his burger then pounded his chest and sucked down some soda to clear his airway. “How do you figure?”
Hunter crumpled his burger wrapper and tossed it in the bag. “When I picked up my phone at the ass-crack of dawn Christmas morning to hear Savannah’s little sister outline, in gory detail, every inhumane punishment she planned to inflict on your—and I quote—‘worthless dick,’ I had your back. A less steel-balled man would have told the furiously imaginative Sinclair Smith to do what she had to do to, and hung up. Not me. I stepped up and told her I’d talk some sense into you.” He folded his arms, sat back in the passenger seat, and smiled. “And I did.”
Beau made a disparaging noise. “You got me drunk.”
“I work in mysterious ways. You don’t always appreciate my genius.”
“That’s for sure. I guess Madison appreciates something about you, since she accepted your invitation.”
He shifted in his seat, suddenly restless. “I don’t know.” Even he heard the frustration in his voice. “She almost turned me down because she has to work Saturday morning. When I suggested she ask for the weekend off, she accused me of not caring about her goals. Like I’m trying to sabotage her plans to get her own place.” He kicked the floorboard.
“Okay.” Beau turned and leveled a steady stare on him. “Time for a reality check, Knox. You don’t want her to move out. How about you get a grip on your big steel balls and tell her how you feel?”
The restless feeling kicked up a notch. “We’ve been over this. She needs to prove to herself she can stand on her own two feet, and I need to clear my plate so I can concentrate on school this fall. I’m not going to lay out time, effort, and money to fail again, and that means there are certain distractions I can’t afford right now, no matter how much I want to—”
“I agreed, originally, but after seeing you two together on a night when you definitely were not at your best, and listening to you talk incessantly about her and Joy, I’ve realized a couple things. First”—he extended a finger—“you’re
not some overwhelmed, eighteen-year-old kid. You’ve learned how to juggle your fucking priorities. Second, and more importantly”—he put up a second finger—“Madison isn’t some frightened, knocked-up teen trying to cling to you so hard she drags you down. She’d be nothing but supportive of your efforts, and you damn well know it. You’re running scared, plain and simple, but instead of admitting as much, you sit here painting Madison and Joy as distractions—insulting, by the way—and justifying your cowardice as prudence.”
“Jesus Christ, all I did was show up to work today.” He crushed his fast food bag to keep from pounding his fist on the dash. “I don’t remember signing up for a personality profile, but thanks for diagnosing me as a chicken-shit bastard, Dr. Montgomery. Your expert opinion means a lot.”
“It should.” His partner turned and pinned him with a serious look. “Because I am an expert on fear, and I know a thing or two about behaving like a bastard. I recognize the signs well enough. What I can’t figure out is whether you’re afraid of failing, or afraid of how you feel about Madison and Joy. Or both.”
Fuck. Why was it so cramped in here? And hot? A headache dug into his frontal lobe like a backhoe. He hit the button to lower his window halfway and breathed in the fifty-degree air. “If Ashley doesn’t get off her ass and write me a rec letter, I don’t have to worry about failing.”
“Don’t change the subject. She’ll write the letter. She’s just making you sweat. Besides, her letter is only for the local school. You applied to, what, four out-of-state schools? You’ll get accepted to one of them. You can take your balls of steel and your fear of failure to Durham or Nashville.”
“I’m not going out of state.” The words came out fast and irrational, considering he’d spent time and money on those applications. He hadn’t even realized he’d crossed the possibility off his list until this moment.
Beau’s brows shot up. “Kind of a late-breaking decision. Why not?”
“Because…fuck…I don’t know.” He lowered the window the rest of the way. “Why are you being such a relentless bitch about this? My life is here.”
“Really? Your have zero family here. You rent your house. You won’t have the job when you go back to school. Your life seems pretty portable to me. In fact, I’d say you’ve done your best not to sink your roots too deep, so why the sudden unshakeable attachment to Atlanta?” He gestured outside the window of the ambulance. “What’s here that you can’t live without?”
